Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (; ; ) is a 1972

Screenplay

Herzog wrote the screenplay "in a frenzy" in two-and-a-half days. Much of the script was written during a bus trip with Herzog's football team. His teammates got drunk after winning a game and one vomited on several pages of Herzog's manuscript, which he immediately threw out the window. Herzog claims that he cannot remember what he wrote on these pages.

The finale is significantly different from Herzog's original script. The director recalled, "I only remember that the end of the film was totally different. The end was actually the raft going out into the open ocean and being swept back inland, because for many miles you have a counter-current, the Amazon actually goes backwards. And it was tossed to and fro. And a parrot would scream: 'El Dorado, El Dorado. This ending was eventually adapted for Cobra Verde, Herzog's final film with Kinski.

Herzog and Kinski

Herzog's first choice for the role of Aguirre was Klaus Kinski. The two had met many years earlier when the then-struggling young actor rented a room in Herzog's family apartment, and Kinski's often terrifying antics during the three months he lived there left a lasting impression on the young Herzog. Years later, the director remembered the volatile actor and knew that he was the only man who could possibly play Aguirre, and he sent Kinski a copy of the screenplay. "Between three and four in the morning, the phone rang", Herzog recalled. "It took me at least a couple of minutes before I realized that it was Kinski who was the source of this inarticulate screaming. And after an hour of this, it dawned on me that he found it the most fascinating screenplay and wanted to be Aguirre."

From the beginning of the production, Herzog and Kinski argued about the proper manner to portray Aguirre. Kinski wanted to play a "wild, ranting madman", but Herzog wanted a "quieter, more menacing" portrayal. In order to get the performance he desired, Herzog would deliberately infuriate Kinski before each shot and wait for the actor's anger to "burn itself out" before rolling the camera.

On one occasion, irritated by the noise from a hut where members of the cast and crew were playing cards, the explosive Kinski fired three gunshots at it, blowing the tip off of one extra's finger. This incident is parodied in the 2004 film Incident at Loch Ness, which Herzog co-wrote.

Filming

The film was made for $370,000 (), with one-third of the budget going towards Kinski's salary. It was filmed on location in the Peruvian rainforest, Machu Picchu (the stone steps of Huayna Picchu),

The low budget precluded the use of stunt men or elaborate special effects. Cinematography in many scenes was done in order to accommodate the inclement weather and terrain of the region, with the camera lens often being obscured by rainwater and mud when the cast moved through thicker regions of the jungle. The cast and crew climbed up mountains, experienced the adverse conditions of the jungle, and rode Amazonian river rapids on rafts built by locals. At one point, a storm caused a river to flood, covering the film sets in several feet of water and destroying all the rafts built for the film. This flooding was immediately incorporated into the story, as a sequence including a flood and subsequent rebuilding of rafts was shot. Years later, Herzog recalled:

<blockquote>It was a very simple 35mm camera, one I used on many other films, so I do not consider it a theft. For me, it was truly a necessity. I wanted to make films and needed a camera. I had some sort of natural right to this tool. If you need air to breathe, and you are locked in a room, you have to take a chisel and hammer and break down a wall. It is your absolute right.

He had appeared as an actor in the director's first full-length film, Signs of Life (1968), playing a pianist. Aguirre was only the first of many collaborations between the band and the director.

Popol Vuh's "hypnotic music" for Aguirre met with considerable acclaim. Roger Ebert wrote, "The music sets the tone. It is haunting, ecclesiastical, human and yet something else ... [T]he music is crucial to Aguirre, the Wrath of God". AllMusic noted, "The film's central motif blends pulsing Moog and spectral voices conjured from Florian Fricke's Mellotron-related 'choir organ' to achieve something sublime, in the truest sense of the word: it's hard not to find the music's awe-inspiring, overwhelming beauty simultaneously unsettling. The power of the legendary opening sequence of Herzog's film ... owes as much to Popol Vuh's music as it does to the director's mise-en-scène."

Herzog explained how the choir-like sound was created: "We used a strange instrument, which we called a 'choir-organ.' It has inside it three dozen different tapes running parallel to each other in loops. ... All these tapes are running at the same time, and there is a keyboard on which you can play them like an organ so that [it will] sound just like a human choir but yet, at the same time, very artificial and really quite eerie."

Reception

Critical response

The film was produced in part by West German television station Hessischer Rundfunk, which televised the film on the same day it opened in theatres. Herzog has blamed this for the relatively poor commercial reception of the film in Germany. The film had a theatrical run of fifteen months in Paris. Aguirre received a theatrical release in the United States in 1977 by New Yorker Films. It immediately became a cult film, and New Yorker Films reported four years after its initial release that it was the only film in its catalog that never went out of circulation. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described Kinski's acting as "too theatrical" to embody God's wrath.

