Night 2 Wrap-Up: Kinski to...well, Kinski
Posted by Chris S.
Don't expect anything too damn profound from this...it's 4 a.m., I'm gooned on beer, bronchial inhaler hits, and 15 straight hours of amazing films! But, I felt like weighing in a little bit on the days events before turning in for the requisite stiff-legged five-hour power-nap before we resume tomorrow morning (er, later this morning).
I can't even imagine I need to tell you what a spine-mulcher Aguirre: The Wrath of God is. You probably already knew that long before I did! The malaria fairly radiates off the screen. Among the many images that sear their way into your mind (the long winding trail of people winding down the mountain, the rafter full of little greenish gibbering monkeys, the man whose head is cut off so fast, it finishes its sentence 20 feet from the body), the one I keep thinking about, for some reason, is the abandoned horse. It's a comical, yet slightly eerie image, the horse forlornly staring back at the raft from shore, not only regretting its insolence, but fairly taunting the crew for their actions..."You'll be sorry you abandoned me! Lots of tasty and nutritive flank meat over here. While you assholes are counting corn kernals, I'm getting plump and juicy off this exotic berries!"
Jeezus, that kind of drifted off topic. Don't mind me. Moving right along...
Woodcarver Steiner seemed at first to be a curiosity, but sucked us in rather quickly. The slow-motion shots of ski jumpers in the air, mouths wide with terror, concentration, and, yeah, ecstacy are hard to forget. This one was a strange kind of fist-pumper...by which I mean my guests and I were absorbed into the competition elements of the story very quickly, as it is constantly revealed that Steiner is being repeatedly handicapped by judges so that his lands will approximate the distances of the other ski-jumpers...when they hit 140 km, he's hitting 170, so they take part of the track out when he competes, to slow him down. Then another piece. Then he starts from a lower spot on the track. Finally, four handicaps later, and he's still beating his competition by over 20 km per jump! The beauty of the shots (and, alas, a lot of montages of jumpers wiping out hard, "Agony of defeat"-style), the passion of the man, and even the post-competition interview/story all give you a very quick but substantive picture of Steiner's great love of life, which is not to win, but to fly.
We saw a lot of amazing films today, but I have to say that The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser wore the crown out of today's contenders. Naturally, Stiff-Leg lifers tend to compare fests from one to the other. If Heart of Glass was this festival's 3 Women, then to me, Kaspar Hauser was its Nashville. Not due to size of ensemble, but just for touching simple human feelings and experiences over and over again. It can't be said enough...Bruno S. is one of the least-affected actors ever. He is without guile, and his face tells 1001 stories with every twitch of the eyebrow or every time he manages to shed tears without contorting his face into the usual agonized laugh/cry face that we all make. Kaspar goes from grunting neanderthal to charming simpleton, to relatively assertive humorist in little time. Notice the considerable (and nuanced) differences in Bruno's face between when he plays Kaspar arriving in the town square for the first time, never having seen people, or civilization, or even understanding the concept of walking, with the second time he takes the exact same stance, posing in the highly abstract freak-show (That's also worth pointing out....what the HELL is with the freak show? Some of the most elaborate stories I've ever heard for the purpose of captivating the children. A tiny king? A man who plays nose flute so that his village will not die? A mozart-like prodidgy that stares into the center of the earth to see black holes?). At this point, Kaspar has learned how to act; how to simulate his initial experiences on a stage. Bruno S. has the skills to play the difficult role, and then to play the role playing an actor! It's all too much for my mind to process at this late hour, but I have to say, this film, and Bruno's performance in it, hit me the hardest today. When Kaspar touches the candle, jumps back, and sheds tears involuntarily, without crying, simply staring off into space, it's hard not to want to squirt off a few yourself. Although I'm sure many images will remind themselves to me tomorrow, most of what I remember are Bruno's words: "Mother, I am so far away from everything." "Why is everything so much harder for me?" Oh, and exquisitely creepy cameo from Popul Vuh's Florian Fricke, and...wait for it.....a super-duper cameo from our favorite small-starting dwarf, HOMBRE!!! All hail the tiny king of the land of Runt!! (I didn't make that up, it's in the movie)
How Much Wood is, as you'd expect, hilarious, inspiring, and totally exhausting. If you know what an auction barker sounds like, imagine over a half hour of uninterrupted mile-a-second barker-babble, and you can see why everybody in the room needed to get a beer afterward.
