Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

It was the cover of a program that was promoting a German Film Festival at my favorite second run movie theater in Northwest Portland that first caught my attention to AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972). The photograph on the program terrified me. On the cover was a crazy eyed Spanish conquistador with white hair coursing from underneath his helmet, gazing intensely to his right off camera. Later, I would see a larger version of that photo (it might have been the film's movie poster) only the conquistador was clutching a young girl's head in front of him. Her expression wasn't terror but it wasn't happiness either. I had no idea what the film was about or who made it. I had no intention of ever watching it even as I was mesmerized by this one image.

Jump ahead maybe ten or fifteen years and I stumbled across AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD on television of all places.  Not the network channels or a cable channel.  It was on our local Public Broadcasting channel. I turned it on just when a soldier was decapitated. As his severed head lay on the ground, he spoke a final word. I was hooked.  It turned out I had caught the last quarter hour of the film.  I eventually rented it and watched the film in its entirety. AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD is an amazing adventure film, shot on location in Peru, written and directed by German director Werner Herzog during his most creative period in the 1970s. It turns out that the young girl held by the conquistador is his daughter in the film. AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD would be a cinematic calling card for Werner Herzog but the film would also catapult a little known German actor named Klaus Kinski (more well known as the father of actress/model Nastassja Kinski) into international fame. Herzog and Kinski would make five films altogether. During those five films, they often wanted to kill each other when they weren't enjoying each other's creative company.

Although a work of fiction, AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD incorporates historical events and real people like Aguirre and Pizarro. Herzog tells his hallucinatory tale through the words of the only supposed account of this lost expedition, a diary kept by the monk Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro) who narrates most of the film. It's December 1560 and Spanish explorer Gonzalo Pizarro (Allejandro Repulles) and his Spanish army of conquistadors have trekked over the Andes after obliterating the Incan empire. Pizarro is in search of the legendary city of gold known as El Dorado. As the expedition comes down a steep, twisting Incan trail, they are met by a swollen, raging river.  The jungle is thick. Their cannons become stuck in the mud. Rations are beginning to dwindle. Pizarro orders rafts built. He decides to send a smaller party of forty soldiers accompanied by a few Indian slaves to scout down river for the fabled golden city.

Pizarro puts in charge Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) to lead the survey party. It's not a popular choice. Ursua brings along his mistress Dona Inez de Atienza (Helena Rojo) against Pizarro's wishes. Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) is chosen as second in command. Accompanying Aguirre is his fifteen year old daughter Flores (Cecilia Rivera). The hefty Don Fernando de Guzman (Peter Berling), representing the House of Spain, the priest Gaspar, and Guzman's personal slave Okello (Edward Roland) are also part of the group. The rafts head down the river.  The party encounters some big rapids early on.  One of the rafts becomes stuck in an eddy, unable to push back into the main river. Ursua sets up camp across the river from the helpless soldiers. He sends out a group to try and rescue them against Aguirre's protests. At night, there's an explosion where the stuck raft lays. The next day, the search party reaches the raft.  Every one on board is dead.

Ursua wants to retrieve the bodies to bury but Aguirre knows this is madness. There are hostile Indians hiding on either side of the river. Aguirre quietly orders the raft and bodies blown up by cannon fire. Ursua decides to turn back to rejoin Pizarro. Aguirre has Ursua shot, wounding him and several others. The hefty Guzman is placed in charge but it's really Aguirre and his right hand man Perucho (Daniel Ades) manipulating the soldiers. They convict Ursua of treason but keep him alive. The expedition will continue. The party comes across a deserted Indian village on the bank of the river.  Signs indicate the inhabitants are cannibalistic. Aguirre and the rafts move on. The river slows, providing the unseen Indians opportunity to shoot their poison darts at the boat, picking off the soldiers one at a time. A canoe rows out to the raft from the shore, carrying two members of the Yagua tribe. One of them wears a gold necklace around his neck. Aguirre and the search party believe El Dorado must be close.

