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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Terribly Tantalizing. Kinski stays as 'Kinski' throughout., 17 Nov 2002
The late, great Klaus Kinski probably had two things in mind when he constructed his autobiography. The first was to do justice to his exceptionally extraordinary time on this planet. The second was to flare up the flavor of his reminiscences to a belief-defying pique.Anyone familiar with this European superstar will find 'Kinski Uncut' many things, running the gamut from racy to repulsive. Anyone not may well be receiving an unfairly angled point of entry into the life that was Klaus Kinski. There are better introductions, namely his movies. From his birth in what is now Poland to his death in California at the young age of 65, no holes are barred, they are just widened somewhat. Through his harrowing time as a young conscript in the Wermacht and then on to his meteoric rise as one of Europe's most in-demand actors, Kinski portrays himself with a fiery relish. Perhaps it might be prudent to watch Werner Herzog's 'My Best Fiend' (1998) to break the reader in to what is going on in 'Kinski Uncut'. While Kinski might not be guilty of lying his way through his autobiography, it has to be said that he had a shrewd business sense. Would a maniac onscreen have anything else but a frenetic, maniacal life offscreen? If he really was the sensitive artist who dumped all his emotional baggage in the dressing room before returning home, before reflecting on things in his mind, could he still be the Klaus Kinski we were served with all through the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties? The answer is tricky. Kinski was in a particularly hard bind when it came time to record his life. It's understandable why he had to record it - it's every bit as understandable why he had to bend truths and turn up the hatred dial when commenting on Herzog, without whom he would never have surfaced to the extent he did. It was all for show, for sales, and, maybe, for fun. Pick up this year's 'Herzog On Herzog', or, if you are fortunate enough to get speaking to Herzog, as I have, you'll learn a great deal about the uncanny ease with which misinformation has been disseminated about him, his films, and, consequently, Kinski. Kinski and Herzog were a symbiotic relationship in film, the latter being the only director to take Kinski's haunted nature and harness it for use in the name of cinematic excellence. Overall, 'Kinski Uncut' is a good study in the discipline of biography. Kinski is writing not for exclusively political reasons to try and keep the record 'straight' on who he was, but he comes across on many pages as a kind and tormented soul desperately trying to put many of the ghosts in his past to rest. He seems to be needing to use bravado both as an anesthetic in looking back as well as a means of securing the success of his book. It's doubtful this kind of biography will ever happen again, such was the man.
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