When you think of director Werner Herzog, you probably think of his documentaries, like Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. But Herzog has also directed a couple of dozen fiction films. His best-known are more recent commercial films like Rescue Dawn and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but the real heart of Herzog’s cinematic lineup, so to speak, is his five collaborations with hothead actor Klaus Kinski, which spanned fifteen years and began in 1972 with Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the story of an exploration gone horribly wrong.
Kinski plays the title character, the second-in-command on a doomed Spanish voyage to find and conquer the mythical golden city of El Dorado. Aguirre establishes himself right away as the voice of reason, divorced from both Judeo-Christian morality and the bottomless avarice driving his compatriots to overrun South America. In the jaw-dropping opening scene, his party descends a mountain through layers of fog. Aguirre whispers to Ursua (Ruy Guerra), the conventionally heroic soldier who would shortly be chosen to lead their doomed scouting party, that El Dorado is a fantasy and that they’ll never make it out of the jungle. The scouting party sets off with Ursua’s mistress and Aguirre’s teenage daughter in tow. Almost immediately, one of their rafts gets caught in an eddy on the river and all the men on it are killed by spear-wielding native Americans, or else they disappear into the jungle. The remaining rafts are swept away by the rising river in the night, forcing the soldiers to build new ones. And that’s just the beginning of everything that goes wrong with the expedition to El Dorado, which even the captive Incas now admit to the Spaniards is a fiction. But Ursua and his men are too swept up in their vision of a city made of gold to stop now.
Our narrator throughout is a monk named Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro), whose diary is meant to be the only surviving account of the expedition. Of course we know now that El Dorado isn’t real and that their quest for it was futile and vain. But as the film progresses and the Spaniards journey deeper into the jungle, the emptiness of their so-called mission to convert the “heathen” Native Americans begins to parallel the futility of their quest for the mythical city. In a horrifying scene, two Incas approach their decrepit raft in their canoe and are immediately hauled on board and interrogated with the help of an Inca translator. Not surprisingly, Carvajal asks first about El Dorado and then whether the Incas “have heard of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” unhelpfully shoving a Bible into their hands and then having the man killed for “blasphemy” when he holds the book up to his ear and says “it doesn’t talk.”
You probably already know about some of the crazy choices Herzog made to get the intimate and terrifying shots of a raft careening down a river, or soldiers climbing down a steep mountain decline. The choice to center the film on the Aguirre character isn’t his craziest one, but it’s my favorite. The first words out of Aguirre’s mouth are a prophecy of doom. He doesn’t believe in their mission—or at least, not in El Dorado—and he’s not interested in maintaining the illusion that their quest is a noble one. His own motivations are murky until we see him interacting with his daughter, whom he treats like a princess, bringing her a cute baby sloth to play with. He’s also the one to take charge when the wheels come off the scouting mission he’s sent on with Ursua, delivering a pep talk to the rest of the party in a strangely quiet tone, almost as if he’s talking to himself. He appeals to their greed, telling them they’ll all be rich beyond their wildest dreams, not because he thinks El Dorado is real but because he knows it’s the only way to motivate his men. Privately he sneers at their small-mindedness and reveals his own goal: total dominion over the land. He doesn’t care about conquering it on behalf of Spain, and has in fact already declared their tiny party separate from and in competition with the Spanish invaders; nor does he have any interest in converting the “heathen” native Americans. In fact he cares about no one but himself and his daughter; he envisions them ruling over the whole continent. Nothing about this sounds heroic, and Aguirre would assuredly not describe himself that way. But there’s something arresting about the fact that he’s the only member of the party who keeps his grip on reality. Aguirre’s refusal to comfort or motivate himself with illusions or fairy tales may not be heroic in the traditional sense, but it makes him a compelling protagonist, as if he’s the black hole the rest of the party is being drawn inevitably toward.
Aguirre, the Wrath of God might seem like a high level of difficulty for audiences who don’t usually watch arthouse or foreign films, and it certainly doesn’t care about making any of its characters likable or following the conventions of cinematic storytelling. But it’s unbelievably gripping and tense, and nothing about it feels dated (except perhaps the bright reddish-orange fake blood, the only visual cue that this film was made in the early 1970s). Aguirre himself might be off-putting, but we don’t need to like him to follow him into the jungle for 98 minutes and watch him turn the wilderness into a kingdom of his own madness.
Ashley Wells is a film writer at Outtake by Tribeca Shortlist. You can find her on Twitter and Letterboxd.