Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

Film: Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

Director: Werner Herzog

Country: Germany / Mexico / Peru

Released: December 1972

Runtime: 94 minutes

Genre: Epic

Studio: Werner Herzog Filmproduktion

Influenced: Francis Ford Coppola, Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Edward Yang, Lucrecia Martel

Aguirre, the Wrath of God marks the first of five remarkable collaborations between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog conceived the film during a trip to Machu Picchu, inspired by the landscape and historical accounts of Spanish conquistadors exploring the Amazon in search of the fabled city of gold, Eldorado. Inspiration for the film came also from an adventure book that Herzog had read, including a story about Lope de Aguirre, which sparked his imagination in such an intense way that he was compelled to write a screenplay over the course of just two and a half days. Very little is known about the historical figure of Aguirre, so Herzog largely concocted his life story and improvised scenes during filming. Herzog never storyboarded his movies, preferring a spontaneous approach to filmmaking.

Set in 1560, the film opens with a column of conquistadors and enslaved indigenous people descending the Andes. The expedition is led by Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) and, when the terrain proves too treacherous, Pizarro orders a smaller scouting group to go ahead. This group is led by Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra) and includes his second in command, the ambitious and volatile Aguirre (Kinski). Aguirre is a charismatic but ruthless leader, and he quickly incites a mutiny against Ursúa, precipitating one of the key moments in the film, where he takes over the leadership of the expedition. His power grab signifies a turn towards anarchy and his ambition overrules any rational decision-making, leading the expedition towards their doom.

Aged 28 at the time of filming, Herzog was full of daring and the movie was clearly very physical to make, with actors having to cut through forests and scale mountains. The budget for the film was very small, at around US$300-400K, and part of the film's reputation and mystique is a result of the challenging and often volatile on-set conditions, embodying Herzog's belief in the "ecstatic truth" of cinema. Herzog would goad Kinski during filming to get more dramatic, emotional performances from him, even threatening to pull a gun on him at one point to stop Kinski walking away from the production. The budgetary constraints also led Herzog to improvise, including innovative handheld close-up shots of actors to depict intimate conversations and long, uninterrupted takes of nature (like that of the furious Amazon river), giving the film a unique and dreamlike quality.

The proclamation of the fat, foolish nobleman Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling) as the new Emperor of Eldorado gives Aguirre control over the expedition, and he leads the group further into the Amazon, their journey becoming increasingly fraught with danger, hardship and tension. We never see the indigenous Peruvians who are picking off the conquistadors one by one but they're a constant, ominous presence. The use of silence and the soundtrack by Popol Vuh add to the sense of drama. Herzog and Popol Vuh's Florian Fricke were good friends and played football together, and they worked in unison to create the film's eerie music, with its haunting, ambient quality generated by a unique combination of traditional instruments, vocal choruses and electronic sounds, including the majestic opening track, Aguirre I (Lacrime Di Rei).

One of the film's most enduring images is its final scene, Herzog's camera circling the raft in innovative fashion and a mad Aguirre delivering a monologue to a group of monkeys, with the corpses of his fellow adventurers all around him, vowing that he will father a pure dynasty to rule over the entire continent. It encapsulates the theme of mad obsession and the destructive power of colonial ambition. For the scene just prior to that with the boat high up the tree, Herzog employed two dozen locals to work for 10 days to find a way to haul it up there and keep it in place. It was the sort of glorious folly that Herzog would repeat in Fitzcarraldo (1982), and the scene underlines how any sense of reality has completely abandoned the crew by the end of the film.