June 2011
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Introducing project #2: "E pluribus unum"
Time to take a break from our Kinski-addicition: this is a brief experiment in visualization of opposite words through the same illustration.
Usually, one word could have multiple meanings and, therefore, multiple visuals. Here we looked for the opposite: one visual representing a polarity between opposite words.
WARNING: this project has deep roots in Italian etimology. We’ll do our best...
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1989: Paganini
KK’s first movie as a director, KK’s last movie as a living being, playing the infamous devilish Italian violinist - one of his alter ego-obsessions along with Jesus, Villon and Van Gogh. Just like it began, “how ironic”. They say he hated directors; quite appropriately, he only directed (and wrote and starred) this Von Trier-esque epic commercial fail, a showreel of sex and virtuosism...
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1987: Cobra Verde
KK is to tragedy what Andy Kaufman is to comedy: a “black hole sun” who made an event horizon out of his career, blurring the boundary between life and representation to a point of no return, making reality fiction (read here) and fiction reality. Pasquale Squitieri, who directed KK in La vendetta è un piatto che si serve freddo, remembers the way he yelled “realism, realism!” while...
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1986: Crawlspace
Five years before, KK had refused the role of Indiana Jones’ Nazi antagonist Major Toht defining the script of Raiders of the Lost Ark, er, “moronically shitty”. In this thriller (not exactly directed by Steven Spielberg), he’s a respectable landlord whose main hobbies include spying, kidnapping and trapping young girls like if they were mice, building deadly contraptions in the style...
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1985: El caballero del dragón
Another Müesli confession: wizard KK’s sci-fi/fantasy headgear has been a stronger motivation for our choice than the nonsensical Miguel Bosé’s alien coming out of a dragon spaceship. ‘Nuff said.
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1981: Fitzcarraldo
Just two hints for KK’s best-known mainstream movie of the n he made (insert a random number between 135 and 270 to quantify the most confused filmography ever, a matchless mix of art and trash). 1, a casting info: Herzog had already shot 40% of the movie with Jason Robards as Fitzcarraldo and Mick Jagger (yep, that Mick Jagger) as his assistant – but, forced to reshoot, KK was enough,...
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1979: Woyzeck
Werner Herzog (and beautiful co-star Eva Mattes too) brings KK back to his Raskolnikov theatrical roots in this shiny little pearldrop of 360° martyrdom (suffered, inflicted and self-inflicted). Herzog’s commentary about the making of “Woyzeck” in his My Best Fiend score-settling with KK is absolutely priceless so, if you haven’t watched it yet, go get it RIGHT NOW. Our Müesli...
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1979: Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht
“I don’t think anything about vampires. When I played Nosferatu I was a vampire myself. So I could ask you what do you think about vampires. I really was this Nosferatu”. KK was true: love-needing (like the mocking title of his autobiography proclaimed), fragile and damned.
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1972: Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes
“The Ultimate Actor” here is the ultimate loser. More ultimate even than Colonel Kurtz (“Aguirre was a very strong influence” [for Apocalypse Now], once said Coppola): lost both at the nowhere-end of the river on a boat full of sick monkeys and dead bodies and downward his own personal spiral of hallucinatory megalomania. KK takes to the extreme evil consequences his desperate anarchist howl on...
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1969: Venus in Furs
In this lysergic video-orgy of jazz and revenge a.k.a. Paroxismus, KK is Ahmed Kortobawi (sic), a millionaire playboy who dies dressed up as a sheik during a bondage RPG with the revenant doppelgänger of his own sex prey (!). Tormentor and victim at the same time: purely KK. And in the end he also gets trapped (or shall we say “tripped”) in the Black Lodge, 20 years before Twin Peaks. Hail to the...
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1969: Marquis de Sade: Justine
If casting him as Jack the Ripper and Dracula’s Renfield wasn’t enough, Exploitation-hero Jess Franco makes his idea of KK crystal clear by giving him the role of the Original Sex Freak himself (at least, a mute, haunted and jailed version of him). Too bad he never puts his sleazy claws on the naked body of a 20-year old Romina Power. Missed chance. We mean, for the better-deserving...
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1968: Il grande silenzio
Corbucci casts KK as the sneaky “Loco” supervillain for his one-of-a-kind Spaghetti Alpine Western masterpiece: one of the bleakest pop representations of the origins of American capitalism ever (along with Watchmen). Also one of KK’s most complex “bad guy” roles, one where he could even express his twisted feminine side - just like in the old Cocteau’s monologue days. Look: he even...
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