Marcelle Clements:
KLAUS KINSKI & THE THING
Is this man of strange and explosive power really the world's greatest actor?"


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But he was being good-natured in his own way. By then, I'd become accustomed to his yelling. Tricks of the print medium cannot - capital letters cannot - convey the intensity of Kinski's voice when it rises, as it often does. And in the several long telephone conversations we'd had before I went to see him in Northern California, I'd been frightened by it. "Why should I do any interviews? It is all shit," Kinski would crescendo. "Why me? Because I am what they call an actor? It is me or someone else, a murderer or a conductor, or anybody, anybody, anything, that can be consumed. They consume everything - art, executions, hamburgers, Jesus Christ. It is all supermarket talk. It is consumer SHIT to fill up their pages."
"Well, that's true," I said, but I hastened to point out that this case would be different, that our talks would not have to be structured like routine interviews, that he would have freedom - "Freedom!" he interrupted, as he almost always does. "Freedom! That's what every shitty ruler promises you before he takes over!"
"Well, it might be fun for you to - "
"Fun?" repeated Kinski in a suddenly weary voice, faintly, as though he'd turned away from the phone. "There is no fun."
Later, when I knew him better, I would come to realize how little fun there was to be had in the fulfillment of his professional obligations.
"I am like a wild animal who is behind bars," he said. "I need air! I need space!" It sounded almost like a plea.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't mean to -"
"Don't be sorry," he said impatiently but not unkindly. "Don't be sorry, OK?"
You can witness Klaus Kinski having a mood Swing within a minute, within a sentence, as his mind conveys him from an infuriating image to a soothing one to a humorous one. If you watch his face while he speaks, you will see it become a mask of ire, his glance menacing as he spits out words of contempt and outrage Then, suddenly, there'll be a smile so gentle that something will constrict in your chest. It is impossible not to respond. He's So close to the surface, I had thought during one of our first long telephone conversation. But after I'd spent some time with him, I sometimes felt there was no surface at all. I think of him now as exposed consciousness, as fragile as a human organ taken from the protective case of the body. I think that's why, between films, he lives alone, in a cabin in the middle of his 40 acres of forest in Northern California. Only his nine-year-old son, Nanhoi, comes for the weekend, twice a month. "I love him," says Kinski, "more than anything in the whole universe.
Kinski often goes for weeks without speaking to another human being. He reads no newspaper. He watches no television.I climbed up to the roof and smashed down the antenna, he explained. He keeps few possessions. When he has finished reading a book, he uses it to start a fire in the hearth that is his sole source of heat. He cuts his own hair; he grows his own vegetables so that he will not have to drive into town. The animals in the forest do not threaten him as do people and their societies, nor do the storms, the wind, the trees. In the cabin, surrounded by vegetation through which there is no path save that made by the passage of his own body, and in his forest, he is safe. Except from the thing.
Kinski was about five years old when he first felt this thing. He says he can recall looking at a dog or a tree or a whore on the streets of Berlin and hurling his own consciousness into the creatures or even the inanimate objects, not pretending to be but becoming the dog or the tree or the whore. "Incarnating" is what he came to call it later, not playing a role. Being, not acting. He detests the word entertainer:
"What does that mean, this word entertainer? Entertain what? Who?"
He also hates the word actor and mocks the European critics who have called him "the greatest actor of the 20th Century" or "the only genius among us, the only prince of the grace of God."

© 1985 by Marcelle Clements and Playboy Enterprises Inc.

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