My Best Fiend · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Somewhere on the Aguirre set, Herzog tells us, the Campas extras came to him with an offer. They would kill Kinski. All he had to do was say the word. He declined — not out of mercy, he says, but because he still needed the actor for the rest of the shoot. He tells this in My Best Fiend as his own memory, marked plainly as memory, with no document behind it and no witness called. The film never tries to verify it. That refusal to verify is the whole method, and it is worth slowing down on, because it is what makes this documentary stranger and better than the making-of footage it is built from.

There is a Deleuzian name for what Herzog is doing, and it actually opens the film up rather than decorating it. Deleuze argues that in a certain kind of cinema, truth and falsity stop being the point. The narrator stops being a witness who reports what happened and becomes what Deleuze calls le faussaire — the forger, the one who creates the truth he is telling. This is the power of the false: not lying, but making the line between true and invented undecidable, and using that undecidability as a creative engine. The Campas story might be exactly what happened. It might be legend Herzog is composing right now, for us, on camera. The film wants both at once and gives you no instrument to choose. Deleuze had a word for a subject caught in the act of inventing himself this way: fabulation, legending. Herzog narrates rhetorically, shaping the record toward his own reading while openly flagging that he is shaping it. He is not a neutral interlocutor. He never pretends to be.

Watch what the editing does and you see the same principle at the level of the image. A story of one of Kinski's eruptions — the screaming, the rifle, the terrorized crew — is followed by footage of the same man doing something transcendent on screen, something only he could have done. The cut composes a Kinski and immediately replaces him with an incompatible one. Deleuze calls this a crystalline description: an image that builds its object and then dissolves it into another, so that no stable referent survives. And the film as a whole behaves like Deleuze's crystal-image — that figure where present and past, the real and its reflection, can no longer be told apart. My Best Fiend is eulogy, settling of accounts, and self-portrait in the same gesture. You cannot peel the tenderness off the indictment. The Popol Vuh score, the dossier notes, returns to frame Kinski's face with an otherworldly grandeur Herzog means as sincere and ironic. Both readings are live. Neither wins.

This is why the film performs rather than reports, and the dossier's sharpest observation is that it has to. Kinski's volcanic acting — the Jesus Christus Erlöser footage of him raging at a Berlin audience in open revolt, losing them over hours — cannot be captured by a film that stands safely outside it and tabulates. A volcano cannot be footnoted. So Herzog answers performance with performance, speech-act against speech-act: his is the legending, testimonial voice, not the dialogue of a talking head but a man building a myth aloud while you watch.

Place it in the lineage and the debts are precise. The on-screen director as partial unreliable narrator, constructing an argument out of assembled archival footage, is Welles's invention in F for Fake — the structural model Herzog inherits whole. The trick of confronting a subject with footage of himself, turning the camera into an instrument of self-examination, comes from Rouch and Morin's Chronique d'un été; here it becomes a posthumous version, Herzog cross-examining a dead man through the negative they shot together. The voice that comments on heterogeneous images rather than explaining them is Marker's, from Sans Soleil. And the deepest debt is an inversion: Les Blank's Burden of Dreams filmed the Fitzcarraldo production from the outside, in patient vérité. My Best Fiend reclaims the same events from the inside, replacing observation with a narration that was a participant — and an interested one, with his own myth to protect.

What did this do to the form? It pushed the essay-film past confession into something that thinks on its feet. Deleuze's word for an image that thinks rather than depicts is the noosign, the screen as a kind of brain. The thought My Best Fiend performs is genuinely unresolved: it credits Kinski with performances of extraordinary power and recounts his violence toward crew and graver allegations besides, endorsing neither, dismissing neither. The conventional documentary closes with a verdict. This one refuses the verdict and makes the refusal its subject.

So the question it hands you is not "who was Kinski." It is whether you can ever know a person you needed too much to see clearly — and whether a film, honest about being a performance, gets closer to that truth than a film pretending to be a record. Watch it again and notice the seams Herzog leaves showing. He is forging, and he wants you to catch him at it. That is the honesty.