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Cobra Verde
Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde opens with images of a hot, barren desert, and then we are immediately thrust into a close up of Klaus Kinski’s face, which is pained, contorted, and undeniably insane. The implication is clear: Kinski is the most barren desert of all, and if Fitzcarraldo was a film about Herzog’s own mad obsessions, then this will be a film totally, completely about Kinski’s enraged soul. No director worked with Kinski more than Herzog; indeed, no director had the nerve or the patience. Kinski was undeniably a madman, given to fits of violent anger and temper tantrums that tested the tolerance of even the most prolific directors like David Lean and Sergio Leone. He was as delusional as he was egotistical—during the making of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he believed himself to be both Jesus Christ and Paganini, all the while throwing temper tantrums when Herzog dared to point the camera at anything but the actor’s face. Kinski and Herzog admittedly hated one another on the sets of their films, yet something continuously drew them back to one another, for film after film. Why Herzog put himself through the ordeal of Kinski is a question that will probably never be fully answered (Herzog himself admits that he has no answers in his documentary about Kinski, My Best Fiend), but Cobra Verde perhaps provides more clues than any other film that they made together. This is because more than any of their other collaborations, Herzog allows Kinski to create a character here that is the living embodiment of his personal rage. Cobra Verde is a difficult film to review, because it is simultaneously one of Herzog’s most deeply flawed pictures and one of his best. Its greatness is completely determined by the point of view in which you watch it. Herzog is clearly trying to make some sort of philosophical statement about the evils of slavery, but the story is so jumbled and thin that such themes are lost and confusing. Besides that, I’m not sure what kind of statement you can make about slavery, except that it is, indeed, evil. Herzog also takes a stab at the politics of slavery, from the points of view of both buyer and seller. Featured, therefore, is a full cast of characters, but they are all curiously flat: They move about with little depth or diversity, and I began to lose track of which character was allied with whom, or why. The overall point seems to be that those who deal in the business of slavery have essentially enslaved themselves, but isn’t that obvious? Yet at the heart of this film is Klaus Kinski as the legendary bandit, Cobra Verde. In Herzog’s best films, fact and fiction have always been interchangeable, such as casting the genuine schizophrenic Bruno S. as a mentally disturbed person in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, or the use of Peruvian locals to literally pull a steamship over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo. Here, it is difficult to tell where Cobra Verde ends and Klaus Kinski begins, and I’m not even sure if such a distinction is relevant. As I describe the character, I might as well be describing Kinksi: A restless madman prone to murderous anger, who literally travels to all four corners of the earth in search of something to calm his spirits. He hates his occupation, but he is brilliant at it. He walks with a cocky strut as people flee from him, his very presence soliciting fear. His body is wrapped in a well-worn blanket, as if it represents the sorrow and agony that covers him. His hair is wild, long, and unkempt, like that of a wounded lion’s. He fathers over sixty children in the film, yet he neither knows any of them nor desires to—to him, sex is simply an unsuccessful attempt at forgetting his pain, if only for a moment. He doesn’t wear shoes because he "doesn’t trust them.” He walks alone, because he dislikes both horses and people. He stands waist-deep in the Brazilian sea, as he stares longingly into the horizon and mutters, “I long to go forward here to another world.” “Another world” turns out to be Africa, where, in perfect Joseph Conrad fashion, Cobra Verde finds himself first a slave trader, and then the captive of a renowned and powerful chief who decides he doesn’t do business with white men. Cobra Verde escapes and later becomes the leader of an army of hundreds of Amazon warriors, and then the second-in-command of an entire African kingdom. Yet even in these epic circumstances, his restlessness cannot be abided. Boredom becomes his worst enemy. “Africa is disappointing,” he laments in his journal. “The heat is unbearable, but my heart only grows colder.” As his kingdom collapses and Europe puts a price on his head, Cobra Verde hisses happily, “At last, something is happening!” The only time in which his restlessness is truly abated is in his bursts of violence and rage. He kills quickly and efficiently, but the anger that surrounds these killings is slow to boil