Hard Act to Follow: Klaus Kinski: Up for the Count
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen HARD ACT TO FOLLOW KLAUS KINSKI: UP FOR THE COUNT I HAVE JUST returned from the voting meeting of the National Society of Film Critics, where Breaking Away won the award for Best Film of...
...Ridiculous...
...Nor is there any tension still in the relationship between Kinski and Herzog, and maybe that is in some ways unfortunate, too...
...He is frenetic, a man whose fate drives him through life willy-nilly...
...It traps him in it...
...I keep saying that there's something wrong in all this...
...When Jonathan said that he also found her enthusiasms hard to understand, she replied a little smugly, ' 'Well, that's what we all have our columns for...
...Even as he and a detachment from Pizarro's expedition of 1560 are trying to escape from the Amazon jungle with their lives, Aguirre still believes that really he is in the process of founding an empire...
...Though Nosferatu is not Herzog's best work, there is even something wrong in its having been out of the running for Best Film...
...He's like a phrase that has become a cliche and lost all its literal meaning in the process...
...The awards were a popularity contest, not a recognition of merit...
...Kinski plays this megalomaniac as if he were a damaged monument, a great, craggy visage listing dangerously in the rain forest, ready to topple over at any moment...
...That was Kinski, who manages to pack more terror and brutality into a vignette than Leone and Eastwood can pack into the rest of the film...
...Each requires an expressionless exterior through which torment and passion somehow show...
...Nonetheless, Klaus Kinski has brought the role back to life...
...I can't imagine a character that would be harder to play with originality then Dracula...
...But the performance that has made Kinski truly memorable as a film actor is the one he would most like to forget: the title role in Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God...
...Kramer and Agatha...
...He seems to have been paralyzed rather than animated by the role...
...He turns the tables on earlier interpretations, where the mortal characters shrink from contact with the vampire, and has Dracula shrinking from his contact with the mortals instead...
...Perhaps the same problem arose for Herzog with Woyzeck, which is his adaptation of Georg Buchner's dramatic fragment written in 1836...
...There is in his portrayal an insight into an impossible role comparable to the one he has playing Dracula...
...Maybe tension is what Herzog's direction of Kinski ultimately depends upon for success...
...camp...
...The life led by Buchner's title character, a soldier garrisoned in a town that's a virtual asylum, may have been too like Kinski's own traumas as a P.O.W...
...Kinski's tour deforce is to play the role of Dracula with an undertone of loathing and disgust...
...So let me leave the National Society behind for another year Commonweal: 56 and take refuge in the opportunity my column offers to continue my discussion of Woyzeck and Count Dracula...
...As I was explaining a couple of issues ago, during the shooting of Aguirre Kinski and Herzog come near shooting each other...
...He's a set of conventions that have replaced the character they were meant to represent...
...Herzog is better—wilder, freer—when he is working with raw material like the priest's journal on which Aguirre is based...
...Herzog's purpose is to pay homage to Murnau, but I think he is inhibited in certain ways by Murnau's presence...
...We see that the one way in which Dracula himself is not human, his inability to die, is his tragedy...
...Unfortunately, whatever the difficulty was here, it was Kinski's as well...
...Aguirre and Nosferatu suggest that Kinski's genius is for playing roles contrary to his own experience, characters of myth who are historically and psychologically distant...
...I'm unsure why Nosferatu is not as great a success for Herzog as it is for Kinski...
...In fact, the roles themselves are comparable...
...Screen HARD ACT TO FOLLOW KLAUS KINSKI: UP FOR THE COUNT I HAVE JUST returned from the voting meeting of the National Society of Film Critics, where Breaking Away won the award for Best Film of the Year...
...Thus has he managed to do something original and affecting where one would have thought it impossible...
...The implication of mortal generations and renewal here is a contribution to the Dracula myth itself, but also an allusion in Herzog's debt to F. W. Murnau, whose 1922 version of Nosferatu was the inspiration for Herzog's own film...
...His dependence on men notwithstanding, it is clear that Dracula can scarcely bear their society...
