Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski (Werner Herzog, 1999)Adam & Sam's take (starts at 40:55)A nice end point to their relationship, but not much more. Well, I say "nice", but really Herzog comes off pretty badly here, trying to hide his own self-aggrandizing tendencies while mocking Kinski's.... clearly Kinski was insane in a way that Herzog isn't, but when the former call the latter a megalomaniac and Herzog more or less answers "look who's talking", I can't help but agree with Kinski. Anything Herzog says is to be taken with a grain of salt : it's telling that the more fantastical stories are related to Aguirre, since we have no behind-the-scenes footage for that one. Sam notes that Herzog's myth-making tendencies are his limit, I'd argue they're his greatest strength (and his films suffer most when he fails at reaching that high, c.f. Cobra Verde), but they are somewhat problematic when he's mythifying himself through Kinski, especially because we don't really get the latter's point of view. I suppose it all goes along with the "ecstatic truth" idea, which makes for entertaining storytelling but slightly awkward eulogies.
All that being said, it is quite fun to try and decipher the web of myths Herzog created around the relationship, and the truth that does transpire is that their relationship was a creative boon for both, a maelstrom which destroyed most things around them but gave us some of the most striking images in cinema, including a new one here of Kinski goofing around with a butterfly. We see here how Kinski was "on" all the time, and I think Herzog's amused detachment is just as much of an affection as Kinski's "erotic nature" posing. Speaking of eroticism and Kinski, we learn that he was much nicer to women, as Cardinale and his Woyzeck co-star have mostly nice things to say about him. I'm sure there's something to be said about how anger and general over-the-topness is a primitive way to assert dominance over other males in an almost animalistic way, but Herzog doesn't really go into that. He's very proud of his own calmness and even says the natives in Fitzcarraldo were more scared of him than Kinski because of it, which... yeah, as I said, he just doesn't come off very well.
This documentary also has the monologue (taken from Burden of Dreams I assume) at the source of Herzog's "nature is unstoppable and evil" (paraphrasing here, obviously), which seems to have perdured as a short-hand for his worldview... and I don't think that's as much of a focus in his films as many seem to think. In his Kinski collaborations at least, nature is not really that big of a focus : only in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo really. And even then, Herzog is much more interested in humanity than anything else, and I think there's been a tendency to reduce him to that speech, given in the middle of an incredibly tough shoot in one of the least hospitable places on Earth, when it really has only been a small part of his films, from what I've seen in this marathon.
6/10