In Time, Richard Schickel opined that "[Herzog] does the audience the honor of allowing it to discover the blindnesses and obsessions, the sober lunacies he quietly lays out on the screen. Well acted, most notably by Klaus Kinski in the title role, gloriously photographed by Thomas Mauch, Aguirre is, not to put too fine a point on it, a movie that makes a convincing claim to greatness." Time Out's Tony Rayns noted, "each scene and each detail is honed down to its salient features. On this level, the film effectively pre-empts analysis by analysing itself as it proceeds, admitting no ambiguity. Yet at the same time, Herzog's flair for charged explosive imagery has never had freer rein, and the film is rich in oneiric moments."

Legacy

The film's reputation through the years has continued to grow. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 54 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 9/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "A haunting journey of natural wonder and tangible danger, Aguirre transcends epic genre trappings and becomes mythological by its own right."

J. Hoberman has written that Aguirre "is not just a great movie but an essential one ... Herzog's third feature ... is both a landmark film and a magnificent social metaphor". Danny Peary wrote, "To see Aguirre for the first time is to discover a genuine masterpiece. It is overwhelming, spellbinding; at first dreamlike, and then hallucinatory." In the same poll, critic Nigel Andrews and director Santosh Sivan also placed it in their top ten list. Martin Scorsese included it on a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker".

In 1999, Rolling Stone included the film on the magazine's "100 Maverick Movies of the Last 100 Years" list. Aguirre was included in Time magazine's "All Time 100 Best Films", compiled by Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss. Entertainment Weekly named it the 46th greatest cult film ever made. The film was ranked #19 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.

Aguirre has won several prestigious film awards. In 1973 it won the Deutscher Filmpreis (German Film Award) for "Outstanding Individual Achievement: Cinematography". In 1976 it was voted the "Best Foreign Film" by the French Syndicate of Film Critics. In 1977 the National Society of Film Critics in the United States gave it their "Best Cinematography" Award. It won the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association in 1976 and was nominated for a "Best Film" César Award.

Influence

Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, a film based on Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, was also influenced by Aguirre, containing seemingly deliberate visual "quotations" of Herzog's film. Coppola himself has noted that "Aguirre, with its incredible imagery, was a very strong influence. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it."

Several critics have noted that Aguirre appears to have had a direct influence on several other films. Martin Rubin has written that "[a]mong the films strongly influenced by Aguirre are Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Terrence Malick's The New World (2005)".

Historical accuracy

Although plot details and many of the characters in Aguirre come directly from Herzog's own imagination, historians have pointed out that the film fairly accurately incorporates some 16th-century events and historical personages into a fictional narrative.

Herzog's screenplay merged two expeditions: one led by Gonzalo Pizarro in 1541, which resulted in the discovery by Europeans of the Amazon River by Francisco de Orellana, and another one that occurred in 1560.

The expedition of Gonzalo Pizarro and his men left from the city of Quito and entered the Amazon basin in search of El Dorado. Various troubles afflicted the expedition and, sure that El Dorado was very close, Pizarro set up a smaller group led by Francisco de Orellana, to break off from the main group and forge ahead, then return with news of what they had found.

This group utilized a brigantine to journey down the river. After failing to find the legendary city, Orellana was unable to return because of the current, and he and his men continued to follow the Napo River until he reached the estuary of the Amazon in 1542. Accompanying Orellana was Gaspar de Carvajal, who kept a journal of the group's experiences.

The historic Gaspar de Carvajal (1500–1584) was a Spanish Dominican friar who had settled in Peru and dedicated himself to the conversion of the Indigenous peoples. His general attitude towards the local people was consistent with the benevolence of his better-known brother Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas. This personality is at odds with the description in the film where Carvajal is portrayed as a cowardly priest who claimed that "the church was always on the side of the strong".

Other Spanish expeditions outside the Amazon influenced the story. The conversation in which the local inhabitants refuse a Bible comes from events before the Battle of Cajamarca, in which Inca emperor Atahualpa allegedly rejected the (declaration by the Spanish monarchy in 1513 of its divine right to take New World territories). The chronicle of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación ("The Account"), mentions the appearance of a boat in a treetop after a fierce tropical storm in Hispaniola:

Kinski's crazed performance bore similarities to the real Aguirre, a "true homicidal megalomaniac". Many of his fellow soldiers considered his actions to be those of a madman.</blockquote>While film journalists acknowledge the various liberties taken within the film's depiction of historical events, these choices are observed as creative decisions on the part of the director, both in service of the narrative structure and also as reflections of imperialist and fascist manifestations occurring throughout history, both prior to and following the 16th-century conquest of South America. Kinski's manic performance combined with the film's blunt portrayal of violence toward the native population acts less as a literal portrayal of events and more as broad condemnation of both historical events and the concept of imperialist conquest.