Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
"At four in the morning, we tied our canoes together and drifted downstream and cried."
Aguirre, the Wrath of God opens on the mist-wound Andes, shot from a distance to emphasize the impenetrability of their size. Spanish conquistadors and their recently acquired Incan slaves, specks vaguely figure-shaped, proceed single-file descending a vast cliffside, crawling from the sky. They trickle down furrows and mucky mountain paths seemingly too vertical to be traversed by men clad in armor, let alone guiding canons and donkeys precariously shouldering chicken coops, which we can make out the closer they come to Thomas Mauch’s camera.
Suddenly it’s overwhelming, an incomprehensible image of accomplishment, or maybe just violation. Beings descend from a place they should never have been and tread into areas of the earth they should never go. It’s the work of Werner Herzog contained in one breathless glimpse—this place was not meant for us, which means the director will rip this memory from fate’s jaw, fearlessly, and make us who witness culpable in the responsibility of what we’re witnessing.
When I first saw Aguirre, likely when I lived in Chicago 20 years or so ago, long before I ever went backpacking or camping or even hiked up to an elevation that could ever yield a decent view, I felt something primordial emerging. I’d always been a bit obsessed with movies, but that was habit and here was something that spoke of my baser self, something that flowed thick like oil, like an elemental humor requiring lancing and draining, through me. I recognized a truth about myself in these initial moments. When we watch a Werner Herzog film we realize we are cowards.
Granted, most people are cowards, openly so, because they have valid reasons, like preservation or protection or panic attacks. People have children to prioritize, or physical disabilities that prevent them, or maybe a preternatural uninterest. I don’t have these. You may argue that one’s deeds define them, and not their intentions, but most people would also say that they shouldn’t risk their lives on a deep-jungle Peruvian adventure, regardless of the untold visceral experiences that could hypothetically await. Their kids probably wouldn’t forgive them if they lost their footing on a rock and tumbled headfirst into a raging river, unlikely to ever claw their way back out. That’s a terrifying prospect, I think—trying to forgive a dead person. My mom very recently read me an article about that happening to a woman in Glacier National Park, where Rebecca and I have camped and hiked before. The woman’s obituary said she “loved hiking, traveling, and being in nature,” and I was honestly surprised People uses the serial comma. I wondered if the waterfall she slipped beneath was a part of the park we saw. We didn’t see all of it, however much we wanted to. There just wasn’t enough time.
Mostly because of that first time, if ever asked, I usually cite Aguirre as my favorite movie. Subsequently, I’ve seen this movie more times than I can count, and I’ve discovered something new with every rewatch, as you do when you go back to something formative. On this most recent viewing, I happened to start the movie on Tubi, only to discover it was the English dub, which I’d never chosen because the original cut-–the default on the DVD contained within the Herzog DVD set I got from my parents for graduating college—was in German. Pretty immediately I realized how closely the English dialogue fit the actors’ mouths, that they were actually speaking in English, and that the subtitles, which I can assume were translated from the original German, were vaguely interpreted at best, and monstrously devoid of the subtleties of Herzog’s language at worst.
Here’s where I’d usually quote a lengthy passage from either Paul Cronin and Herzog’s A Guide for the Perplexed, or from Herzog’s recent autobiography, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, or maybe from Of Walking in Ice, weaving his philosophies together to strengthen my weak own. As I’ve been going at this blog patchily for over a year now, I’ve seen more and more of my insight replaced almost wholly by Herzog’s words, and more and more of his anecdotes repeated, to the extent that, like different books of the Bible, the stories begin to confront and contradict one another. Here’s what I wrote about what Herzog wrote about Aguirre when I reviewed his memoir for Paste back in October:
Hunger and pennilessness are Herzog’s close companions throughout his life. They aren’t themes of Every Man for Himself and God Against All so much as tentpoles of his reality. They fill Herzog’s cup when nothing else will, sustain him and deliver him through undreamable situations. In the chapter “Peru,” Herzog writes of the disaster surrounding the production of Aguirre, the Wrath of God in the rainforest, how Klaus Kinski inspiring murderous threats was only the most visible of the film’s problems. Multiple, unreproducible rolls of film had gone missing, lost to local corruption, and Herzog didn’t have the heart to tell the already beleaguered crew that their hard work literally rotted in the sun. His memories from the Peruvian jungle all but eschew the romance of adventure and the thrill of artistic epiphany:
I remember there sometimes wasn’t anything to eat, and at night, I and a couple of pals set out in dugout canoes to an Indigenous village to try to find food. Once, I swapped my good shoes for a bathtub full of fish; another time I left my wrist watch as payment. I remember one night we paddled out and met at a bend in the river. None of the three of us had managed to find anything. At four in the morning, we tied our canoes together and drifted downstream and cried.
Then, as a beneficent deus ex machina, the director’s younger half-brother Lucki flew in to save Aguirre. Lucki came up with the plan to, in exchange for immediate Peruvian funds from local rich people, have their brother Till wire that same amount of money (with some extra on top) to the United States. Peruvian rich people wanted their money to go to the U.S. to avoid Peruvian tax authorities, and Herzog gave them an opportunity to have that happen directly and cleanly. In fact, one of the film’s largest investors, Joe Koechlin, badly needed an influx of American dollars to fund a Carlos Santana concert. Aguirre gave Koechlin the smoothest of venues to obtain the cash, so much so that Koechlin eventually produced Fitzcarraldo and Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams and is still Herzog’s friend today. But the starvation, wasted work, Kinski’s abuse, a Carlos Santana concert—was Aguirre worth so much suffering? Is any film?
