Kinski, Herzog, and Their Colonial Protagonists
A look into one of the strongest creative partnerships of the New German Cinema
Author’s Note: Due to the release of Herzog’s new autobiography, “Every Man For Himself and God Against All” I felt inspired to publish a paper that I wrote a few years back for my German Cinema class. Enjoy!
The creative relationship between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski is one that has become mythologized as time has progressed, and the documentary directed by Herzog about their toxic creative partnership titled My Best Fiend (1999) has helped embellish this mythos even more. Of the five films they had worked on together: Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972), Woyzeck (1979), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987), three stand out as Herzog’s unofficial triptych of colonialism; with Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde all having colonial protagonists in different centuries of western imperialism, all portrayed by Kinski. An interesting aspect of Herzog’s work is his aversion to discussing the political nature of his films. In Professor Joshua Lund’s introduction in his book on the filmmaker, he actually mentions this by saying that “Herzog’s ample and unusually authoritative discourse on his own films is a commonly rehearsed refusal of the political” and he rejects “any identification as a political filmmaker” even though “his films represent a direct or even systematic treatment of blatantly political themes and topics” (Lund 4). “Herzog in contrast [of his New-German Cinema contemporaries] depicts human beings who are, for various reasons, independent from or separated from such social systems” (Brockmann 330). Western colonialism, mercantilism, and the African slave trade are all topics that are inherently political and continue to leave blights on nations hundreds of years later. Herzog does not wish to engage with his films this way, however, going as far as “displacing historical contexts from his keenly grounded historical films” (Lund). What must be done in lieu of that is to analyze what the films are saying on their own. Herzog’s emphasis on nature as “an overwhelming, implacable power with which human beings must contend” (Brockmann 331) is an important piece of understanding the director’s ideological project. With that in mind, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Cobra Verde all operate at the same wavelength of semi-fictional colonial protagonists, mythologized through Herzog’s storytelling abilities; but how do Lope de Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, and Francisco Manuel da Silva (all played by Klaus Kinski in their respective film) differ in their madness?
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
“After the Spaniards had conquered and sacked the Inca realm the sorely oppressed invented the legend of a golden kingdom El Dorado. Its alleged location was in the impenetrable bogs of the Amazon tributaries” (Herzog)
These two sentences are what open the conquest in delusion that is Aguirre, the Wrath of God. This brief crawl of exposition in the film establishes it as taking place in 1560, during the advent of the Spanish Inquisition, and “under the leadership of Gonzalo Pizarro set off from the Peruvian sierras.” (Herzog). The words alone describing the actions of the Spaniards towards the native people is already a show of the brutality depicted in the film. The failures of Spanish colonialism are seen even before Aguirre authoritatively installs himself as the de-facto ruler of the expedition, with Catholicism, (the religion that was the driving force of the Inquisition) being portrayed in a negative light. The church is used as a method of control and an excuse “to support and enable imperial greed more than act as a check to it.” (Prager 29) The seemingly “Christian” expedition of the conquistadors in the search for the rumored “city of gold” or El Dorado is the real catalyst for the expedition. The obsession over the gold to be found in this city cuts against one of the capital vices of Christianity, avarice. One scene, in particular that highlights this, is when monk Gaspar de Caravajal (Del Negro) encounters two indigenous people and asks one of them to “’hear’ the word of the lord”. When the indigenous man hears nothing, they are both immediately murdered for blasphemy (Prager 30). The church is also used as a method of excuse in lieu of action, when Caravajal is confronted by Inés de Atienza (Helena Rojo) about maintaining the stability of the expedition that has gone astray and has little to offer other than empty platitudes towards how to fix the way the expedition has gone, “finally admitting to [Inés] that ’the church has always been on the side of the strong’” (Prager 29) instead of using any of his actual power.