The gluttonous Guzman proclaims the land in the name of Spain. Guzman mysteriously dies soon after. The expedition begins to descend into madness. On Aguirre's orders, Ursua is led away into the jungle and hanged. The party drifts past another cannibal village where they're attacked by arrows. The soldiers go ashore and burn the village.  In the confusion, Ursua's mistress Dona Atienza wanders into the woods, never to be seen again. Aguirre threatens anyone who tries to desert with death but his men are hungry and feverish. Soon, even Brother Gaspar and Aguirre's daughter Flores are mortally wounded by arrows. Aguirre pushes on, his raft overrun with monkeys, as he alone searches for the mythical El Dorado.

From Herzog (and cinematographer Thomas Mauch's) opening long shot of conquistadors, Incan slaves, and pack animals winding down a steep Peruvian mountain (actually filmed near the ancient Incan cloud city Machu Picchu), we know we're in for a haunting, mystical adventure.  With period costumes, cannons, and rugged locations, it's hard to imagine that Herzog made the film for $360,000. Herzog used just one 35mm camera that he stole from a Munich film school and had a film crew of only eight people. But like another Herzog film set on a Brazilian river 1982's FITZCARRALDO (also starring Klaus Kinski), Herzog gets a lot of mileage out of filming on a floating set. He can just reposition his actors around the raft in AGUIRRE and there's always interesting scenery as they float by.

Watching AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD as the Spanish exploratory party floats down the Peruvian river, attacked by spears and poison darts from unseen savages, I couldn't help but think of another film that takes place mostly on a river and encounters a faceless enemy - Francis Coppola's Vietnam War epic APOCALYPSE NOW (1979).  Like APOCALYPSE NOW'S American soldiers, Aguirre and his Spanish conquistadors fight not only inhospitable Indians but fight among themselves and venture into madness the farther into the jungle they go. Coppola has been quoted that AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD strongly influenced him in the making of APOCALYPSE NOW. In AGUIRRE, the men see a boat lodged high up in a tree.  Is it a figment of their imagination or an actual boat lifted to the top by high water?  In APOCALYPSE NOW, as Willard and his crew get closer to Colonel Kurtz's compound, they pass burnt out helicopters and fighter planes stuck in trees. Ghostly, hellish images that Coppola may have found inspiration in from Herzog's AGUIRRE visual style.

APOCALYPSE NOW was based on Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness set in the African  Congo but AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD'S journey echoes some of Conrad's story. In the novella, the protagonist Marlow seeks the god-like ivory trader Kurtz  and meets him farther down the river. In AGUIRRE, it's Aguirre who starts to believe he's a god while on the river. Aguirre quietly undermines Ursua, ordering new rafts to be made without Ursua's knowledge when their original rafts float away at night after the river rises. Aguirre has Ursua arrested for treason when Ursua decides to turn back from the mission and rejoin Pizarro. Aguirre has more on his mind than finding El Dorado (which he may not even believe exists). Aguirre has decided he wants to conquer this South American jungle single handedly, throwing out the Spaniards. By the end of the film, still floating aimlessly down the river on a makeshift raft, his crew dying, dead, or feverish, Aguirre and his army of monkeys push on as Aguirre dreams of marrying his daughter and starting a new dynasty in this inhospitable land.  To quote Kurtz from Heart of  Darkness, "The horror...the horror."

AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD is an impressive film to view with its exotic locations and historical based plot but it's the performance of the kinetic, volcanic Klaus Kinski as the ruthless Don Lope de Aguirre that brings AGUIRRE to another level and made Kinski an international film star. Kinski had appeared in minor roles in some noteworthy films like Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964) and David Lean's DR. ZHIVAGO (1965). With his expressive blue bulging eyes and golden locks cascading down from his conquistador helmet, Kinski as Aguirre snarls, hisses, cajoles, and intimidates officers and soldiers alike. He walks like a hunchback at times but he's no cripple. He's a battle tested warrior. Yet for all of Aguirre's Machievellian tendencies, he's also a doting father to his fifteen year old daughter Flores, brushing her hair or showing her a rare pgymy sloth he found in the jungle. Kinski and director Herzog would have a turbulent relationship making AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD yet the two of them would make four more films together including WOYZECK (1979); a remake of F.W. Munrau's classic NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979), and FITZCARRALDO.

