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The
naming of autobiographies is a minor art. A great title can be nobly direct
(Nabokov's Speak, Memory ; Jack Paar's I Kid You Not ), bitterly
cryptic (Josef von Sternberg's Fun in a Chinese Laundry ; Adolf Loos'
Nevertheless ), or too clever by half ( Roman by Polanski). In this
obscure pantheon, a place must be reserved for Klaus Kinski, the erratically
gifted Polish-German actor and noted mal
vivant , who tried to
publish the English version of his autobiography in 1988 under the massively
ironic title All I Need is Love . The book was caught in a copyright
dispute between Random House and a West German publisher, with huge libel
problems looming; it was withdrawn shortly after publication, and became one of
the books most often stolen from public libraries. Now, five years after its
author's demise, it has re-emerged as Kinski
Uncut . Despite the
unfortunate change of name, this ghastly and hypnotic memoir lives up to its
long-festering legend. The whole witless genre of the celebrity confessional
undergoes a horrifying self-disembowelment.
Kinski, with the huge, burning eyes, the weirdly colored
hair (yellow? orange? rotting gold?), the sandpaper voice, the glint of a sharp
intellect beneath a brutish exterior. He emitted a strange kind of electricity;
before he even said a word on screen, he put everything and everyone on edge.
(In his five-minute role in Dr. Zhivago , he seems to be performing with
a wax statue of Omar Sharif.) There was no visible technique to his acting,
other than radiating ineffable Kinski-ness. His secret weapon was, perhaps, his
playfulness, his sense of being slyly amused by a mad world and his own mad
self. He will live into posterity on the strength of the five films he made
with the great German director Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo and
particularly Aguirre, Wrath of God ; his Aguirre, the languidly
nihilistic martinet who leads an Amazon expedition toward nothingness, is one
of the great human monsters in movie history. But for the most part, his
talents were wasted, and Kinski Uncut shows how he went about wasting
them.
He was
born Niklaus Nakszynski in 1926, in the old free city of Danzig (now Gdansk in
Poland). Growing up impoverished in Berlin, he was drafted into the rag-tag
teen-age and old-age army that fought for Hitler in the last days of World War
II. He showed no enthusiasm for the Nazi cause, and soon deserted. On the other
hand, he said afterward that he would have outdone Hitler if he had been given
the part. He began acting in Berlin and regional theaters, developing a
reputation for savagely accented classical performances and electrifying
one-man shows. In the latter, he would read mad scenes from plays, poems of
Rimbaud or François Villon, and other programs of his own devising. He began
acting in movies in 1948; from 1960 on, he made at least one film a year, and
sometimes five or 10.
T >he film career
began promisingly. He appeared in Douglas Sirk's A Time to Love and a Time
to
Die ; a film by the mildly celebrated German director Helmut
Käutner; Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More ; and several crisp
English thrillers and war flicks. Addicted to quick work and upfront salaries,
he quickly gravitated toward the lower road: countless crime serials,
low-budget horror films, spaghetti Westerns, other multinational genre pictures
of no distinction. Even when he began the seemingly career-transforming
collaboration with Herzog, he kept spewing out atrocious B, C, and D movies,
right up to his death in 1991. He was the kaiser of crap, and took pride in his
bad taste. Several times in Kinski Uncut, he lists the famous directors
he turned down: Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini, and so on. He passed on Raiders
of the Lost Ark for something called Venom , because Spielberg didn't
pay enough.
The nearly unrelieved
squalor of this career goes side by side with a self-consciously decadent and
degenerate lifestyle. Episodes recorded in Kinski Uncut fall into four
categories: 1) sexual encounters with hundreds of women, beautiful and ugly,
young and old, in a grotesque pornographic idiom that excludes sensual
pleasure; 2) Céline-esque voyages of degradation and misery, often involving
vomit, excrement, and delirium; 3) excoriations of incompetent directors,
producers, writers, actors, journalists, and generally, all individuals who are
not Kinski; 4) bouts of self-righteousness mixed with intense self-loathing. He
actively sets out to make himself appear the biggest creep who ever walked the
earth.
"Once
when I was asleep I pissed on my sister because I dreamed she was a tree,"
writes Kinski. "I believe there is no stench that I haven't stunk of," writes
Kinski. "The chick with the blond curls ... yells 'Kinski!' which sounds like
'Fuck me,' " writes Kinski. "Herzog is a miserable, hateful, malevolent,
avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, blackmailing, cowardly,
thoroughly dishonest creep. His so-called 'talent' consists of nothing but
tormenting helpless creatures and, if necessary, torturing them to death or
simply murdering them. ... Every scene, every angle, every shot is determined
by me. ... I can at least partly save the movie from being wrecked by Herzog's
bungling," writes Kinski. (This behind-the-scenes mastery of cinema did not
seem to bear fruit in his 1989 directorial debut, Paganini , which has
been described as unwatchable by the few people who have watched it.)
On and on it goes, sickening and tedious by turns. But this
book is weirdly enjoyable for what is not in it: conventional film gossip,
name-dropping, show-biz folly of any kind. Here is a man who reports working on
For a Few Dollars More, but fails to mention Clint Eastwood. For good
long stretches, you'll be wondering, "What year are we in?" or even, "What
decade?" There are no dates, and few hard facts; movies are referred to as
"some piece of crap," directors, as "some idiot." (The "New York actress slut"
referred to on page 309 is Susan Sarandon. For other helpful annotations, see
the Kinski filmography
attached.) He doesn't even give the full names of his various wives. You also
wonder whether certain things actually happened. Some of the sexual escapades
sound curiously like unfulfilled fantasies. Phrases recur in them like literary
motifs.
Eventually, a genre crisis sets in. Is this autobiography, or an
autobiographical novel? It becomes an interesting game to guess at the real
feelings behind this Kinski-esque character called Kinski. The Herzog sections
ring particularly false; if Herzog was a bungling murderer, why did Kinski keep
making films with him? Read Maureen Gosling's journals about the making of
Fitzcarraldo , or Bruce Chatwin's essay on Cobra Verde , and you
discover a rather different Kinski: an irascible, lonely, lovable eccentric,
whose fits of rage come and go like squalls, whose childish enthusiasm for
filmmaking and playacting bursts through the put-on cynicism. The camera
faithfully recorded his impishness; Aguirre, Wrath of God and
Fitzcarraldo are grand, dark, but also comic, and Kinski supplies the
lion's share of the wit.
S >o why is
Kinski such a glum book? Part of the problem may be the translation.
Joachim Neugröschel is a respected and experienced translator, but he tries too
hard to turn Kinski's thuggish prose into slinky American slang. Idioms are
sometimes not quite on the mark--for example, references to Kinski's pals
sleeping with "minor boys" and "minor girls." The translation that Kinski made
himself in 1988--I found one remaining copy in the New York Public Library--was
more arch, cold, stylish. Also, there are strange discontinuities between the
two versions: each has material omitted from the other, and the new "uncut"
edition is actually much more cautious naming names. All this will have to be
sorted by Kinski scholars of the future.
In the end, the book is
another performance, another ranting Kinski creation. If asked for a
Siskel-and-Ebert yea or nay, I wouldn't know what to say: It can be recommended
only to certain tastes. Amateur psychologists may enjoy it as a sort of
high-level Nintendo game of bombarding sexual neuroses. Students of human
misery can savor its underlying sadness and futility. And as always with
Kinski, there's a taunting taste of comedy; the tears on his cheeks are from
laughter. As I put this wretched book down, I thought I heard a cackle from
somewhere, and a man with red eyes rasping, "Idioten !"