...But it was obvious that a number of critics writing for prominent national magazines hadn't seen Nosferatu at all...
...It's a likable little movie, but the whole idea of giving it an award is silly...
...It is almost a cringe of revulsion at times...
...Kinski's acting career began during World War II when he pretended madness in order to get himself out of a P.O.W...
...In it he is thinking always on two levels, in doubles entendres, as at the end when he has Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) turn into a vampire while Dracula is dying...
...He has truly breathed a kind of human life, or a grotesque but recognizable perversion of life, into the role...
...It makes us realize that below the surface there is some terrible pressure capable of having forced this tiny eruption through an impermeable substance...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Hoffman is a Method actor with intensity and considerable discipline, but there is something fundamentally wrong when he sweeps to victory in the voting while Klaus Kinski receives only a few, scattered nominations for his performance in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu...
...What's wrong is that either I'm crazy, or my colleagues at the National Society are...
...That a film by a hack who happens to have hit his stride should carry off top honors, while a flawed masterpiece isn't even in consideration, is, again, ridiculous...
...Since then he has done, besides legitimate theater, over 150 movies, many of them strictly commercial films in which he had small roles...
...The moral character comes out in behavior that is like an extrusion on rock...
...They must have figured there wasn't much point in dealing with this relatively obscure film, and the voting showed that they were right...
...Woyzeck is a character whose despair is right up on the surface...
...Dustin Hoffman won Best Actor for his performances in both Kramer vs...
...February 1980: 57...
...I think it has to do with Nosferatu's being for Herzog a more self-conscious piece of work...
...This is precisely why it deserves no awards...
...Kinski's response to humanity goes beyond shrinking...
...His immortality doesn't liberate him from the human condition...
...As I said in the first column I devoted to these two men, the strangest aspect of their relationship, which is always bizarre, even at its most normal, is that they seem to do their best work only when they are ready to kill one another...
...After Bram Stoker's novel and over half a century of vampire movies, Dracula isn't a character at all anymore...
...But Kinski's revulsion at mortal beings makes us believe it...
...His displeasure is most apparent when the bewitched and devoted Renfield (Roland Topor) volunteers for service...
...Inside the conventions, the role of Dracula has crumbled away to dust...
...Even though Pauline doesn't have her old New Yorker columnn these days, that was the only opinion I agreed with all afternoon...
...The title role in Woyzeck may have been too close for him to lunge at it from afar the way he could with Aguirre and Dracula...
...Clasped over one another like folded wings, his hands follow the posture of his lip, rising with disdain as if to place themselves out of reach...
...If you're a spaghetti Western fan, for instance, you may recall the hunchback gunman who goes up against Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More (1965...
...When he's around people his upper lip often rises with an involuntary quiver, as if it were his feet he were lifting in order to avoid stepping in something nasty...
...Breaking Away no doubt is the best work of which its director, Peter Yates, is capable...
...All Draculas have done lip service'to the idea that Dracula is tired of living...
...The more deferential the ovations from men are, the more they revolt the Count...
...There is no place in this role for the tension between external and internal nature that characterizes Aguirre and Dracula...
...By behaving in this way, Kinski makes Dracula into a pathetic figure rather than a horrific one...
...We take this revulsion to be, partly, a self-revulsion...
...Yet Kinski's performance as Aguirre is inspired...
...Remember that Kinski once turned down a chance to do Woyzeck on the stage because the role filled him with such immediate, personal dread...
...On those rare occasions when the title Nosferatu did come up in the reading of the tallies, one or two critics who clearly hadn't voted for it would say, "Oh, yes . . . Nosferatu," as if the dimness of their memories were tinged with regret...
...A good deal of banter goes on during the voting (the banter, rather than the votes, is what makes the meetings worthwhile), and at one point Pauline Kael accused Jonathan Baumbach from Partisan Review of having "eccentric" tastes...
...A man should be known by the company he keeps...
...When he is working from an established masterpiece, like Murnau's Nosferatu, it restricts him...
Vol. 107 • February 1980 • No. 2