The rest of the cast of AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD may not be as famous as Kinski but they are uniformly good. It's an international cast: Helena Rojo who plays Ursua's loyal mistress Inez is Mexican; Ursua was played by Portugese actor Ruy Guerra; Del Negro as the priest Gaspar is American; German Peter Berling who was also a director and appeared in Herzog's FITZCARRALDO appears as Guzman, the delusional representative for the kingdom of Spain on the raft; and Aguirre's daughter Flores was played by Peruvian actress Cecilia Rivera. All the cast and extras deserve special credit for surviving such an arduous production and giving high quality performances.

The 1970s would be Werner Herzog's most creative decade. He became an internationally known director with AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD and led a wave of new German filmmakers that included Rainier Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders onto the cinematic scene.  Today, Herzog bounces between commercial films like RESCUE DAWN (2006) starring Christian Bale and BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (2009) with Nicholas Cage and making numerous documentaries on subjects as diverse as GRIZZLY MAN (2005) about doomed grizzly bear advocate Timothy Treadwell, CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS (2010) an intimate look at man's earliest known paintings in southern France, or a documentary series ON DEATH ROW (2012-13) about death row inmates. Herzog even finds time to act occasionally, appearing as the bad guy in the Tom Cruise action film JACK REACHER (2012).

Herzog actually combined two real life Spanish expeditions into AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD'S plot. In 1541, Gonzalo Pizarro did lead an expedition of 200 Spaniards and 4000 Indians into an unchartered area east of Quito, Ecuador. In AGUIRRE, Pizarro sends Ursua to continue the search for El Dorado.  In reality, Pizarro sent his lieutenant Francisco de Orellana to look for provisions for their large group.  Orellana and his brigade of fifty soldiers realized they could never make it back to Pizarro. Instead, Orellana explored the Amazon region. Pizarro would barely make it back alive to Quito in 1542. AGUIRRE'S  plot also borrows from the real life Lope de Aguirre. Aguirre joined an expedition led by Pedro de Ursua in 1560 to search for El Dorado. Ursua and Fernando de Guzman would be killed by Aguirre in a rebellion during the quest. Aguirre would raid several towns and murder his daughter Flores before he was caught and executed by the Spaniards in 1561. Herzog weaves pieces from both historical accounts into the film while making AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD his own original story as well.

The actual movie program with the image from AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD that captivated me as a youth.

As I've watched AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD a few times again recently, I've stared at that image of Aguirre and his daughter on the cover of the DVD that captivated me those many years ago. Gazing at the photo (which is taken from a scene in the film), I noticed something for the first time. Aguirre's daughter Flores has an arrow sticking out of her (which occurs toward the end of AGUIRRE). I was always staring at Kinski's face and his daughter Flores expression, trying to figure out if she was terrified of him, was he hurting her, or what their connection was? All these years the arrow sticking out of her chest eluded me. Until now.  That single photo for AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD is one of the great posters of all time.

Even today, AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD is a milestone in guerilla filmmaking, made by a young German filmmaker named Werner Herzog who was determined to get his vision onto celluloid and projected onto movie screens around the world.  AGUIRRE is an adventure film, a mystical film, a story of ambition and madness that we've seen from Shakespeare to the samurai period to modern battle fields. There's no CGI or rear projection as the actors climb down a steep mountain or stand on a makeshift raft down a roaring river in heavy armor.  AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD is real filmmaking and as impressive today as it was in 1972.