268301 Mein liebster Feind (Werner Herzog)

MY BEST FIEND
(UK/Germany 1999 95 minutes)

Director: Werner Herzog
Producer: Lucki Stipetic
Photography: Peter Zeitlinger
Editor: Joe Bini
Music: Popol Vuh Leading Players:
Werner Herzog (narrator)
Klaus Kinski (in film excerpts)
Claudia Cardinale
Eva Mattes
Beat Presser

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 plans to murder one another.

It will be a remarkable year for cine-histrionics if anything tops Klaus Kinski's posthumous turn in Werner Herzog's My Best Fiend - a first-person documentary assembled largely from footage taken in the course of the five features they made, being madmen together. Herzog introduces his alter ego on stage, in the lunatic midst of his ranting 'Jesus tour', and reveals that, back in the 50s, Kinski briefly occupied the same Munich pension where 13-year-old Herzog lived with his mother and brothers ... Herzog is no mean performer - his account of the day Kinski trashed the house, locked himself in the toilet, and raved for 48 hours is not the least of My Best Fiend's fantastic takes.

The first and greatest Herzog/Kinski collaboration, Aguirre: Wrath of God - shot under extreme conditions in the amazon rain forest - provided momentum for the less-hallucinated features that followed, including the near-remake Fitzcarraldo (where the star's tantrums so rattled the Indian extras that, according to Herzog, they offered to kill Kinski for him).
-J Hoberman, Village Voice.

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