and even slower to dissolve. In one instance, he leads the Amazons in a siege to assassinate a village chieftain, only to find that the chieftain has decided to commit suicide. Cobra Verde explodes into a screaming fit, seemingly because he didn’t have the pleasure of killing the chief himself. Before this showdown, as he trains the Amazons to kill effectively, his eyes are wild with fury and passion, and we realize that these times of fury are the only moments in which Cobra Verde is truly alive. In this film, Herzog creates the most utterly fascinating character of all his movies, and certainly his most psychologically complex protagonist. That Cobra Verde’s story is inspired by a real-life myth only fuels the legends surrounding Kinksi’s own troubled lifestyle of sexual temptation, rage, and violence. Cobra Verde is clearly the personification of Kinski himself, who was prone to similar fits of anger and restless wandering throughout his very unhappy life. Sans the jumbled slavery themes, Herzog’s primary thesis seems to be that the restlessness found in both Cobra Verde and Kinski cannot be contained by anything except rage. Cobra Verde does not realize that he exists simply for this rage (and neither did Kinski), but we do not doubt that this is the case. No one can say what fuels this restlessness, and Herzog does not try to answer this question. But it does exist, and at best, it can only be temporarily restricted through aggression, but never stopped altogether. The character of Cobra Verde provides an insightful clue as to why Kinski returned again and again to Herzog’s films—the director somehow managed to capture his rage in a way that made him feel the most uninhibited. Why Herzog continually cast Kinski is a trickier question, except that perhaps he found the actor as fascinating as we find Cobra Verde. For the picture’s shortcomings, Herzog insists that his films are supposed to reveal the contradictory human nature in all of us, and on this level, Cobra Verde achieves greatness. His bandit lives on the same literary plain as those restless, vengeful literary icons like Joseph Conrad’s (and, for that matter, Coppola’s) Kurtz, Charles Dicken’s Mrs. Havisham, Martin Scorsese’s Travis Bickle, William Shakespeare’s Iago, and Frank Miller’s Batman—characters driven to anger and sadness for seemingly no rhyme or reason, but who are nevertheless cursed to live lives of despair and depravity. There is a thin line between greatness and evil, Herzog argues, and they are created out of the same wandering restlessness. “Slavery is an element of the human heart,” the bandit insists, and we know that, yes, it is at least an element of his heart. Herzog
also claims that his films are meant to inspire us with original,
imaginative images. Even as the narrative of Cobra Verde
falls apart, it cannot be said that Herzog doesn’t fulfill
his primary goal of giving us haunting pictures to look at. We
are shown mesmerizing shots of men covered in mud and moving about
as if on a chain gang; we see a skin-crawling carpet made literally
out of human skulls; an epic shot of a beautiful slave dance involving
white flags; the aforementioned army of Amazon warriors being
led by the shoeless bandit into a raging battle; Kinski sitting
alone in a gigantic, rundown castle, which serves as a vacuum
disguised as great power. These images are, in a word, unforgettable—had
the director provided no narration at all and simply contained
these moments that Herzog pauses to give us, this would alone
merit a four-star rating and allow the film to be ranked among
the director’s best works. Not long after starring in Cobra Verde, Kinski died of a sudden heart attack. Today, Herzog describes the actor’s life as “a comet that finally burnt out.” Herzog seemed to know that this would be Kinski’s fate, and so the final images of his film ring like a chilling prophecy that could only be given by the man who knew Kinski best. As we watch these final moments of Cobra Verde on the beach, we realize how appropriate it is that Herzog never made another film with Kinski. Herzog insists that this decision was made because Kinski had “become uncontrollable.” I prefer to think that after finally using this film to peer into the mystery of Kinski’s soul, there was no more reason to continue the collaboration: The director had looked as far into the workings of his greatest arch nemesis and ally as he possibly could, and he dared to ask what made the actor tick. After tackling some of the earth’s greatest jungles and deserts, here was the greatest wilderness of all. Cast: A film by Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.
Written and directed by Werner Herzog. Based on the novel The
Viceroy of Ouidah by Bruce Chatwin. Not rated, but contains images
of violence, slavery, sexual innuendo, and non-sexual nudity involving
natives. Running time: 111 minutes. Original German theatrical
release date: December 3, 1987. In German, with English subtitles.
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