Klaus Kinski

  • Crawlspace (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) If you’re looking for a reason to watch Crawlspace, I’ll tell it to you straight: Klaus Kinski as a landlord. Need more? Klaus Kinski as a Nazi-descended landlord who observes, tortures and kills female renters. Oh, you did not need that much? Well, too bad, because even the film’s production history is about Klaus Kinski being a terror on set, earning the enmity of the cast, crew, producers (who reportedly considered having the actor killed for the insurance money and de-aggravation factor) and director David Schmoeller, who later directed the short essay Please Kill Mr. Kinski. Considering all of this, it makes sense to report that Kinski is just about the most interesting thing is this humdrum slasher/torture horror movie. While the cinematography occasionally scores a striking image, the rest of Crawlspace isn’t much more than a young-man-versus-psychopath thing that we’ve seen countless times, made even more exploitative by Nazi imagery. But hey: Klaus Kinski.

  • Fitzcarraldo (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) There are a few films about which the story of the film’s production rivals and perhaps exceeds the narrative of the film itself. Most of the time, we’ll never suspect those stories (and it’s not as if the publicists will ever tell the whole thing). For Fitzcarraldo, though, the incredible is right there on the screen in the film’s showpiece sequence: A 300-ton steamboat being dragged up a mountain to the other side, from one river to another. In a pre-CGI era, you can feel the weight and effort of every shot in that sequence, especially as the hundreds of extras labour to clean-cut the side of the mountain, prepare the boat with timber supports and drag it all the way up. It’s a ten-minute sequence that almost raises as many questions as it answers, most notably what kind of director would ever think this was a viable way to shoot a movie. The answer could only be Werner Herzog, in telling the story (inspired by real events, although the real story is not nearly as insane as its recreation) of an opera-obsessed entrepreneur who hits upon a rubber-extraction scheme that hinges on a boat making an extreme portage between two rivers separated by a mountain. Deep up the Amazon, the entrepreneur (Klaus Kinski, suitably weird) finds the spot he’s been looking for and gets the natives working for him. As the frontier between fact and fiction blur, as Kinski and Herzog blend together, the real production set out to do what the characters do, stripping away trees from the mountainside, preparing the steamboat, pulling it up. Calling Fitzcarraldo a support mechanism for that extraordinary sequence is not much of a stretch — even if it feels a bit bloated as such. Utterly unforgettable if only for those ten minutes, Fitzcarraldo still ranks as a reference for cinephiles for a good reason — one of the most difficult move shoots in history. Just let me close with a delicious quote from Wikipedia’s article on the film: “Herzog says that one of the native chiefs offered, in all seriousness, to kill Kinski for him, but that he declined because he needed the actor to complete filming.”

  • Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre, the Wrath of God] (1972)

    Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre, the Wrath of God] (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Kanopy streaming, October 2018) You never quite know what you’re going to get when Werner Herzog is behind the camera, and Aguirre, the Wrath of God is as good an illustration of that as any. Something that, at first glance, looks like a historical jungle adventure eventually becomes an ill-fated tragedy, with death striking at any moment and the lead character diving deeper and deeper in madness. The film may have pacing issues, but the final sequence is unforgettable. Klaus Kinski authentically looks insane and dangerous in the lead role, while Herzog lets the landscape do about half the cinematographer’s job. It’s not a jolly film, and watching it often feels like being on an express train to hell with no stops. But it does have a few things running for it, especially once past the tedious exposition and on to the final act. I’m not sure I’m going to put Aguirre anywhere near my list of favourite movies, but it is an experience.