Annotation: Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’

 

To German film director Werner Herzog, the jungle is far from lush or idyllic. He sees no Eden, but instead an overgrown, seething wound in the earth, deprived of beauty and screaming with suffering, spewing up the contents of madness and isolation. In Les Blank’s documentary Burden of Dreams, about the making of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog calls it “vile and base”, incongruous with survival but somewhat united in “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder”. To Herzog, man has crawled out of the sea only to face similarly untenable living environment on earth—life, in this case, is forging on in spite of one’s own inevitable doom. Never was this dark, brittle ideology evoked as tacitly than in his 1972 film Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

Herzog’s distinction between fact and truth precludes his wildly imaginative take on history. Herzog encountered the character of Don Lope de Aguirre in a children’s historical storybook, in which he was mentioned in passing. He appropriates the history of South America’s invasion by Spanish conquistadors and their search for El Dorado, inserting his madman Aguirre into the story where necessary. That’s not to say there’s no historical accuracy. The fate met by Aguirre and his cavalry of sheepish followers was undoubtedly experienced by many of the thousands of men and women who explored the South American jungle in search of capital, riches and land. To Herzog, the “accountant’s truth”—in this case history based on the facts—offers little illumination. By taking license of history and its trove of forgotten characters, Aguirre amongst them, Herzog reaches a deeper stratum of truth, the “ecstatic truth” to which he has dedicated his career in search of.

Aguirre was the first collaboration between Herzog and his volatile leading man Klaus Kinski. They would go on to collaborate on four further films, including Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu the Vampyre and Woyzeck. Kinski was well-known in Germany at the time, but mostly for his infamously inflated ego and volatile behavior. Before shooting Aguirre, he had just concluded one of his scandalous ‘Jesus tours’, a series of one-man shows originally intended as an outlet for him to connect to his public, but which quickly descended into chaos when the public took it as an opportunity to rile and humiliate him. The footage from these shows paints Kinski as a raving lunatic with a God complex, but in Aguirre his performance is far from demonstrative. Kinski, despite being notoriously difficult on set, injuring fellow cast members and frightening natives into conspiring to kill him, distills all of his egoistic, nervous energy into a frightfully controlled performance.

As the rogue megalomaniac Aguirre, Kinski overthrows the leadership of an expedition to find El Dorado—the city of gold partially invented by the Indians to confuse their colonisers—and declares ownership of the undiscovered Empire that lies unpillaged before him. He and his crew travel down the tributaries of the Amazon, soldering on despite multiple setbacks, which include deathly encounters with native Indians, dwindling food supplies and an outbreak of fever. The narrative seems a forgone conclusion. We’re told in the opening titles that the city of El Dorado does not exist, and yet Herzog creates a palpable tension. There is a sense that the plants and animals have conspired against the despotic Aguirre and his crew. Instead of heady action, the film is populated with strange sounds and images that provoke a sense of decay, madness and encroaching doom. Aguirre is said to have inspired Apocalypse Now, but it is a much quieter film than that.

Herzog begins to cast his unnerving spell from the first frame. The clouds have parted to reveal a string of figures descending down a dangerously vertiginous slope on one of the Peruvian Andes. Herzog has claimed that many of his extras suffered from altitude sickness and had to be secured to the precipice to prevent them from falling off. When Kinski would throw violent tantrums, Herzog would be forced to run to the top of the mountain to calm him. He scaled the mountain four times. When the cast and crew threatened to abandon him, he would convince them by imploring that the final product would be truly special, and that they would have been a part of it. Thankfully, he was right. When we see these opening images, we’re seeing real movie magic; a sense that this astonishingly simple opening shot is in fact the product of a physically arduous and highly improbable set of circumstances that would never have worked were it not for Herzog’s staunch adherence to his convictions.

Herzog is obsessed with these strange and obscene images. Think of the carnivalesque riot of Even Dwarfs Started Tall, the baby held dangling by its feet, or the dead-eyed dancing chickens in Stroszek, the cavalcade of dirty rats run amok in Nosferatu, the Siberians splayed across the frozen lake in Bells from the Deep, the penguin which strays from its natural course in Encounters at the End of the World, or the albino alligators which provide the epilogue to Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Herzog wants to depict this planet as an alien landscape, an otherworldly realm which we humans live alongside but are so often blind to. There is no shortage of this strange, hypnotic imagery in Aguirre. From the baby sloth which Aguirre flaunts to his mistress, to the mutiny of monkeys which Aguirre grapples in the final scene. At one point, one of Aguirre’s crew members declares that he sees a ship in the jungle. It must be a hallucination, he says, because the land  they traverse is as yet untouched by Western civilization. And then Herzog shows us the ship, tangled in vines and half-swallowed by the jungle it is nestled in. The film straddles the real and the hallucinatory. At some point in the film, what we see transcends reality and becomes illusory. To demarcate this shift is impossible. Aguirre, the maniac, the self-declared wrath of God, leads us into the heart of darkness. As the film drudges on, the camera becomes increasingly apprehended by Aguirre’s vision.

