Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes; adventure / historical drama / art-film, Germany / Peru / Mexico, 1972; D: Werner Herzog, S: Klaus Kinski, Peter Berling, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Ruy Guerra

In December 1560, a group of Spanish conquistadors and their 200 Native slaves are having trouble walking through the Peruvian jungle of the newly dissolved Inca Empire. They are searching for El Dorado. Due to a food shortage, they stop and send a part of their crew in three rafts downstream of a river to search for provisions. But when one of the rafts gets destroyed, there is a rebellion and the short-tempered Aguirre kills their leader Don Pedro de Ursua who wanted to get back, placing the obese Don Fernando de Guzman as their puppet-leader. But they don't know that the Indians only invented El Dorado to fool the invaders. On their long way on the raft, the expedition members start to lose their reason, they are shot with arrows and have lost all their food. When everyone dies, Aguirre remains the only survivor on the wooden raft floating across the river.

A lot of things are annoying in the story and the frenzy-nihilistic atmosphere sometimes seems unnecessary, but there is still something unique in the cult film "Aguirre, the Wrath of God", the first cooperation between director Werner Herzog and hot-tempered actor Klaus Kinski. About what kind of catastrophes and feuds they went through while filming in the South American jungle (in the local newspapers, some even reported how Herzog directed Kinski at gunpoint on set because the actor was fed up with everything and threatened to leave the set) the viewers should watch Herzog's documentary "My Favorite Enemy" from '99. Kinski is brilliantly picked as the mad megalomaniac Aguirre, a man with a limp who uses intrigues Richard III-style to seize power in a quest to expand his selfishness, in this case the search for imaginary gold of El Dorado, while his suicidal expedition that ends in a disaster influenced even Coppola's "Apocalypse Now", except that it is less suspenseful, and more lyrical. Kinski plays Aguirre so bizarrely that he even shouts at a horse ("Get out of my way!"), after which the scared animal falls from the raft into the river, and brings a small dose of irony with his frenzy. 

The crucial moment appears when the commander de Ursua orders the expedition to give up and return back to their base, upon which Aguirre starts a mutiny by appealing to the soldiers ("Remember Hernando Cortez? On his way to Mexico, he received an order to turn back. But he simply continued! He ignored the orders and conquered Mexico!"). Later, Aguirre deviously talks to one of de Ursua's former loyalists, now a captive in an improvised cage: "I would like you on our side. We need men like you. You should think about it... but not too long". Herzog was never able to craft suspense like Hitchcock, which is why some viewers might perceive the meandering story as boring or too abstract, but Herzog is more interested in evoking the dreamy, esoteric side of nature: his moving camera is unmatched and he has a sense for poetry in the scene where a butterfly flies from the soldier's finger to his shoulder. "Aguirre" drags a bit, has pacing issues, questionable episodes (during an attack on a village, conquistadors strip an African man, Okello, in underwear, because they heard that Native Indians are afraid of black people) and needed better writing. But is an overall grand allegory on colonialism and imperialism in general, showing deluded strangers trying to steal a foreign land for themselves, as well as a symbolic contemplation on conscious life drifting in search for some meaning in a chaotic, anarchic, aimless world, here embodied in the wild jungle, whereas the finale with the mad Aguirre holding one among hundreds of small apes in his hand on a raft drifting on the Amazon, is one of the most expressionistic and unforgettable images of the 70s cinema.

Grade:+++