Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski: A Film Legacy

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski: A Film Legacy Review

As the other reviews show, Herzog is not to everyone's taste.... that just leaves more for the rest of us! If you love Herzog's work and the fruits of his collaborations with the superhuman Kinski, then this set is definitely for you. I just finished reading three Herzog books: "Herzog on Herzog", "Conquest of the Useless" and "Of Walking in Ice"---these have given me many new insights into the mind of Werner Herzog, and I would say they even changed my life, because they build up a haunting and mysterious picture of what an intense creative self-awareness looks like, and how it can translate into storytelling.

Anyway, all that greatly augmented my appreciation of the movies in this set, so I can highly recommend reading those books if you want to know more about the process, or just as a Portrait of the Filmmaker.

The quality of the transfers and the commentaries on these DVD's are very rich and satisfying. I miss Klaus Kinski! Of course that's easy for me to say, I never had to work with him; I just reap the benefits of the great Herzog-Kinski partnership.

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski: A Film Legacy Overview

No Description Available.
Genre: Foreign Film - German
Rating: UN
Release Date: 21-MAR-2006
Media Type: DVD

Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski: A Film Legacy Specifications

The six-film Herzog/Kinski boxed set is a sleek compilation of a visionary cinematic collaboration. The history of cinema is dotted with great directors who have found an actor whose face, voice, and style capture that director's point of view: Josef Von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich; John Ford and John Wayne; Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro. In 1972, the German director Werner Herzog cast Polish actor Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, the Wrath of God--the result was perhaps the definitive film for both. Kinski had previously made almost 100 films, but his malevolent role--as a Spanish conquistador obsessed with finding gold--shot him into international stardom. Though Herzog and the volatile Kinski were at each other's throats through much of the filming, seven years later the director cast Kinski as the tortured vampire of Nosferatu, Phantom of the Night (a color remake of the silent horror classic) and the title character of Woyzeck, based on the classic expressionistic German play about a jealous, unstable soldier who murders his lover. Both films continued the Herzog-Kinski trademark of intense unflinching emotion and the palpable presence of the raw physical world.

In 1982, Fitzcarraldo carried this ethos to new heights as Kinski portrayed a man who, in order to bring grand opera to the depths of Peru, has a huge steamship hauled over a mountainside using ropes, pulleys, and human endurance. The mad ambition of the film matched that of its hero as Herzog repeatedly placed crew and actors at risk of their lives. Nonetheless, the love-hate relationship between the director and his star carried them into one last film, the uneven but still remarkable Cobra Verde, about a Brazilian bandit sent to Africa to reopen the slave trade. After Kinski's death in 1991, Herzog made a documentary, My Best Fiend, about their decades of collaboration; the result rivals their previous work as a testament to human extremity. --Bret Fetzer

Available at Amazon Check Price Now!

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Oct 04, 2010 19:06:06