Top Movies #11

Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972)

“That man is a head taller than me. That may change.” – Don Lope de Aguirre

Werner Herzog’s film has left a tremendous impact on me. It contains some of the most haunting images I have ever seen, depicting a man on a journey towards madness. Klaus Kinski plays Don Lope de Aguirre: an unsympathetic man who verges on tyrant given the right circumstances. Those circumstances are provided when the leader of a Spanish expedition to find El Dorado dies. Aguirre, being second in command, naturally takes over control of the group. He leads his men (and daughter) on a futile journey downriver. They are low on supplies and face no real prospects of surviving the journey back to civilization. It is a one way trip.

Along the way, Aguirre manifests a perception of himself as a brave noble conqueror and explorer. He selfishly seeks immortality and fortune, and postulates fantasies about conquering Mexico, and indeed all the world, for Spain. This is, of course, at the cost of his crew, as they travel downriver on a raft; assaulted by nature, natives, and the like. These attacks escalate further down river, as do the fever dreams. I love the shot of the boat in the jungle canopy, far too high to have been lodged there by flooding. There is something so out of place about this image, just like the adventurers themselves. Here they are in the Amazon jungle where it is both hot and humid, yet many of these men, including Aguirre, wear armour and they drag a canon through the jungle. Their defences are wholly inadequate against the small blow darts and arrows that seem to be shot from the jungle itself. This confrontation is at the heart of the film: a woefully unprepared band of adventurers are slowly taken down by the brutality of nature itself, yet Aguirre forces them along with only fame and glory as motivation in an environment that is incapable of empathy and surely promises no reward.

Throughout the film, the arrows increase in size from darts to two foot long arrows. In one of my favourite scenes, a man is shot with one of these monster arrows and while in a state of delirium comments, “The long arrows are back in fashion.”

I also really love the feast scene. The newly crowned monarch of Aguirre’s mutineers, ominously destined to rule over the new land they quest for, sits down to a hearty meal prepared for him by what’s left of the adventurers. The meal consists of what little scraps of fruit and fish they could compile together, but it is presented so to be worthy of nobility. On a raft in the middle of the Amazon, floating towards oblivion, the explorers still try to create order where order is meaningless. And yet most onboard the raft seem to recognize this, it is only Aguirre who enforces the facade of nobility. When neither Aguirre, nor the monarch are watching, everyone else scrambles to eat whatever they can off of the table.

It may not be possible to sympathize with Aguirre, and he is certainly not a likeable character. But we do pity him and understand his tenacity. It is on a deeply human level that we are able to see through Aguirre’s growing self-obsessed narcissism and madness, and see the troubled, relentless man underneath. Who would have thought that a scene involving Klaus Kinski chasing cute little monkeys around his raft could be so unfunny: so deeply disturbing in a fundamentally human way? The scene allows a comprehension of the full extent of Aguirre’s madness, as he rants about manipulating the power of God. Herzog leaves us with a protagonist who has lost everything, his soldiers, his daughter, but who still leads. He leads the monkeys. He leads his own pride to certain death.