Aguirre, the Wrath of God

[intertribal]

Oh yeah, I should also say that this old Werner Herzog cult movie is awesome and powerful and pretty much insane.  It's "based on the true story" of Lope de Aguirre, who was himself pretty damn psycho, and in the movie Aguirre is played by Klaus Kinski, who is just as psycho as Werner Herzog, so, yeah.  There was some urban legend about Kinski shooting a crew member and Herzog threatening to shoot himself and Kinski if Kinski walked off the set, which was authentically enough, Peru.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God is about Spanish conquistadores (speaking in German) trekking through the Amazon in search of El Dorado, the city of gold.  They're led by a basically reasonable guy, Ursua, and for no good reason have with them Ursua's mistress, Inez, and Aguirre's daughter, Flores.  There's also a somber monk and a pompous nobleman and a black guy and an "educated" Indian and a whole bunch of slave Indians who are tied together and have to haul Inez and Flores around.  It's a splinter group off a larger group of explorers, which is always a foreboding sign in a Herzog movie, and sure enough things begin to go crazy when Ursua decides they should turn back and Aguirre stabs Ursua, telling the other conquistadores that they need to seek out El Dorado and claim greatness for themselves.  What's more, they should reject Spanish rule and form their own empire!  Yes!  They'll conquer the rest of the Amazon and then sail all the way to Spain and take the Spanish throne too!  Ha ha ha! 

Meanwhile the Indians are shooting poisoned darts at them and they're raiding the Indians back, making the black guy run around because supposedly the Indians are scared of black people, and the pompous nobleman becomes emperor of their new little empire and has his own special outhouse and makes them shove the horse into the water because it's bothering him, and Inez walks off into the jungle, and they all float around on a glorified raft getting fevers, and they see a ship stuck in the trees but the monk says it's a hallucination, and then monkeys overrun the raft and Aguirre has a long monologue with a monkey and needless to say, the expedition ends in disaster, as so many of these colonial expeditions did. 

There's not much I can say because it's a Werner Herzog movie and there's nothing more you need to say, really.  It's a Heart of Darkness kind of movie, except even more psycho and eerie than Heart of Darkness.  You get a real sense of alienation and "fever dream" and the end result is really very hypnotic.  Pretty much exemplifies the insanity and delusion and absurdity and death that went into early colonialism.  So I'll just include the trailer.  It's English dubbed, but you should watch it in German with subtitles, obviously.

You may ask what I'm doing watching 9 if my kind of movie is Aguirre, the Wrath of God, and I would respond: yeah, I don't know either.

Comments

[madali.livejournal.com]

I did not like the movie THAT much but Klaus Kinski was beyond brilliant. THere did not seem to be any distinction between actor and character