“Klaus Kinski attempts to defeat the jungle using only the power of his face, fails.”
The man had a face.
His skull was well-hung.
Not a beautiful face.
Klaus Kinski was not a Chris.
He wasn’t All-American Chris.
Or Aussie Bro Chris.
Or The Other Chris, what’s his name, I think he was maybe in the new Star Trek films.
No, Klaus Kinski was not a Chris.
This was him (left):
Also: Yes, that is a real monkey.
Y’know that credit that informs the viewer that “no animals have been harmed in the production of this film?”
Aguirre does not bear that credit.
It actually got worse for the little guy.
I’m not even gonna get into what happened to that poor horse.
(If you haven’t watched Aguirre yet, and are wondering if you would enjoy it, then just look at the GIF and ask yourself, “Do I wanna know what led to that man who looks like Satan yeeting that primate ?” And, Christ, I hope you answer “Yes.” Worst thing a person can be is incurious, especially about hurled monkeys.)
LOOK AT THIS GUY’S FUCKING FACE!
DID YOU LOOK LIKE I TOLD YOU?
Stop yelling about dead, poorly-behaved foreigners, please.
HIS FACE IS TOO BIG FOR HIS HEAD!
Stop it right the fuck now.
Ahem.
Although, if we’re honest about our math, Klaus Kinski’s face only generates two miili-Helens.
Helen’s punim launched a thousand ships, and Klaus’ only two.
Can’t argue with the numbers, Enthusiasts.
Aguirre is 80% Klaus Kinski’s face, and 20% the opening scene where the whole of the expedition walks down an Ande.
You never realized that each individual mountain in the Andes was called an Ande, did you?
This here’s an educational site.
Anyway, it’s 1560 or so and the Spanish are conquistadoring.
It’s not like the French could do it.
They couldn’t even pronounce “conquistadoring.”
But the Spanish, freshly free of Moorish rule, could conquistador you up one side and down the other before you could say “Why did you kill my entire village?”
They weren’t slow, like a conquistawindow; they were fast, like a conquistador.
THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE!
But it made me giggle, and that’s all that matters during these trying times.
The indigenous folks the Spanish have enslaved have stories about a city made of gold.
Donde esta este ciudad de oro? the Spanish ask.
And the natives would point to the jungle and say De esa manera. No tan lejos. Es fácil de detectar.
(The natives had learned Spanish by that point, or at least had access to Google Translate.)
So the Spanish went hot-assing into the Amazon, via the Amazon, and that was just the worst idea.
Everything named Amazon wants you dead.
The mythical lesbians with bows.
The next evolution of the Company Store owned by that little penishead.
The river.
The rainforest.
You ever meet a guy named Amazon Hufnagle, RUN.
But there’s one tenet that white people have held sacred since time immemorial: If the locals tell you not to go somewhere, go there immediately.
“Rapids, shmapids. You are talking to a Christian, sir. Ready the rafts!”
And then no one ever sees them again.
Both Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo are loosely based on true stories.
Incredibly loosely.
Imagine a ghost giving you a tugger.
Or that 38 Special is specifying how you should hold on.
Or that Precarious Lee had a cousin who slept around a lot.
That loosely.
Both Don Lope de Aguirre and Brian Fitzgerald (known as Fitzcarraldo because the locals can’t pronounce Fitzgerald) existed, and each sort of performed the main action of their fictional iterations.
Aguirre really did go searching for El Dorado, lead a mutiny, and then declare himself King of All This Shit Right Here.
Fitzcarraldo really did (force enslaved natives to) drag a steamboat over a mountain.
But that’s it.
We don’t know much about Aguirre because he lived in 1560 and everyone who knew how to write was too busy lopping off the heads of everyone who didn’t to keep a journal.
But he wrote letters back and forth to the King, and the King wrote letters about him, and the Court Archivist (Don David de Lemieux) kept the correspondence, so we know the general parameters of Aguirre’s spiral into madness and monkey-tossing.
The shit about Fitzcarraldo’s just made-up.
Yes, he did get a boat over a mountain, but he had it disassembled and carried over the pass.
And it only weighed 30 tons.
That almost sounds reasonable.
Werner Herzog is not a reasonable man.
He is A German man with a dream.
It involves climbing a mountain.
All German dreams involve climbing mountains.
And schnitzel.
All German dreams involve climbing mountains, and schnitzel.
In Werner Herzog’s dream, the mountain was smack in the dampest asshole of the world’s largest jungle, and instead of climb it, he wanted to shlep a 300-ton steamboat over it.
I am unaware of Werner Herzog’s schnitzel dreams, but I do know that his new documentary, Wener Herzog’s Schnitzel Dreams, will be airing on the Food Network in June.
300 tons.
The original was 30, and–once more–it was humped over in pieces and then reassembled in the new river.
(This was all about rubber. During the Industrial Revolution, Europe needed it, and the Amazon was still the only place in the world where it grew. Until a European stole some tree bulbs and started plantations in Asia, but that’s another story that’s exactly like the silk story. But I digress.)
Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo are certainly not merely entertainment, but art.
Entertainment makes promises, and then succeeds or fails by measure of how well it’s lived up to said promises.
A comedy is successful if it makes you laugh.
A babadook movie is successful if it frightens you.
Art asks questions.
And one of the questions that Fitzcarraldo asks is “Was this all really necessary?”
Go watch this:
Did you watch that?
Who do you think the villain of the piece was?
I think it’s the guy who shanghaied several tribes worth of people into the middle of a jungle and underpaid them to literally pull a literal steamboat up a literal mountain, all the while permitting Klaus Kinski to scream at them.
