Roger Ebert once picked this film for his Top-100 All-time Films. It would easily make my Top-100 Non-English Language Films, though not my Top-100 of all films. In any case, it’s a film experience that you won’t find easy to match in kind. It combines an exotic locale and difficult shooting conditions with a magnetic performance by Klaus Kinski as the power-obsessed and, ultimately, delusional Aguirre.

Historical Background: Werner Herzog was born Werner Stipetic on September 5th, 1942 in Munich. He lived on a farm in the Bavarian mountains until his parents divorced and then moved with his mother to Munich. To understand just how eccentric he was as a young man, consider that at age thirty-two he once walked from Munich to Paris to visit a sick friend. He later won a literary prize for his diary of the journey, called Walking on Ice. He had no formal education in film, but made his first short at age twenty. Two years later, he wrote a screenplay that won the Carl Mayer Prize, for which he receiving funding culminating in his first feature film, Signs of Life (1968).

Herzog is best known for about six films: Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Nosferatu (1979), Woyzek (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987). Klaus Kinski starred in five of those six films, which illustrates the importance of the difficult collaboration between Herzog and Kinski to Herzog’s career. Herzog is known especially for his preference for exotic locales – in South America and Australia. He is often viewed as something of a visionary with an obsessive personality.

The Story: In 1560, Gonzalo Pizarro (Allejandro Repulles) leads an expedition, numbering in the hundreds, eastward through Peru, over the Andes Mountains and down into the Amazon jungle. Their target is the legendary city of gold – El Dorado. The long line of men and slaves amble down the steep mountain trail in single file. The party is little prepared for jungle conditions. The soldiers wear breastplates and helmets. A few Spanish noblewomen are transported in sedan chairs by slaves. Other slaves are burdened with pieces of a cannon and other inappropriate cargo.

Reaching a wide river with strong current, Pizarro opts to send a smaller scouting party down the river to determine if it is worth proceeding. He selects a party of forty to be led by the aristocratic Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra). Second in command will be Don Lope Aguirre (Klaus Kinski). Also in the party are the nobleman Don Fernando de Guzman (Peter Berling), the priest Brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro), Don Pedro’s wife Flores (Cecilia Rivera), and Aguirre’s daughter Inez (Helena Rojo) . They are accompanied, as well, by a black slave, Okello (Edward Roland). The scouting party will proceed down river on rafts and will have one week to return.

As they proceed, the scouting party is confronted by one disaster after another. One raft gets caught in a whirlpool. Though the main unit is situated on the opposite shore, Don Pedro orders a rescue attempt, over the objections of Aguirre who is prepared to let the men on the raft die rather than risk more men in the effort. The effort fails and, with night falling, further rescue attempt is put off until morning. When the sun rises, it is evident that all of the men on the trapped raft are dead. Aguirre organizes a mutiny, taking Don Pedro prisoner and declaring Don Fernando the ostensible new leader, flattering him by dubbing him the “Emperor of El Dorado”.

The obese Don Fernando is unfit for leadership. He eats voraciously while the other men get by on near-starvation rations. When an abused horse dies, he orders it thrown overboard while the men complain that it could have provided meat for a week. Aguirre soon disposes of both Don Pedro and Don Fernando so that his authority is now unchallenged.

During another night, the river level rises suddenly and the party awakens to discover that most of their equipment and supplies have been washed away. Several of the men want to turn back, but Aguirre will hear none of it. He keeps them in line by a combination of brutal discipline and a rousing call to glory: “Fortune smiles on the brave and spits on the coward.” When he overhears one man talking up the idea of another mutiny, he has the man’s head cut off without warning and so abruptly that the severed head actually finishes the sentence it had begun in its normal location! The party has gone past the point where they could have returned within the allotted week. As they continue down the river, they hear the sound of invisible natives chanting and beating drums. Many of the men come down with fever and others are hit by poisonous darts shot from the river banks. Aguirre, however, becomes increasing obsessed with going forward so that they can conquer and claim El Dorado on their own. Even when his daughter is killed by one of the poisoned darts, Aguirre presses on. Gradually the party dwindles until only Aguirre remains on a raft now overrun by spider monkeys. Still, he barks out commands and deliriously recites his dream of an Empire of the New World, where he would inaugurate a new, incestuous dynasty of rulers by taking his daughter as his wife.

