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Monday, April 20, 2009

My Best Friend


2000 Theatrical Release and Cannes 1999 Official Selection Special Screening! A film about the tempestuous yet legendary working relationship between two creative giants of the film industry - Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. A chain of coincidences brings the 13-year-old schoolboy Werner Herzog together with Klaus Kinski to the same apartment in Munich. In an unabated, 48 hour fit of rage, Kinski immediately proceeds to lay waste to all the furniture, only one of such fits to come. Herzog therefore knows what awaits him when, some years later, he engages Kinski to work with him on Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, their first film together. Four more films would follow. My Best Fiend is a film about the love-hate relationship between director Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski - utterly puzzling to others. It reveals the deep trust between two exceptional artists and their independently and simultaneously hatched plans to murder one another.

"Yet Herzog continued working with Kinski—they eventually made five films together—and in this, one can detect something of the perversity that impelled the director to drag a boat across a mountain in the first place. Herzog has never really been able to fully account for his and Kinski’s twisted reliance upon each other. He did pull from Kinski some astonishing performances—particularly in Woyzeck, a film basically composed of several long one-take sequences—but their working relationship involved serial pledges to kill each other. Kinski, who died in 1991, wrote in his autobiography that “I absolutely despise this murderous Herzog. . . . Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes, gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts!”
The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the Mirages of Werner Herzog

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