Directed by Werner Herzog.
Starring Klaus Kinski and Helena Rojo.
Starring Klaus Kinski and Helena Rojo.
In a Nutshell: Conquistadors travel down river in an ill-fated search for gold.
Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God is as haunting a decent into madness as cinema will produce. Anything to the contrary needs only to look into the glazed, bright and curled lips of Klaus Kinski as the aforementioned Aguirre. He is the member of an expedition chosen by Gonzalo Pizarro to find El Dorado; a team woefully unprepared for the horrors that await them in the jungle. Following the death of the team leader, Aguirre is put in command and leads the group further into the unknown. With a production as rife with misfortune and madness as the finished piece, Herzog brings an amused detachment to the conquistador’s self-destruction.
Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God is as haunting a decent into madness as cinema will produce. Anything to the contrary needs only to look into the glazed, bright and curled lips of Klaus Kinski as the aforementioned Aguirre. He is the member of an expedition chosen by Gonzalo Pizarro to find El Dorado; a team woefully unprepared for the horrors that await them in the jungle. Following the death of the team leader, Aguirre is put in command and leads the group further into the unknown. With a production as rife with misfortune and madness as the finished piece, Herzog brings an amused detachment to the conquistador’s self-destruction.
Aguirre presents the story of the quest for greatness and the elements of nature that crush it in the end. Here, the jungles of the Amazon are an insidious force against the men ready to swallow them whole. A whole raft of men is shown mysteriously slaughtered in the morning. Men are fallen by silent arrows shot from the forest. Herzog himself never really delves into the minds of any one character. Even Aguirre himself, despite the electricity of Kinski’s performance, is only the unstable, greedy dreamer that others see. But it is all that is needed to suck the audience into Aguirre’s blind obsession for gold and to feel dread at the danger he ignores.
The film’s opening shot of the conquistadors descending down the mountains carries a poetic resonance. But on the same coin, Herzog views them at a distance, enough to have them lost in the thicket of trees and vegetation while the inhuman strains of the organ plays them on. Their river trip is not full of plot contrivances, nor is it just a parade of hallucinatory imagery (though there is plenty of the latter). It is a harrowing view at immoral ambition in the face of the impossible and the ensuing tragedy. The final scene is one of great sadness with Aguirre stranded forever in his own delusions against an unforgiving reality.
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