Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch My Best Fiend
1999 · Werner Herzog · My Best Fiend on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for Herzog flagging a story as his alone. (sound)
Herzog narrates stories like the Campas offer to kill Kinski and flags them plainly as his own recollection, with no outside witness called to confirm them.
Payoff: You are told, openly, that you are hearing a legend being built, not a fact being reported. In the reading: story-telling / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a narrator caught legending himself and the story at once, in real time.
Notice a story of rage followed by a moment of brilliance. (cutting)
The editing pairs an account of Kinski's eruptions with footage of him doing something transcendent on screen, one image undoing the other.
Payoff: You are never allowed to settle on one version of the man before the film hands you a different one. In the reading: crystalline-description. The reading calls this a crystalline description: an image that builds its subject and then dissolves it into another.
Watch how small Herzog looks against the jungle. (camera)
Zeitlinger shoots the return visits to Peru on wide lenses that dwarf Herzog's figure inside the landscape he once filmed features in.
Payoff: The scale puts the man back inside the world that shaped his films, rather than standing apart from it.
Listen for old film scores returning over new footage. (sound)
Music from Aguirre and Nosferatu resurfaces to frame Kinski's image, its trance-like quality carrying real feeling rather than nostalgia.
Payoff: The old music does real emotional work here, not just a wink back at the earlier films.
Notice Herzog stand alone facing the camera directly. (staging)
He appears without other people in many of these segments, addressing you directly rather than being interviewed by someone off-camera.
Payoff: The solitude and the authority arrive in the same shot, and you feel both at once.
Once you have seen it
Notice the Campas story has no other witness in the film. (structure)
Herzog tells us local extras offered to kill Kinski for him, presenting it entirely as his own memory with nothing else in the film to confirm or deny it.
Payoff: You are never given the tools to decide whether this actually happened or is being invented for you right now. In the reading: puissances du faux. The reading calls this the power of the false: true and invented left deliberately undecidable, on purpose, as method.
Notice the film never delivers a final verdict on Kinski. (structure)
Herzog credits Kinski with extraordinary performances while also recounting real violence toward crew, and refuses to resolve the two into one judgment.
Payoff: The film ends without telling you how to finally feel about the man at its center.
Listen to the sound of Kinski's audience turning on him. (sound)
Archival theater footage preserves the ambient noise of a Berlin crowd in open revolt during one of Kinski's own performances, still audible decades later.
Payoff: The raw sound of that anger is more unsettling than anything Herzog could have described in narration.
Carry this in: Listen for when Herzog tells you a story is only his memory; the film keeps flagging its own uncertainty.