THE WRATH OF GOD AGUIRRE Movie Review

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes

In one of the 16th century's more spectacular follies, would-be conqueror Gonzalez Pizarro mounted an expedition through the jungles of Peru to seek El Dorado—the shining, legendary city of gold. One of the many unlucky and unprepared men to accompany him was one Gaspar de Carvajal, who kept a journal of the nightmarish adventure which would eventually find its way into the hands of Germany's Werner Herzog, who fashioned Gaspar's account of the bizarre quest into his own demented and irresistible masterpiece. Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is sent ahead with a group of soldiers by an exhausted Pizarro, and as the small army makes its way through the Peruvian jungles, their physical and emotional ties to civilization become increasingly tenuous. Rarely in screen history has an actor embodied madness and megalomania with the authority and hypnotic power of Klaus Kinski in Aguirre. His face seems to change shape (which it literally would years later when he starred in Herzog's Nosferatu) as he becomes more and more convinced that “the earth trembles with his steps.” I don't mean to dismiss the power of Popol Vuh's musical score, but Kinski and Herzog have created a film that works on such powerful visual terms that if you watch it without sound, you may not notice that anything's missing. Herzog presents Aguirre's dementia not as a descent into madness, but as an ascent. He achieves a kind of holy state as he lords over a wooden raft teeming with wild monkeys, for it's apparent that this conqueror has indeed found his El Dorado, and it would be almost rude to inform him otherwise. That task was left to Francis Coppola, whose Apocalypse Now was almost certainly influenced to some degree by Herzog's visionary epic, when “civilization” would finally put Kurtz/Aguirre out of his misery. Oddly enough, Aguirre, the Wrath of God was originally filmed in English (read the actors’ lips as you watch the film), but the expressionist visuals combined disastrously with American accents, and Aguirre was released successfully in America with a German soundtrack.

NEXT STOP … Fitzcarraldo, Burden of Dreams, Apocalypse Now

1972 94m/C GE Klaus Kinski, Ruy Guerra, Del Negro, Helena Rojo, Cecilia Rivera, Peter Berling, Danny Ades, Alejandro Repulles; D: Werner Herzog; W: Werner Herzog; C: Thomas Mauch; M: Popul Vuh. National Society of Film Critics Awards ‘77: Best Cinematography. VHS NYF