God and Gold: “Aguirre, The Wrath of God”

Circa 1982, my once and future boss Roger Corman signed on to help distribute Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, a bizarre adventure set in the jungles of the Amazon. This was during a ten-year period, starting with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, when Roger went all in on the American distribution of outstanding European art films.

 Ten years earlier, Herzog had made another challenging film set in the rainforests of Peru. It was this earlier film that helped give him an international reputation, and it starred the same actor—the manically intense Klaus Kinski—who was later to be at the center of Fitzcarraldo, the story of a 20^th century man obsessed with the bizarre idea of building an opera house in the jungle. Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a period piece, vaguely linked to historic fact, in which a troop of Spanish conquistadores and their local minions hack and raft their way through Amazon rain forests in a bid to find the fabled lost city of El Dorado.

 Aguirre, a mere 94 minutes long, begins with a slow stretch in which a long line of Pizarro’s Spanish soldiers (as well as slaves, indigenous conscripts, Catholic priests, and—to our surprise—a few elegant ladies in sedan chairs) inch their way through a challenging landscape, from lofty mountaintops down to the Amazon River. So slow-moving is this opening section that I suspect the always impatient Roger Corman would have been itching to trim it, if he had any say in the matter. I got a bit restless too, but my hunch is that Herzog was here sending us a message—that this film would require us to step outside of time and give in to the plodding nature of the actual and the symbolic journey.

 And what a journey! Early on, Pizarro recognizes that it might be pure folly to send the entire regiment in search of an enigmatic city of gold. That’s why he creates a small squadron of maybe forty people and sends them off on rafts, giving them two weeks to return with some usable intel. Things go badly from the start: there are perilous rip currents that trap some of the travelers, as well as concealed but deadly Indian tribes who oppose incursions into their territory. In the face of these challenges, genteel and steady commander Don Pedro de Ursúa is overthrown in a mutiny led by the brooding Don Lope de Aguirre.

 From the moment we first spot him, it’s clear that Aguirre (played, of course by Klaus Kinski) is dangerous. You have only to look into his pale blue eyes to see the madness blazing within. He’s a man caught in the grip of an obsession: to find El Dorado and seize its golden treasures, thus ensuring himself fame as well as fortune. Though others on the trek focus on spreading the glory of God, he himself is fixated on the gold he believes awaits those bold enough to find and claim it.

 The last section of the film concentrates on the way the trip implodes, with those still alive (though starving and debilitated) seeming to lose all touch with reality. Aguirre, who likes calling himself “the wrath of God,” is predictably the last man standing. But his vision of the future contains ominous (and sexually perverse) elements I would rather not discuss. And then there are those visitations from what seems to be another world, but perhaps is just the natural order striking back at man’s hubris. I know one thing: I don’t want to see Klaus Kinski in my dreams.