In 1989, having freed himself from his friend/enemy Herzog and the Italian genre cinema that often cast him in supporting roles, Kinski ambitiously ventured into directing, in addition to acting, in a film about the great musician Niccolò Paganini. The unruly and obsessive life of the Genoese musician and his perverse and morbid relationship with the violin and women are the primary sources of inspiration for the director, who does not develop a conventional biographical film but mainly tries to unleash his own interpretive flair, always placing himself at the center of the camera's lens. The shots are often shaky and slow motion is frequently used, along with voiceovers and all those alienating tricks that, to be honest, only disturb in the long run. The plot is a very thin thread, almost non-existent, that links memories, performances, erotic adventures (represented in rather explicit scenes) cloaked in violence and unhealthy passion. Kinski takes the camera and points it at himself throughout the film, and when he doesn't, the characters talk about him (him as "Paganini" or him as "Kinski"?) usually with negative connotations.
The first scene shows a concert at the Tatro Regio di Parma and it is already clear what the film's entire attitude is: while our Kinski/Paganini performs on stage, displaying a frightening, horrific, and animalistic aspect, a woman comments in uncontrolled orgasmic excitement, while symbolic images or pseudo-biographical sequences roll by. The film proceeds uniformly for an hour and twenty minutes, interspersing erotic delusions, musical delusions, and the director's visual delusions. The only more human glimpse is the sweet relationship between the Violinist and his little son. For the rest, Paganini's dark, pale, and luciferian figure ensnares, somehow (or rather, we know, thanks to his music), maidens of every age and extraction who surrender themselves to him to experience violent carnal relations at the brink of consensual rape. Kinski acts in Italian without the aid of a dubber (after all, the dialogues are very few), but his German accent betrays him, despite the interpretation being more physical and visceral than verbal. Also in the cast is his then-wife Deborah Caprioglio.
Among carriage journeys, galloping horses, frenzied violins, decadent interiors, gloomy rooms, and dirty embraces, the film ends without a clear understanding of its meaning. It is unclear whether the director wanted to create an avant-garde work or intended to somehow repeat Herzog's visionary cinema, however, flavored by a Kinski finally unrestrained. The impression one gets watching "Paganini" is that the horse (Kinski) has finally broken free from the reins that had so far forced him into a "cinema of others" and that he is finally exercising his artistic freedom with a liberating scream, as if to say "finally I do what I want, only I do." The result is an excessive film, an inner biography of the director, who does not care much for the audience or the critics, who indeed harshly criticize it. In this perspective, it is worth watching to delve into the delirium of the grotesque, the muddled, and the "horrid," provided you love Kinski with his excesses and follies.
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