I missed part of Heart of Glass while getting dinner, and never quite got my equilibrium back, but as I say, this gets the 3 Women award for the fest. Abstract, softly surreal, with deep swaths of menance caressing every actor, it's a non-stop fracas of uncomfortable people. Whether the hypnotism really brought out the cast's inner claustrophobia or what, it seemed like everyone's response to the loss of the city's main export (ruby-colored glass) is to claw at themselves and spin in small circles. I like the ideas people come up with for finding out how to make ruby glass...they bring in the guy who can talk about ruby glass most evocatively, they take all the ruby glass that's left and throw it into the sea (so the sea will turn ruby red) and the sop up the blood of a dead woman to add to the glass. None of these remedies gets them far, and in the end, the road to insanity is more like a long walk off a short pier. Bonus points for abundant hurdy-gurdy use!
My copy of La Soufriere had pretty crappy sound, but this turned out to be kind of a boon...viewers were tightly focused on the action. A lot of laughter and heads shaking incredulously, as can be expected. The three people on the island who would not leave all have nearly the same answers, as if they'd been coached. "Aren't you scared?" "Why should I be? We all have to die eventually." ALL RIGHT! WE GET IT! Naturally, the fact the Herzog and his later-to-strike-out-on-his-own cameraman Ed Lachman are still alive and making movies gives away the ending....volcano? No show.
Stroszek...another winner. As much as it's like the most obvious and typical thing to do in a situation like this, I have to want to compare Kinski and Bruno S. and what they bring to Herzog's films (Since they are the two actors most closely connected with his work), and it's kind of natural. Kinski seems to fill up a screen/shot/room with his immense presence. All scenes with him simply radiate Kinski and his hulking magnificence. Bruno S., on the other hand, seems to absorb everything that is happening in the screen/shot/room and react accordingly. He absorbs pain, wheras Kinski simply gives it, even when he's on the submissive end, a la Woyzek. Although the room went still as Bruno showed the model of his insides, "where people are constantly closing the door on me, politely but constantly," the dark humor easily showed through on this film. The fart-lighting, the dancing chicken, the humiliating act of having someone place a bell on your head and your backside and instructing you to keep still...these are the things we'll be desperately trying to explain to our co-workers on Monday. "He lit a fart...and nobody reacted! It was great!" Again, despite three top-flight Kinski blowouts today, this might have been my second-favorite film in this set.
Ah, Nosferatu. What a presence Kinski has! I can't even compare his demonic count to any dracula character I've seen...even Murnau's original demon seems kind of one-dimensional by comparison! He walks, glares, and gnashes like Murnau's demon, but his expressive face tells so many stories....for all his bravado and bluster, Kinski can really dial it down when the mood dictates. Least mugging dracula ever? Probably not, but definitely unsettling and otherwordly (Side note: he HAS to have been on platform heels or something! Kinski's body shape here, impossibly tall and ruler straight/thin, is so different from Aguirre, who was all shoulders and limp, squat and focused. Here, he almost hovers off the ground). I don't know my original Stoker (or Murnau!) all that well, but I didn't think most Dracula stories focused so much on the whole dracula/black plague parallel...rats! Rats everywhere! Eating the town alive in macro, just as the Prince of Rats (as he's called) gnaws away in micro. Also the sleaziest throat-blood-suck (for Eva Harker) I've ever even imagined seeing!