He could’ve filmed five miles outside of town.
Or–and this is a wild idea–built a fake boat.
I think that’s called a prop.
They use ’em in movies all the time.
But, no, Werner Herzog wanted realism in his completely made-up story that sprung from a vision and originally starred Mick Jagger.
(Fitzcarraldo was the South American version of Apocalypse Now: the production was protracted and throughly unhinged, the weather and locals conspired to destroy everything, and the documentaries are–in their way–just as good as the films. Fitzcarraldo might have been more fucked, as the original leads were Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo and Mick Jagger as his dumbfuck sidekick. Robards got sick and went home with 40% of the scenes shot, which meant a production hiatus, which meant Mick had to go home and assemble Tattoo You out of scraps so the Stones would have an excuse to go on tour. Klaus Kinski signed on after many, many raving fits on the telephone to play Fitzcarraldo, and Mick’s dumbfuck was written out of the script.)
It is mind-boggling how many people took concrete steps towards murdering Klaus Kinski.
Not just wishing him dead.
Pretty much everyone who ever met him did that.
I’m talking about making a plan, gathering the tools, plotting an escape from the scene.
People on at least two continents aborted attempts on his life only at the very last moment.
Plainly, the man was mentally ill.
Movie stars are tops at throwing strategic tantrums; Klaus Kinski did not do that.
I always had the sense that Marlon Brando was an asshole because he knew he could get away with it; that’s not why Klaus Kinski misbehaved.
Go watch Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, or go watch ’em again.
They’re on Amazon Prime, which has a deeper collection of old and obscure films than Netflix, but which keeps recommending that I watch not one, but three of Tyler Perry’s Madea pictures, and I don’t know why it would do that.
I loved it so much that when I was managing a museum I got the author to come speak about it as part of our history series, and he was a helluva dude too, totally would have Conquistaed were it still a trade . . . https://www.buddylevy.com
(There’s two links in this post and I know I am going to get sent to the Comment Problem Attic for that, so I’m gonna save time and go ahead and scream now: Attica!!! Attica!!!!)
Well it doesn’t appear he made his movie about the west Edmonton mall but it is a bizarre place. When he finally arrived for our interview, he was still full of stories about the West Edmonton Mall. Speaking precise but accented English, he went on about the fleet of submarines, the performing dolphins, a full size replica of the Santa Maria and sculptures of huskies in the igloo room. He said that unlike Las Vegas or Disneyland, the mall had an authenticity he found fascinating. Authenticity is essential to Herzog and his quests to achieve it are the stuff of legends. As a child, he remembers seeing an educational film showing Eskimos building an igloo, “You could see that they didn’t really know how to build an igloo, you could see it was fake. With my films I wanted people to be able to trust their eyes. In Fitzcaraldo, when you see a steamship being dragged over the mountain, you can see that it’s no joke. It’s happening for real and you can just sit back and
The Reinhold Messner book or documentaries are probably interesting.
I think I read the book, I am only hoping the movie is good.
And yes he is probably Italian or something but we are talking about Germans and mountains and his name is Reinhold for goodness sakes, if I want to claim he is German, well I just did.
The eternal GD connection: Klaus lived out his final years and died in a cool house just a few minutes stroll from where the boys summered in that Boy Scout camp in ’66 and just a few minutes stroll in the other direction from where Garcia breathed his last.
Hooray!!!
You really, really, really need to read this: https://www.amazon.com/River-Darkness-Francisco-Orellanas-Legendary/dp/0553807501
I loved it so much that when I was managing a museum I got the author to come speak about it as part of our history series, and he was a helluva dude too, totally would have Conquistaed were it still a trade . . . https://www.buddylevy.com
(There’s two links in this post and I know I am going to get sent to the Comment Problem Attic for that, so I’m gonna save time and go ahead and scream now: Attica!!! Attica!!!!)
Without research but failing memory, I think Werner made a movie about west Edmonton mall one time when I was living there.
Well it doesn’t appear he made his movie about the west Edmonton mall but it is a bizarre place. When he finally arrived for our interview, he was still full of stories about the West Edmonton Mall. Speaking precise but accented English, he went on about the fleet of submarines, the performing dolphins, a full size replica of the Santa Maria and sculptures of huskies in the igloo room. He said that unlike Las Vegas or Disneyland, the mall had an authenticity he found fascinating. Authenticity is essential to Herzog and his quests to achieve it are the stuff of legends. As a child, he remembers seeing an educational film showing Eskimos building an igloo, “You could see that they didn’t really know how to build an igloo, you could see it was fake. With my films I wanted people to be able to trust their eyes. In Fitzcaraldo, when you see a steamship being dragged over the mountain, you can see that it’s no joke. It’s happening for real and you can just sit back and
Speaking of Germans and Mountains,
The Reinhold Messner book or documentaries are probably interesting.
I think I read the book, I am only hoping the movie is good.
And yes he is probably Italian or something but we are talking about Germans and mountains and his name is Reinhold for goodness sakes, if I want to claim he is German, well I just did.
A good jag to get on. Here’s an antidote, some Al McGuire and Mark Aguirre
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JcwdiyQuPP8
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gnGBSytJbWI
Are you Hep to the Garnet Herzog?
the pride of whip an egg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r_aWMWic-Uc
Check out Nomad. Bruce Chatwin by Herzog. They made a film based on Chatwin’s book The Viceroy of Ouidah called Cobra Verde
The eternal GD connection: Klaus lived out his final years and died in a cool house just a few minutes stroll from where the boys summered in that Boy Scout camp in ’66 and just a few minutes stroll in the other direction from where Garcia breathed his last.
Mug like Todd Snider.