Much of the film embodies the abrasiveness that came with colonialism, a glaring example being that “Aguirre’s very title refers to an angry God in contrast to whom human beings are small and powerless” (Brockmann 331). The stand-in for God’s wrath is none other than the real historical figure, Lope de Aguirre. Kinski gives the character of Aguirre the deserved insanity that the character demands based on the fiery presence of the actor. In My Best Fiend, Herzog describes what he calls the “Kinski Spiral” which is an acting technique that Kinski employed where he would walk into the frame with a side profile and then turn towards the camera which “created a mysterious, disturbing tension” (Herzog). Kinski does have an enigmatic ability to come across in the frame as omnipotent with a single stare into the lens of the camera. If according to Herzog the landscape of Aguirre is “’not just a location, it is a state of our mind’” (Brockmann 330) then there is something of profound brilliance in the diabolical stare of Aguirre also mirroring the equally hellish and cruel Amazon. The character of Aguirre also can represent the theme that humanity is their own worst enemy in many ways, the film is also reminiscent of a Greek tragedy, “Aguirre deliberately leads his expedition to destruction” (Brockmann 335) more so than any of the so-called “savages” that the Spanish oppress and enslave, Aguirre invades the minds of his fellow compatriots by validating their innermost delusions, such as by “crowning” Don Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling) as the “king” of Aguirre’s new country. Guzmán forces the people to feed him like a king, disregarding the low supplies of food for everyone. These conflicting realities are juxtaposed in the scene where “Guzman eats his dinner in front of the starving men and proclaims that his new empire is six times larger than Spain.” (Prager 29). This scene ties into Herzog’s philosophy “that ultimately nature will triumph over any society” despite the labels given to ourselves to shape reality, the truth of nature will always catch up to people (Brockmann 335). In the final scene of Aguirre, the colonial pursuits of the expedition are superseded by everyone’s inevitable demise, their raft falling apart and overrun by monkeys in the end. Despite Aguirre witnessing the death of his daughter Flores (Cecilia Rivera) by an arrow, he either ignores or disregards the incontrovertible evidence at hand, instead giving his final monologue: “I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her, I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together we shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath of God…who else is with me?” (Herzog). As the camera pans out there is no one left on the raft except Aguirre and the aforementioned monkeys. The raft is but a microscopic stage in the desolate bowels of the rainforest for a “small voice of conquest exploding with desire” (Lund 50) that is also “a conquistador with nothing to conquer” (Lund 51). What makes Aguirre a fascinating protagonist compared to the other two colonial Herzog protagonists is that his goal is the one that is the least attainable, there is no El Dorado, his daughter (and everyone else) is dead, and even finding his own sanity is a near-impossible task.
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Staying deep in the rainforests of Peru, but jumping forward to the beginning of the 1900s is where Fitzcarraldo takes place, with Kinski playing the titular Irishman (also known as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald). Fitzcarraldo’s colonial interests are not concealed under the “moral piety” of bringing Christianity to natives, like in Aguirre, but rather revealed to be for pure capitalist profit, through the extraction of precious resources.. Yes, the colonialism depicted in Fitzcarraldo is one of madness, but not in the same tradition as Lope de Aguirre or the conquistador’s insistence on domination. Fitzcarraldo’s plan is to build an opera house in his city of Iquitos, Peru, and to do so, he decides to make money off of the booming rubber business in South America. So, Fitzcarraldo purchases a steamship and “obtains the rights to four hundred square miles that are thought to be useless because a deadly rapids prevents a boat from reaching them.” (Ebert 156) In a stroke of mad-genius, Fitzcarraldo decides to move his over 300-ton steamboat over the forty-degree hill on the piece of land that separates the two rivers with the help of the native population. In Les Blank’s documentary about the troubled production of the film, Burden of Dreams (1982), Herzog describes the story as “Sisyphus-like” (Blank). While the goal is met and the boat is successfully heaved over the piece of land that separates the Ucayali River from the Pachitea River, he returns to Iquitos with no rubber. Yet Fitzcarraldo still appears triumphant, being able to achieve what many thought was the impossible, and even though he is “no better off than before” (Prager 36) he smokes his cigar with a certain type of swagger as the cast of his opera production all perform Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani to the cheering people. Fitzcarraldo never gets to build his opera house, but this ending still seems to show the triumph of the human spirit. Fitzcarraldo “has succeeded only in leveling a swath of trees in the jungle yet, he too comes away apparently redeemed owing to his appreciation for aesthetics and his desire to share opera with others.” (Prager 37).