The three of us that made it all the way to Woyzek though we would be slowing it all the way down...maybe half watching, half-napping, mixing up some dreams and on-screen images, but to our surprise and delight, we got a happy little bum-rush, courtesy some Million Tongues Festival exitees! Thanks guys and gals!! So great to see you. The jolt really got us all the way focused on poor Kinski's most submissive role, the perpetually shat-upon soldier Woyzek. The compact running time allowed for a strangely brisk storytelling...lots of information is thrown at you to help explain why Woyzek would eventually want to kill his unfaithful wife (this is based upon a play from 1829, by the way). All of the reasons (including a weird sort of army-mandated experiment being conducted in which Woyzek is fed abnormal diets and asked to perform stressful actions, like catching a cat that's thrown from the second floor of a building (more animal cruelty! Werner, what's with you? [don't worry folks, Klaus katches the krazy kat]). But the image (and the example of the most intense cruelty perpetuated by those in power above him) comes during the frantically hilarious/brutal/raw-nerved opening credit sequence, in which Kinski is slapped, thrown to the ground, made to do pushups, kicked in the ribs, told to do more pushups, kicked in the head, more pushups, etc., until he completely collapses in a heap. If Bruno's Stroszek is perpetually left behind, no matter where he goes, Kinski's Woyzek would be okay if ONLY he was left alone. To each according to what he can bear, Kinski is given overt violence, Bruno a series of neglects and failures, until each reacts in a way consistent with the style of actor: Kinski kills another, while Bruno kills himself (but not before putting a lot of quarters into the "Dancing Chicken" machine! Oh my God, the DANCING CHICKEN! And the RABBIT FIRE CAPTAIN! And the DUCK THAT PLAYS PIANO! AND THE ONE THAT PLAYS DRUMS!!! ARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!)
And on that note, it's only about six or seven hours until it's time for Reverend Huie to take the pulpit, so I'll sign off. Bye!
Don't expect anything too damn profound from this...it's 4 a.m., I'm gooned on beer, bronchial inhaler hits, and 15 straight hours of amazing films! But, I felt like weighing in a little bit on the days events before turning in for the requisite stiff-legged five-hour power-nap before we resume tomorrow morning (er, later this morning).
I can't even imagine I need to tell you what a spine-mulcher Aguirre: The Wrath of God is. You probably already knew that long before I did! The malaria fairly radiates off the screen. Among the many images that sear their way into your mind (the long winding trail of people winding down the mountain, the rafter full of little greenish gibbering monkeys, the man whose head is cut off so fast, it finishes its sentence 20 feet from the body), the one I keep thinking about, for some reason, is the abandoned horse. It's a comical, yet slightly eerie image, the horse forlornly staring back at the raft from shore, not only regretting its insolence, but fairly taunting the crew for their actions..."You'll be sorry you abandoned me! Lots of tasty and nutritive flank meat over here. While you assholes are counting corn kernals, I'm getting plump and juicy off this exotic berries!"
Jeezus, that kind of drifted off topic. Don't mind me. Moving right along...
Woodcarver Steiner seemed at first to be a curiosity, but sucked us in rather quickly. The slow-motion shots of ski jumpers in the air, mouths wide with terror, concentration, and, yeah, ecstacy are hard to forget. This one was a strange kind of fist-pumper...by which I mean my guests and I were absorbed into the competition elements of the story very quickly, as it is constantly revealed that Steiner is being repeatedly handicapped by judges so that his lands will approximate the distances of the other ski-jumpers...when they hit 140 km, he's hitting 170, so they take part of the track out when he competes, to slow him down. Then another piece. Then he starts from a lower spot on the track. Finally, four handicaps later, and he's still beating his competition by over 20 km per jump! The beauty of the shots (and, alas, a lot of montages of jumpers wiping out hard, "Agony of defeat"-style), the passion of the man, and even the post-competition interview/story all give you a very quick but substantive picture of Steiner's great love of life, which is not to win, but to fly.