It is difficult to know how exactly the crew were able to film many of the scenes. On land, the small spaces of diplomacy and political discussion are so secluded and cramped that it seems impossible that a camera crew could figure into the space. For me, though, it is the scenes on water which bring the film into its breathtaking fullness. The cameras and crew members stood on rafts not dissimilar to the one that Aguirre floats down-river on, often without moorings, and ordinarily undertaking rapids that Herzog selectively deemed “not life-threatening”, but dangerous enough to provoke palpable discomfort in the film. On water, the cameras seems to swirl around Aguirre and his deteriorating raft, providing the film with a physical and mental epicentre: the ego of a man obsessed with worldly dominance. That Aguirre’s exacting and flagrant obsession has such a firm grasp on the film is largely due to the Faustian tale occurring off-screen. Herzog is leading his crew with his trademark ungovernable certitude that the final product will have been worth all the trouble. As such, Aguirre is perhaps the least compromised film in the history of the medium, made with an obsessive commitment to a dream, much like its main character.

Krautrock band Popul Vuh’s soundtrack does more than add mood and texture. It enhances the themes of the film with its sensation, a knife’s edge between angelic and ghostly, created by looping and overlapping different artificial choir sounds so as to create dichordant and uncanny harmony between artificiality and authenticity. The film is brimming with vivid noises schematically placed to provoke nature’s eerie animism and its collaboration against Aguirre and his crew. It is impossible not to notice the piercing screeches of the jungle’s thousands of birds. In most other movies these sound effects are designed to be subtle and inconspicuous, but in Aguirre the birds are so earsplittingly omnipresent that their sudden absence piques suspicion. In the jungle silence means Indians, and Indians mean death. Herzog has a native Peruvian play the pan-flute for Aguirre and his crew, sometimes for entertainment, often to quell the tension created by the jungle’s silent attack. I suspect that the flute did little to settle nerves. This Peruvian calls the jungle home, and his wistful song sits like an imposter in the midst.

It is easy to watch this admittedly strange movie and forget about its pointed historical critique. I’m not sure Herzog is even cognizant to it; perhaps he intends on telling a straight-story, and that the black fable of imperialism is just part-and-parcel with it. In any case, the fact that tens of millions of people were decimated in the Spanish conquest for South America sets Aguirre a dark milieu to work through. In a particularly dark moment, an Incan slave who is also able to speak Spanish (although the film is in German) tells of his old life. He says, “I was born a prince, and men were forbidden to look at me. Now I am in chains.” The film never takes sides, even if, aesthetically, it falls under Aguirre’s maddening grip. Herzog depicts the atrocities of slavery and violence with rare asceticism, and I suggest that he’s asking us to use our innate humanity to place our sympathies. When the monk Brother Gaspar thrusts a bible into the arms of a native Indian and declares it to be the word of God, the Indian puts it to his ear and says that he hears nothing. There is, in Aguirre, a certain undercutting of the Catholic mission that makes it look inherently stupid, eccentrically ecclesiastical. A moment later the Indian is promptly killed for blasphemy. In a slow and mediated response, the jungle is punishing Aguirre for his blasphemous assertion of dominance over nature and for the innately Western ideology that man can conquer anything. Let’s not forget that the Amazon remains one of the last places on earth relatively untouched by Western civilization.

Whatever its meaning or message, Aguirre remains one of the great feats of narrative filmmaking, and the story of its making still inspires new audiences to seek it out. Made for $370,000 of borrowed money, with the tyrannical Kinski in the lead role, with a stolen camera, with forged permits, with no shared language through which to communicate with his cast and crew, through infectious illness, flooding, negatives lost in transit, Herzog’s film survives. And it survives as a singularity, inalienably Herzogian: strange, vivid, hallucinatory, with a documentary-like fidelity to portraying the world as he sees it. The film begins as a reality with a dreamlike quality, until it becomes a fever dream that looks hauntingly similar to reality. Few filmmakers have the skill to traverse these metaphysical realms so adeptly, so hauntingly.