Kinskischraube – Kinski Screw
2015 · 5m · Austria
Directed by Dave Lojek, Hermann Leitner
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, sensual, theatrical
An experimental study of human faces and their magnetic pull, in which male and female principles intertwine against alpine mountain panoramas while exploring the "Kinski screw" — a pirouette movement Klaus Kinski invented for swinging into frame, coined as a technique by Werner Herzog.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a genuinely weird premise—turning a Kinski tic into the whole architecture of a film—but the execution feels more precious than subversive, more reverent nod to Herzog than anything that actually *resists* its own cinephilia.
A formally rigorous essay film that recuperates an obscure acting technique as its organizing principle, situating itself squarely in the lineage of experimental cinema and auteur theory; the interplay of bodies and landscape against this inherited formal constraint is exactly the kind of work that sustains serious critical conversation.
The singular choice here is treating the Kinski screw not as historical trivia but as a generative movement vocabulary—every entrance, every spiral becomes the film's whole argument, and that structural decision pulls the budget constraints into something luminous.