We saw a lot of amazing films today, but I have to say that The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser wore the crown out of today's contenders. Naturally, Stiff-Leg lifers tend to compare fests from one to the other. If Heart of Glass was this festival's 3 Women, then to me, Kaspar Hauser was its Nashville. Not due to size of ensemble, but just for touching simple human feelings and experiences over and over again. It can't be said enough...Bruno S. is one of the least-affected actors ever. He is without guile, and his face tells 1001 stories with every twitch of the eyebrow or every time he manages to shed tears without contorting his face into the usual agonized laugh/cry face that we all make. Kaspar goes from grunting neanderthal to charming simpleton, to relatively assertive humorist in little time. Notice the considerable (and nuanced) differences in Bruno's face between when he plays Kaspar arriving in the town square for the first time, never having seen people, or civilization, or even understanding the concept of walking, with the second time he takes the exact same stance, posing in the highly abstract freak-show (That's also worth pointing out....what the HELL is with the freak show? Some of the most elaborate stories I've ever heard for the purpose of captivating the children. A tiny king? A man who plays nose flute so that his village will not die? A mozart-like prodidgy that stares into the center of the earth to see black holes?). At this point, Kaspar has learned how to act; how to simulate his initial experiences on a stage. Bruno S. has the skills to play the difficult role, and then to play the role playing an actor! It's all too much for my mind to process at this late hour, but I have to say, this film, and Bruno's performance in it, hit me the hardest today. When Kaspar touches the candle, jumps back, and sheds tears involuntarily, without crying, simply staring off into space, it's hard not to want to squirt off a few yourself. Although I'm sure many images will remind themselves to me tomorrow, most of what I remember are Bruno's words: "Mother, I am so far away from everything." "Why is everything so much harder for me?" Oh, and exquisitely creepy cameo from Popul Vuh's Florian Fricke, and...wait for it.....a super-duper cameo from our favorite small-starting dwarf, HOMBRE!!! All hail the tiny king of the land of Runt!! (I didn't make that up, it's in the movie)
How Much Wood is, as you'd expect, hilarious, inspiring, and totally exhausting. If you know what an auction barker sounds like, imagine over a half hour of uninterrupted mile-a-second barker-babble, and you can see why everybody in the room needed to get a beer afterward.
I missed part of Heart of Glass while getting dinner, and never quite got my equilibrium back, but as I say, this gets the 3 Women award for the fest. Abstract, softly surreal, with deep swaths of menance caressing every actor, it's a non-stop fracas of uncomfortable people. Whether the hypnotism really brought out the cast's inner claustrophobia or what, it seemed like everyone's response to the loss of the city's main export (ruby-colored glass) is to claw at themselves and spin in small circles. I like the ideas people come up with for finding out how to make ruby glass...they bring in the guy who can talk about ruby glass most evocatively, they take all the ruby glass that's left and throw it into the sea (so the sea will turn ruby red) and the sop up the blood of a dead woman to add to the glass. None of these remedies gets them far, and in the end, the road to insanity is more like a long walk off a short pier. Bonus points for abundant hurdy-gurdy use!
My copy of La Soufriere had pretty crappy sound, but this turned out to be kind of a boon...viewers were tightly focused on the action. A lot of laughter and heads shaking incredulously, as can be expected. The three people on the island who would not leave all have nearly the same answers, as if they'd been coached. "Aren't you scared?" "Why should I be? We all have to die eventually." ALL RIGHT! WE GET IT! Naturally, the fact the Herzog and his later-to-strike-out-on-his-own cameraman Ed Lachman are still alive and making movies gives away the ending....volcano? No show.
Stroszek...another winner. As much as it's like the most obvious and typical thing to do in a situation like this, I have to want to compare Kinski and Bruno S. and what they bring to Herzog's films (Since they are the two actors most closely connected with his work), and it's kind of natural. Kinski seems to fill up a screen/shot/room with his immense presence. All scenes with him simply radiate Kinski and his hulking magnificence. Bruno S., on the other hand, seems to absorb everything that is happening in the screen/shot/room and react accordingly. He absorbs pain, wheras Kinski simply gives it, even when he's on the submissive end, a la Woyzek. Although the room went still as Bruno showed the model of his insides, "where people are constantly closing the door on me, politely but constantly," the dark humor easily showed through on this film. The fart-lighting, the dancing chicken, the humiliating act of having someone place a bell on your head and your backside and instructing you to keep still...these are the things we'll be desperately trying to explain to our co-workers on Monday. "He lit a fart...and nobody reacted! It was great!" Again, despite three top-flight Kinski blowouts today, this might have been my second-favorite film in this set.
