Werner Herzog Season – Screening: My Best Fiend

The Frontline Club’s Werner Herzog season celebrates the work one of the greatest living filmmakers. The season has been kindly curated by his long-time producer Andre Singer who will be speaking at this screening.

The film is about Werner Herzog’s tumultuous working relationship with actor Klaus Kinski who remains best known for the five films they made together.

It documents the darker side of the relationship between the two men who met in an apartment in Munich when Werner Herzog was a 13-year-old schoolboy. In a fit of rage that lasted 48 hours, Klaus Kinski destroyed every piece of furniture: this was one of many such fits during the course of a collaboration that began in 1972, when Werner Herzog cast Klaus Kinski in Aguirre.

Both documentary and cinematic memoir, the film includes on-set footage, personal recollections and clips from the first film and four more films that were to follow: The Wrath of God, Woyzeck, Nosferatu the Vampyre, Cobra Verde, and Fitzcarraldo.

In this personal documentary, Werner Herzog traces the often violent ups and downs of their relationship, revisiting the Munich apartment where they first met and the locations of their films.

Release: 1999
Duration: 95 minutes

Werner Herzog –

Werner Herzog grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria without a television and has gone on to direct 57 films over the last five decades. We will be showing 3 films that explore the themes his work is best known for, heroes with impossible dreams and the “ecstatic truth”.

The three films in our season are Lessons of Darkness (’92), My Best Fiend (’99) and The White Diamond (’04).