Themes: The primary theme of Aguirre: The Wrath of God is one that recurs in many Herzog films: the hubris of men seeking great achievements that causes them to overreach and spawn disasters. Herzog is clearly more awed by the power of nature than the capacity of mankind to harness it or quell its fury. It is ironic that Herzog himself was a man of great vision who often teetered on the precipice of such disasters. Just as Aguirre was a man of vision whose obsessive nature transformed his dreams into madness, so too was Herzog visionary and obsessive to an extent that sometimes bordered on madness. Operating on a shoestring budget with a crew of just eight, Herzog drove his team recklessly into the wild Amazon where they could have died from starvation, disease, or accidents. Herzog himself came down with a fever after being stung by fire ants emerging from a hatchetted log. Actors on the raft in the whirlpool were at risk of drowning had they fallen off the raft. The scene in which supplies and equipment were lost to the rising river was written into the storyline of the film because it actually happened to the film team. Herzog understood from first-hand experience that the gods of the rain forest could smite overly-ambitious mortals at random. In the film, however, the hubris of which Herzog speaks was the Spanish obsessions with conquest, subjugation of the native populations, and the acquisition of gold and other wealth necessary to sustain the glory of the Spanish monarchy. They met their match in the raw wildness of mother nature in the South American jungles. Pride and avarice could still be the undoing of mortal men. A related sub-theme is the ease with which ordinary, weak-minded men can be induced to follow a charismatic leader by the combination of threats and the allure of riches or power.

The secondary theme in this film relates to the immorality and avarice of the Catholic Church, with Brother Gaspar de Carvajal as its stand-in. In one scene, a native couple posing no threat has been taken on board one of the rafts. Brother Gasper hands the man a Bible, telling him that it contains the Word of God. The man places the book to his ear to listen but says he hears nothing. Gaspar stabs him clean through with a sword and comments casually, “These natives are hard to convert”, as the native women sobs inconsolably. Brother Gasper also exhibits avarice, speaking of finding a gold cross in El Dorado to replace his silver one. He condones the enslavement of the natives, such as Okello, who confides to a sympathetic ear that he had been born a prince but is now in chains. Perhaps the most pointed condemnation of the church, however, is when Gasper refuses to condemn Aguirre’s mutiny, siding with Aguirre not on principle but because he was the de facto victor. “For the sake of God, the church always stands with the strong.” What he means is that the Church maintains and extends its power by allying itself with the most powerful political elements, regardless of any moral considerations. This observation in relation to the Catholic Church has been all too frequently borne out in history, such as the support voiced by the Vatican for the Nazis as they consolidated power.

Production Values: This film was shot with a single stolen 32-mm hand-held camera, producing a documentary-like style and gritty texture. The shot angles and shot quality are remarkable given the conditions under which the film was made. Sometimes, it sinks into a slightly amateurish appearance.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the important of Klaus Kinski to the success of Aguirre: The Wrath of God. It is his face that so ably provides the face of madness of the lead character. Kinski was not that far from a madman in real life – certainly highly eccentric. He and Herzog were frequently at loggerheads – even to the point of threatening each other’s lives. Kinski once shot a gun into a crew tent, detaching the tip of the finger of a crew member. Herzog claimed that he held a gun to Kinski’s head at one point to force the man to continue acting. Kinski’s expressions range from a brooding icy stare to wild ferociousness in playing the demonic Aguirre. Even so, his performance was thankfully restrained compared to what he has sometimes delivered in other films. Kinski portrayed Aguirre as partially paralyzed on the right side, featuring an awkward, imbalanced stride. He was particularly effective in the final descent of his character into an unrestrained delusional state. It’s a performance that will haunt your thoughts for days after watching the film.

The music for Aguirre: The Wrath of God was provided by a band called Popol Vuh (named after a Mayan folk myth). Popol Vuh also provided soundtracks for several other Herzog films. For Aguirre, part of the track uses a special electronic instrument called a “choir-organ” to provide an ethereal, surreal sound effect.

Bottom-Line: Aguirre: The Wrath of God is part adventure story and part psychodrama. For the “adventure” component it might better be termed a “misadventure” story. Those coming to the film expecting mainly an action film may be disappointed. Its pace is more what one would expect for a psychodrama. A lot of the screen time is devoted to the study of the main character’s gradual mental deterioration and his magnetic hold on his crew. Aguirre: The Wrath of God is in German with English subtitles. It has a running time of 95 minutes.


Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age