Ah, Nosferatu. What a presence Kinski has! I can't even compare his demonic count to any dracula character I've seen...even Murnau's original demon seems kind of one-dimensional by comparison! He walks, glares, and gnashes like Murnau's demon, but his expressive face tells so many stories....for all his bravado and bluster, Kinski can really dial it down when the mood dictates. Least mugging dracula ever? Probably not, but definitely unsettling and otherwordly (Side note: he HAS to have been on platform heels or something! Kinski's body shape here, impossibly tall and ruler straight/thin, is so different from Aguirre, who was all shoulders and limp, squat and focused. Here, he almost hovers off the ground). I don't know my original Stoker (or Murnau!) all that well, but I didn't think most Dracula stories focused so much on the whole dracula/black plague parallel...rats! Rats everywhere! Eating the town alive in macro, just as the Prince of Rats (as he's called) gnaws away in micro. Also the sleaziest throat-blood-suck (for Eva Harker) I've ever even imagined seeing!
The three of us that made it all the way to Woyzek though we would be slowing it all the way down...maybe half watching, half-napping, mixing up some dreams and on-screen images, but to our surprise and delight, we got a happy little bum-rush, courtesy some Million Tongues Festival exitees! Thanks guys and gals!! So great to see you. The jolt really got us all the way focused on poor Kinski's most submissive role, the perpetually shat-upon soldier Woyzek. The compact running time allowed for a strangely brisk storytelling...lots of information is thrown at you to help explain why Woyzek would eventually want to kill his unfaithful wife (this is based upon a play from 1829, by the way). All of the reasons (including a weird sort of army-mandated experiment being conducted in which Woyzek is fed abnormal diets and asked to perform stressful actions, like catching a cat that's thrown from the second floor of a building (more animal cruelty! Werner, what's with you? [don't worry folks, Klaus katches the krazy kat]). But the image (and the example of the most intense cruelty perpetuated by those in power above him) comes during the frantically hilarious/brutal/raw-nerved opening credit sequence, in which Kinski is slapped, thrown to the ground, made to do pushups, kicked in the ribs, told to do more pushups, kicked in the head, more pushups, etc., until he completely collapses in a heap. If Bruno's Stroszek is perpetually left behind, no matter where he goes, Kinski's Woyzek would be okay if ONLY he was left alone. To each according to what he can bear, Kinski is given overt violence, Bruno a series of neglects and failures, until each reacts in a way consistent with the style of actor: Kinski kills another, while Bruno kills himself (but not before putting a lot of quarters into the "Dancing Chicken" machine! Oh my God, the DANCING CHICKEN! And the RABBIT FIRE CAPTAIN! And the DUCK THAT PLAYS PIANO! AND THE ONE THAT PLAYS DRUMS!!! ARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!)
And on that note, it's only about six or seven hours until it's time for Reverend Huie to take the pulpit, so I'll sign off. Bye!
posted at 10:18 PM
1 Comments:
Re: Heart of Glass. The monologue towards the end when the village is descending into chaos is amazing: "People settle down as though never wanting to leave this world. But overnight the clearing of the world begins. From the Orient, a huge bird appears and shits into the sea. The sea rises as high as a house, and boils. The earth trembles and a big island half drowns. The big city with the iron tower is in flames . . . but the fire was started by its own men, and the city is leveled . . . . In Italy the clergy is killed and the churches collapse. The Pope sits in a cell. During his flight he consecrates a goat as a bishop. People starve." Apparently Herzog got all these lines from some obscure medieval German prophet....
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