A Journey with Werner Herzog, The Final Reckoning
Herzog shows us the Madness to his Method - My Best Fiend (1999)
In the 1950's a young Herzog lived with his mother in a Munich apartment with eight others. For three months, his world was upended by the arrival of the actor Klaus Kinski as a fellow renter. Kinski was struggling as an actor and as a person. Herzog recalls a man unhinged, completely frightening and prone to violent fits. At one point Kinski locked himself in the bathroom for 48 hours straight and smashed around till the toilet, the bathtub and the sink had been reduced to tiny pieces. Herzog also recalls that he would spend ten hours at a time honing his craft as an actor, perfecting his skills. Thus began the enigma of Klaus Kinski - one of cinema's greatest, yet most unhinged, performers.
This is how My Best Fiend, Herzog's ode to Kinski begins. Its perhaps notable what he doesn't tell us - following the time he stayed at Herzog's house, he was admitted into a mental hospital and given the preliminary diagnosis of schizophrenia. A mild case of schizophrenia could explain a lot of what we see about Kinski in this movie, such as his insane "Jesus tours" where he actually claimed to be Jesus and provoked people to denounce him. But, Herzog never was interested in why Kinski was what he was. He has always taken him at face value. He celebrates who he was, and many times he prodded the madness, trying to harness it for his films. As a man who wanted to capture the world as he believed it was, Herzog was willing to work with Kinski, even after he tries to kill another actor during a scene, or shoots into the extra's tent at night, or drives a cinematographer to quit. Herzog's own megalomania drove him to keep filming Kinski's megalomania.
There is a lot of tenderness here too though. Kinski did have a kind side and Herzog is sure to honor that. Despite their frequent public rows, Herzog and Kinski realized that they made each other better. Herzog also tries hard to show Kinski's occasionally decent side. In the end though, the message is that no matter what he was off the screen, on it he was one of the most brilliant actors to be captured. In each of the Kinski films I've seen in this marathon, he played the role completely different, in a way that was completely consistant with the character, yet with a magnetism that was all his own. Actors are typically divided into character actors and leading men. Kinski was both at once. Schizophrenia - not always such a bad thing.
We come to an end. "I persevere, I persevere..."- Grizzly Man (2005)
In My Best Fiend, Herzog explains what he feels to be the fundamental difference between Kinski and himself: While Kinski believes that nature is erotic (although he never seems to want to actually touch it), Herzog sees nature as vile and base. "I don't hear the songs of birds as singing, I hear them screaming in pain." Yet, Herzog admits that he loves nature, he loves wilderness, against his better judgement.
A similar debate about nature plays out in the final film of our journey, Grizzly Man. The documentary features the videos taken by Timothy Treadwell, a troubled man who found his calling in the wild of Kodiak Island, spending his summers there for the last 13 years of his life, filming his experience in the world of the bears. As a film maker, Herzog seems to find a kindred spirit in Treadwell, someone who can capture nature at its most remarkable. As we proceed through the story, some of what Treadwell has capture is truly remarkable. There are scenes of the bears and foxes that Tim lives with that take your breath away. There is not a small amount of admiration that Herzog has for this man.
Yet, as with Kinski, Herzog sees a man who's passion and conception of nature is misguided. Its sort of an open and shut case - We learn from the start that Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed by a starving Grizzly in 2003. The nature that Treadwell believed was in harmony, a refuge from the torments of the world of men, swallowed him up in the most horrible way imaginable.
But this isn't a takedown of Treadwell, this is an attempt to understand the man and his story. I think that Herzog basically takes it as a given that people are fallible, hubristic, stupid. He is more interested in articulating and achieving understanding about why we are what we are.
By giving us the ending of Treadwell's story at the very beginning of the film, and constantly reminding us of how horrible it was, Herzog heightens the tension in each frame that we see Treadwell among his bears, coming so close to the beasts that he can touch them. He has a coroner give his assessment of what happened based on the pieces of his and his girlfriend's remains. He listens to the last tape Treadwell took, as they were being mauled (his camera was running but the lens cap had no time to be taken off. He doesn't play it for us, just explains some of the worst details. He tells Treadwell's former girlfriend and co-owner of his foundation that she must destroy the tape, she must never listen to it.
The emotion and dread captured here makes it one of Herzog's most effecting scenes he has ever captured. With this in the background we watch Treadwell, a gentle and emotional man, proceed in his life in the wilderness. We watch how the man, alone with a camera, slowly becomes unstuck with reality. He comes across evidence of the horrible potential violence of the bears - a paw of a cub eaten by his mother because of hunger, for instance - and cannot accept it, it does not fit into his conception of bear's gentle nature. He starts to rave in front of the camera, yelling and cursing about his perceived enemy, the park service. He starts to believe that he is the only person protecting the bears from poaching (even though there is absolutely no evidence of one bear being killed by humans in the park that he lives in.) We hear diary entries about the vileness of the 'world of men' and his wish to stay in the 'world of bears' forever. We learn that he was a former alcoholic, but found his calling during a trip to Alaska. We learn that he becomes more and more like a character of his ideal self - a man, alone, saving the world of bears.
And then we learn some more about the circumstances of his death - he had left weeks before at the time he usually did, but an argument with an airport agent sends him into a rage, and he returns to his world of bears. The bears that he knows have left though, and new, older, more desperate bears are occupying his camp area. One of them is particularly surly and desperate - was this the bear that killed him? We don't know, but it certainly seems capable. The girlfriend worries that Treadwell seems to have a death wish by staying here, threatens to leave him, but decides to stay by his side. Timothy would rather die by bear then live with people, and in the end there is nothing that could have been done.
The themes here are the themes of Herzog - of unshakable dreams, of isolation, of madness and hubris, and of the chaos of the world and nature. These are the same things we started with in Signs of Life, and have seen play out every day since. We find our selves in the 16th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st century, in places as far away as Poland, Alaska, Peru and Australia, yet we circle and circle around the same basic truth about what we are as humans. This is Herzog's achievement in film - his stories and particularly his use of images that challenge our conceptions of reality - tell us much about ourselves. He has a point - although perhaps we should temper our enthusiasm for a philosophy that was developed when Herzog was 20 - but as a fim maker he taps into the reasons cinema is great. They bring us out of our own world so that we can view and explore ourselves, from a safe distance.