However, the redemption of the protagonist at the end seems unearned and fallacious considering Fitzcarraldo is a rubber baron that exploited the labor of the indigenous population. “For the indigenous communities of the Amazon, the extraction of rubber is symbolic of a more deadly plague. In the last instance, the commodity and its cognates-lumber, gold, petroleum- are second-order objects of plunder. The real objects of plunder is the Indians themselves, their homes swallowed by machines, their bodies dismembered by the vampirism those machines require” (Lund 134). This makes the colonial politics of this film grey at best considering the hardship presented because “identifying with a protagonist who sets hundreds of natives to hard labor should rightly present problems” (Prager 39). Dutch critic Hans Koning had a myriad of problems with Fitzcarraldo in a review he penned at the time of its release. Koning believed that the inclusion of “a ’colonial’ German hero” is a problematic and racist concept to entertain as well as it being “the kind of movie we would have seen in very large numbers if Germany had won its wars” (Koning 43). Koning does make sure readers know he is aware that only Klaus Kinski is German but the character he is playing is an Irishman, however, these attacks are still quite harsh towards the film, the hardship portrayed in the film does not hold back. The ending is confusingly victorious at first, but Fitzcarraldo’s indifference to everyone else on the rubber expedition makes him quite sociopathic, while Aguirre was much more directly violent in every way, he also was mentally unwell. Fitzcarraldo is just a normal capitalist rubber baron (one of many), colonializing another culture’s land for maximum profits, he just also really likes opera, one of his few humanizing traits. Fitzcarraldo and others on the expedition call the indigenous people the derogatory term “bare-asses” which is part of the racist notion of “uncivilized” and “savage” indigenous cultures, and another piece of information that does not paint him in a too favorable light.
Cobra Verde (1987)
Cobra Verde is not only the final Kinski-Herzog collaboration but also the final piece in the “trilogy of colonialism” of Herzog’s oeuvre. “Cobra Verde is the ugly duckling of the three, scantly known even among cinephiles, and having received the least and most uniformly negative response from scholarly criticism.” (Lund 140). Taking place during the transatlantic slave trade in West Africa, Cobra Verde is the third part of one of the watershed moments of the creation of the world we know today, along with “discovery and conquest in Aguirre” and “capitalist accumulation through resource extraction in Fitzcarraldo” (Lund 140). Klaus Kinski plays Brazillian bandit Francisco Manoel da Silva in the film. In Kinski fashion, the character is a nasty and immoral protagonist - a slave driver, a rapist, and a murderer who is also cunning. Like many of Herzog’s films, there is not an outright denunciation of de Silva’s actions but more or less a showcase of these gestures at face value which would lead any observer to believe how dishonorable he is. The closest thing that there is a condemnation is a remark from de Silva at the end when conversing with Captain Fraternidade (Salvatore Basile) over champagne about the slave trade. The captain raises his glass saying “To slavery. The greatest misunderstanding in the history of mankind!” de Silva follows up that remark by saying “It was no misunderstanding. It was a crime.” (Herzog). However, this offhand comment doesn’t really erase the complicit nature of his actions for the whole film.
