Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

“Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God is one of the great haunting visions of the cinema…Of modern filmmakers, Werner Herzog is the most visionary and the most obsessed with great themes.” — Roger Ebert

SYNOPSIS

In the mid-16th century, after annihilating the Incan empire, Pizarro leads his army of conquistadors over the Andes into the heart of the most savage environment on earth in search of the fabled City of Gold, El Dorado. As the soldiers battle starvation, Indians, the forces of nature, and each other, Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), “The Wrath of God,” is consumed with visions of conquering all of South America and revolts, leading his own army down a treacherous river on a doomed quest into oblivion. Featuring a seething, controlled performance from Klaus Kinski, this masterpiece from director Werner Herzog is an unforgettable portrait of madness and power.

Presented in German with English subtitles.

PROGRAM NOTE

Herzog’s peerless, epochal exercise in phenomenological mysticism opens with an image that embodies not just the film and its philosophy but a defining project of his career: ant-like conquistadors descend the steep slope of a viridescent mountain smothered in mist, lugging livestock and weapons of war, some plummeting to their doom while the enclosing, indifferent jungle looks on. It’s a tale as old as time: hubristic, questing men, committed to the delusional pursuit of a geographical chimera, swallowed by the impassive force of nature. But Herzog boldly frames historical fiction as fact, with a documentary immediacy that dispels the illusion of narrative, as if the film were a transmission beamed from across the galaxy—an alien record of a moment when the objective reality captured by the camera mirrored the madness consuming the colonizers.

From whose perspective is this told? A fellow conquistador? Nature? God? The filmmaker himself? Perhaps all or none, and the urge to fix a single answer feels as futile as forcing the film into a neat historical allegory (Vietnam? the sins of German fathers?). Even the sharpest intellectual readings fail to account for the film’s enveloping mystique, something many filmmakers (Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, and John McTiernan among them) have tried to reproduce without fully capturing the brutal, haunting sensorial lunacy that infects every frame. Herzog’s heightened naturalism gradually slips into phantasmagoric realism, where reality and delusion begin to mirror one another. The result is both an impeccable example of artistic perfection and a monumental portrait of megalomania run amok. — Dan Santelli