In attempting to remember this story about Aguirre without looking back at the text, I replaced Santana with Bruce Springsteen in my head. Maybe because I discovered this revelation around the time that Santana was occupying headlines by openly making transphobic comments in concert; maybe my mind is no longer accommodating iterative learning and every new thing I absorb about Werner Herzog must replace a thing I’ve previously known about Werner Herzog, which likely once replaced a thing I knew about my own life and the time I’ve shared with people I love, which is running out, as we know. Like time, there is only so much brain.
Klaus Kinski plays Don Lope de Aguirre, a man who dreams of finding the lost City of El Dorado so he can conquer it and fully secede from the Spanish crown, thereby allowing him to marry his daughter and validate what he sees as transhumanist desires bestowed him by God. In 2016, for Versions, a kind of sister site of Kill Screen (if I’m remembering that correctly), I compared Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant to Aguirre, whose plot I described using much of the same anecdote as I did much later in that Paste piece. The evidence of how often I repeat myself is everywhere—how often I reuse the same thoughts, re-do the same patterns, rewalk the same angles and words and still fail to get at anything meaningful.
The story of how a Spanish conquistador (Klaus Kinski) doomed his expedition and lost all sanity to his obsession with finding the lost city of El Dorado became a travelogue of Herzog’s own obsession with finishing his film about the tragedy of obsession. Midway through shooting the film, even, Herzog got word that his reels, which he had sent out of the jungle to begin processing, were lost in transit. Knowing he did not have enough money to finish, he still kept shooting anyway, hiding his perhaps futile efforts from the rest of the crew. Eventually, the footage was found, but there’s no escaping the reality of Herzog’s dangerous infatuation with capturing art as a result of lived-in experience. That, ten years later, he made a movie (Fitzcarraldo) about a man dragging a boat over a mountain by dragging a boat over a mountain isn’t as surprising as the critical injuries and even death that accompanied the production.
In Burden of Dreams, Les Blank’s documentary about the making of Fitzcarraldo, Herzog, a spectre of a man after the trying circumstances of what he’s done, whines, “I shouldn’t make movies anymore.” He takes full responsibility for the pain experienced on his set, as well as for the experience of watching both Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, films which plunge the viewer into the helplessness of not just man’s struggle with nature, but of man’s struggle with the delusions of obsession. He does not bid Klaus Kinski to look into the camera, to suggest that as an audience we are somehow complicit with such epic follies of our species. He shoulders the burden of his dreams alone, later admitting, “…we are cursed with what we are doing here.”
Herzog wants to save us, Iñárritu to martyr us.
Aguirre is about failure, but it’s also about the drive to move past failure, even while actively failing. Which most people would call delusion, but Herzog seems to see as a spiritual calling—an invitation to let go of all the fear that holds you back and press on. In the case of Aguirre, whose mania is inextricably tied to the psychopathy of the actor bringing him to life, that drive is more delusional than it is a calling, but that’s presupposing that there is a moral imperative behind vocations. Throughout Burden of Dreams, in the commentary for Aguirre, all over his many writings, Herzog finds nature devoid of judgment or mercy or conscience, and inimitably beautiful for that. How can you push through so much failure if you weren’t called to it?
The more I attempt to write about my favorite movie, the more I realize this is what I’ve always done. At Paste, in 2017, in a list I made of the best movies on the now-transubstantiated Filmstruck:
The Rosetta Stone to understanding the relationship between director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski is contained within watching the way Herzog sees Kinski as Aguirre, the Conquistador circa 1560 who, through the sheer power of his belligerence, led a small army of Spaniards to their certain doom. In Kinski’s disturbing, hobbled presence, Aguirre is delusion manifest, his need to find the lost City of Gold while trekking through the unforgiving rain forests of Peru so corrupt and surreal it appears to be crippling his body from the inside out, crawling free from his heart and out through his bug-eyes. Herzog exploits that delusion when he casts Kinski—known IRL for his self-aggrandizing optics—and in Aguirre, the Wrath of God is no purer sense of just how wholly Herzog knows Kinski’s true nature, letting the delusion at the core of the film seep into the reality of the film itself: “Based on a true story” wasn’t so debased a cinematic term until Fargo took up the challenge decades later. Which is pretty much how Herzog treats true stories anyway—his documentary subjects he’s known to openly manipulate, and even Paul Cronin’s Herzog on Herzog book, a series of conversations amounting to a career retrospective, Cronin prologues with a lengthy explanation for how involved Herzog was in editing and rewriting his own interviews. What’s left in lieu of fealty to the story of Gonzalo Pizzaro’s ill-fated expedition is something so much more visceral: A reenactment of the story’s—and therefore History’s—pain, absurdity and grand illusion.
When I watch Werner Herzog’s films, I feel like I’m watching someone get away with the uncanny. I sense all the lack in me longing for something like experience to fill it. I may not want to carve down a steep mountain in the Amazon, but I mourn that soon I never will, my body won’t let me or I’ll resign myself to knowing I’ll never have the courage to do more than spend a lifetime so far building up to this moment: 40 years old, writing about my favorite movie inadequately for one more countless time.