One scene in particular in Cobra Verde that provides commentary on race is when de Silva is captured by King Bossa Ahadee (played by real king Nana Agyefi Kwame II of Nsein) and remarks to the tribesmen: “I wish I had your skin, black people believe the devil is white” (Herzog). This remark is actually self-fulfilling (and incorrect) because almost immediately afterward, de Silva’s face is covered in black ink when he is about to be decapitated because “they are not allowed to kill a white man” (Herzog). Even when de Silva is “the only white man in this country, perhaps on [the] whole continent” (Herzog) the indigenous people are still afraid of the oppression that the white colonists have brought to their land, showing the hierarchical implications of colonialism. While de Silva is rescued before he can be beheaded, he also ends up overthrowing King Bossa, and continues the slave trade alongside Kankpé (Kwesi Fase), both ruling as equal kings. Professor Brad Prager brings up how the double crowning of two kings, one black and one white “is Herzog’s way of making clear that black King and European slave-trader were both implicated in exploiting Africa.” (Prager 192). Followed by Herzog’s acknowledgment of how this approach to the European cultural hegemony is politically incorrect but is impartial to these criticisms. Herzog saying on the DVD commentary for Cobra Verde that: “it has been a little wiped under the carpet that African kingdoms and African potentates were much involved in the slave trade as well.” (Herzog). This reading of slavery from Herzog is problematic, as it does not fully account for the power imbalances of the European colonialists compared to the African people. However, this can possibly have something to do more so with Herzog’s ignorance on the topic of colonialism or aversion to political themes like his New-German Cinema contemporaries of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge. In Herzog on Herzog, (a series of interviews the director conducted with film historian Paul Cronin) he says that “in most films set in Africa, the continent is portrayed as either a primitive or dangerous place full of savages, or with a kind of Out of Africa [Pollack 1985] nostalgia. Cobra Verde deviates from that.” (Herzog and Cronin 213). Herzog also underscores “the sophisticated and complex structures of Africa” and the predominance of social life in the kingdoms (Herzog and Cronin 213). All these statements give credence to what is already known about Herzog’s curiosity of other cultures and obsession with authenticity, in portraying them with as much accuracy as possible including Herzog’s insistence to cast a real-life African king as a lead character.
Conclusion
Herzog’s trilogy of colonialism spans from the mid-sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, but the thread of indigenous exploitation and their haunting lead performances by Klaus Kinski is what ties them together despite their differences (as it they are all part of the history of the world). No matter what Herzog says, by having a colonial protagonist, whether it be a conquistador, rubber baron, or bandit, the historical baggage that comes with the time period will be there too. It seems Herzog enjoys and openly admits to his ethnographic interest in other cultures, going as far as admitting to insulating the native people from Western culture during Fitzcarraldo, but does not want to talk nearly enough about the historic damage that European cultures have already brought to South America and Africa through colonialism. ◒
Works Cited
Blank, Les, director. Burden of Dreams. Criterion Channel, Flower Films, 1982, www.criterionchannel.com/videos/burden-of-dreams.
Brockmann, Stephen. A Critical History of German Film. Camden House, 2016.
Ebert, Roger, and Werner Herzog. Herzog by Ebert. The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Lund, Joshua. Werner Herzog. University of Illinois Press, 2020.
Herzog, Werner, director. Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Amazon Prime Video, Herzog, Hessischer Rundfunk, 1972, www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07V4MF9V6/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r.
Herzog, Werner, director. Cobra Verde. Tubi, A Werner Herzog Filmproduktion in Cooperation with ZDF and the Ghana Film Industry Corp., 1987, tubitv.com/movies/268892/cobra-verde?start=true.
Herzog, Werner, director. Fitzcarraldo. Amazon Prime Video, Filmverlag Der Autoren, 1982, www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07CHTNZTS/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r.
Herzog, Werner, director. My Best Fiend. Amazon Prime Video, Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Café Productions, Zephir Film, 1999, www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B08QR3DX1X/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r.
Herzog, Werner, and Paul Cronin. Herzog on Herzog. Faber and Faber, 2007.
Koning, Hans. Cinéaste, vol. 12, no. 4, 1983, pp. 42–43. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41686219. Accessed 1 May 2021.
Prager, Brad. The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. Wallflower Press, 2011.