Aguirre, the Wrath of God movie review (1972)
If the music is crucial to “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” so is the face of Klaus Kinski. He has haunted blue eyes and wide, thick lips that would look sensual if they were not pulled back in the rictus of madness. Here he plays the strongest-willed of the conquistadors. Herzog told me that he was a youth in Germany when he saw Kinski for the first time: “At that moment I knew it was my destiny to make films, and his to act in them.”
When Pizarro fears that his expedition is a folly, he selects a small party to spend a week exploring farther up-river. If they find nothing, he says, the attempt will be abandoned. This smaller party is led by the aristocrat Don Pedro de Ursua, with Aguirre (Kinski) as his second in command. Also in the party, along with soldiers and slaves, are a priest, Gaspar de Carvajal; the fatuous nobleman Fernando de Guzman; Ursua’s wife, Flores; Aguirre’s daughter Inez, and a black slave named Okello, who sadly tells one of the women, “I was born a prince, and men were forbidden to look on me. Now I am in chains.”
Herzog does not hurry their journey, or fill it with artificial episodes of suspense and action. What we feel above all is the immensity of the river and the surrounding forest--which offers no shore to stand on because the waters have risen and flooded it. Consider how Herzog handles an early crisis, when one of the rafts is caught in a whirlpool. The slaves row furiously, but the raft cannot move. Herzog’s camera stays across the river from the endangered rafters; their distress seems distant and insoluble. Aguirre contemptuously dismisses any attempt to rescue them, but a party is sent out to try to reach them from the other side. In the morning, the raft still floats in place; everyone on it is dead.
How did they die? I have an idea, but so do you. The point is that death is the destiny of this expedition. Ursua, the leader, is put under arrest. Aguirre arranges the selection of Guzman as their new leader. Soon both are dead. Guzman’s last meal is fish and fruit, which as acting “emperor” he eats greedily while his men count out a few kernel of corn apiece. A horse goes mad, he orders it thrown overboard, and men mutter darkly that it would have supplied meat for a week. Guzman’s dead body is found soon after.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46gqZ6ZpGK6sMLInmSan6Wev7OxjK2fnmWnp661tIyonWafn5l6coWWaw%3D%3D