Klaus Kinski, Beast of Cinema by Matthew Edwards

Author:Matthew Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2016-07-05T16:00:00+00:00

Original Japanese VHS cover for Crawlspace (courtesy Tonya Howe).

In Crawlspace, the enclosed film setting mimetically imagines Karl Gunter’s psychological interiority, focusing our attention on the way that interiority works; and yet, from the very beginning, Gunther slides into Kinski. The original VHS box cover art, which was duplicated in a one-sheet for the film, dramatizes the way the interior spaces of the film fold in on the star’s character, emphasizing the slippage between character and actor.

In the Lightning Video U.S. release, the VHS cover art depicts a stylized, almost hand-illustrated photograph of a dark-haired young woman (ostensibly Balsam’s Lori Bancroft) reaching out toward the viewer as if seeking to escape the sketched setting of the crawl space. This image is inset and blended into a photographic image of the unmistakable Klaus Kinski—more precisely, his forehead. It is as though she is trying to escape not so much the crawl space in which she is trapped, but the mind of Kinski’s Gunther. Indeed, one of the film’s tag lines makes it obvious: “He seduces them in his mind and traps them in his crawlspace.” Gunther—or perhaps Kinski—is the visual focus of this image; his head takes up almost the entirety of the compositional space. While the Japanese Vestron International VHS cover art37 more equally distributes the visual real estate, Gunther/Kinski is again photographically rendered, while the female victim remains unmoored from the actress in the film illustrated. She is neither clearly identifiable as Balsam’s Lori Bancroft, nor is she costumed as she was in the film itself; instead, she wears a white nightgown or teddy. It is not coincidental that the female victim is rendered more illustratively, as this suggests her status as fantasy—but it is interesting that the cover art draws our attention to the inner spaces of Gunther’s/Kinski’s mind and the role of the women he kills as products of it. The fact that Klaus Günther Kinski and Karl Gunther share similar names and a similar biographical history only draws the slippage between the two into focus; it is telling that one can replace “Kinski” with “Gunther” and vice versa throughout this essay and come away with much the same story—but focusing on “Gunther” emphasizes the film, while “Kinski,” the iconic actor. Kinski’s notorious hatred of being directed, as Horrocks notes, is part of his megalomania; he “seeks to place himself, rather than the director, as the most important element of any film.”38 For many viewers, he has succeeded in eclipsing the film as a whole with his star persona, though ironically, his persona is one that many cult film fans themselves identify with—an outsider, part of an exclusive club, and one who is not “afraid to outrage the mainstream.”39

As noted film theorist Jeffrey Sconce points out, drawing on Christian Metz, “All films depend on primary cinematic identification. The viewer must make this identification and assume a certain subject position for the images to be ‘meaningful.’”40 This isn’t the same kind of identification as character identification, but rather, Metz

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