Aguirre

Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Few images in film history are as hauntingly indelible as the final scene of Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Werner Herzog’s 1972 masterpiece stars Klaus Kinski as the unhinged Conquistador Lope de Aguirre, who, driven mad by the double allure of gold and power, leads a small band of Spaniards and their Indian slaves deep into the Amazon and into the depths of madness. Aguirre, now the only one left alive on his raft, aside from a herd of monkeys, dreams of reaching the sea, saying, “we’ll build a bigger ship” and seize the island of Trinidad from the Spanish Crown. As Aguirre rants about marrying his daughter and founding a “pure dynasty” to rule the entire continent, even the monkeys desert him, jumping into the river and swimming to shore to escape his doomed madness. The camera circles the raft as Aguirre is left standing there, drifting down the river, left with nothing but his illusions of grandeur.

Herzog’s film is full of delirious images like this one, yet the film’s madness is meticulously arranged. Everything about Aguirre, from Kinski’s queer loping gait to the visual dichotomies portrayed between the ladies’ and palanquins and the mud and inimical jungle, recommends a removal from our own reality and an immersion in another. In many ways, the film seems meant to transport the viewer not just to an exotic place and distant past - as films like Gladiator or Elizabeth do, telling stories based on modern ideas about storytelling and social interactions, which happen to take place in the past - but to convey the viewer to an entirely alternate mindset altogether. Herzog uses the trickery of cinema to create for his audience the illusion of themselves being a conquistador, and witnessing the cutting blade of history for oneself, and not through some coeval’s cinematic lens. The sparsity of dialogue and hypnotic quality of the film’s score - an intoxicating mingling of electronics, chants and Andean flute by the influential German progressive band Popol Vuh - sends the viewer into a fugue, in which the walls of our world seem to open up, and the boundaries separating us from the world of Aguirre and sixteenth century Peru are broken.

Aguirre opens with a shot showing an ethereal otherworld of craggy peaks, out of which emerges a ridge of mist-shrouded viridescent Andean foothills, along which a plodding, seemingly endless line of figures make their way. The score marries two sustained whorls of sound, one of human voices and the other of synthesizer, creating an eddy which sucks in the viewer and holds him immersed, just as one of the expedition’s rafts becomes trapped in an eddy on the impetuous Huallaga early in the voyage. The details of the plot - the framing device of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal’s journals, the expedition’s search for El Dorado, even the Machiavellian plotting by Aguirre to seize command from Don Pedro - are ultimately inconsequential and irrelevant. It is no criticism to say that the plot of Aguirre is not the thing one remembers about it. The film captures the profound emotional impact of arriving in a truly New World, five thousand miles away from your home, where the sound of your language has never been heard and the color of your skin has never been seen.