Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Encyclopedia
Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a 1972
West German
adventure film
written and directed by Werner Herzog
. Klaus Kinski
stars in the title role. The soundtrack
was composed and performed by German progressive
/Krautrock
band Popol Vuh
. The story follows the travels of Spanish soldier Lope de Aguirre
, who leads a group of conquistador
es down the Amazon River
in South America in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. Using a minimalist
story and dialogue, the film creates a vision of madness and folly, counterpointed by the lush but unforgiving Amazonian jungle. Although based loosely on what is known of the historical figure of Aguirre, the film's story line is, as Herzog acknowledged years after the film's release, a work of imagination. Some of the people and situations may have been inspired by Gaspar de Carvajal's
account of an earlier Amazonian expedition, although Carvajal was not on the historical voyage represented in the film. Other accounts state that the expedition went into the jungles but never returned to civilization.
Aguirre was the first of five collaborations between Herzog and the volatile Kinski. The director and the actor had differing views as to how the role should be played, and they clashed throughout the film's production, while Kinski's tantrums terrorized both the crew and the local natives who assisted the production. The production was shot entirely on location, and was fraught with difficulties. Filming took place in the Peru
vian rainforest
on the Amazon River during an arduous five week period, shooting on tributaries
of the Ucayali region
. The cast and crew climbed mountains, cut through heavy vines to open routes to the various jungle locations, and rode treacherous river rapids on rafts built by natives.
Aguirre opened to widespread critical acclaim, and quickly developed a large international cult film
following. It was given an extensive arthouse
theatrical release in the United States in 1977, and remains one of the director's
best known films. Several critics have declared the film a masterpiece, and it has appeared on Time
magazine's list of "All Time 100 Best Films". Aguirre’s visual style and narrative elements had a strong influence on Francis Ford Coppola's
1979 film Apocalypse Now
.
, march down from Quito
in the Andes
mountains into the jungle below. Under the command of Gonzalo Pizarro
(Alejandro Repullés), the party's mission is to find El Dorado. The men, clad in half armor
, pull cannons through narrow mountainous paths and hot, thickly humid jungle. After much difficulty, on New Year's Eve
, Pizarro orders a small expeditionary group of forty men to continue ahead by rafting down a river on search for El Dorado. If they do not return to the main party within one week with news of what lies beyond, they will be considered lost. Pizarro chooses Don Pedro de Ursúa
(Ruy Guerra
) as the commander of the expedition, Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) as his second-in-command
, fat nobleman Don Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling
) representing The Royal House of Spain
and brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro
) as a chronicler. Also accompanying the expedition, against Pizarro's better judgment, are Doña Inéz (Ursúa's lady) and Aguirre's young daughter, Florés (Cecilia Rivera, in her only film role),
One of the four rafts becomes separated from the others and gets caught in a whirlpool
. A rescue team is unable to approach the raft until the following day, when all men on the raft are found to have been killed by unknown attackers. Ursúa wants the bodies to be brought back to camp for proper burial. Knowing this would slow down the expedition, Aguirre orders Perucho (Daniel Ades) to fire a cannon at the raft, which sinks, and the corpses are lost in the river.
During the night, the remaining rafts are swept away by the rising river. Since supplies start to run out and things get progressively worse, Ursúa decides that their mission is hopeless and orders them to return to the main group. Wanting power, Aguirre takes the opportunity to lead a rebellion
against Ursúa, telling the men that untold riches await them ahead. Ursúa and a soldier loyal to him are shot. Ursúa's mistress, Inez (Helena Rojo), cares for them. Aguirre coerces the soldiers to "elect" the fat, lazy Don Fernando de Guzman as the new leader of the expedition. Aguirre proclaims Guzman Emperor in the New World, “dethroning” Philip II
. A farcical trial of Ursúa results in his being sentenced to death, but Guzman surprises Aguirre by refusing to allow this to happen. Instead, Guzman grants Ursúa clemency.
Aguirre proves to be an oppressive leader, so terrifying that few protest his leadership. Those who complain are killed. Only Inez has the courage to speak out against him. Knowing that some of the soldiers are still loyal to Ursúa, Aguirre simply ignores her.
The expedition continues on a single, newly built, large raft. An Indian couple approaching with a canoe is captured by the explorers, but when the man expresses confusion at the sight of a Bible, Brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro) has the man and his wife killed for blasphemy
. Guzman dines on the low food supplies while the men are starving, and has the expedition's only horse pushed off the raft because it annoys him. Soon after, he is found strangled near the raft's outhouse
. After Guzman's death, Aguirre proclaims himself leader. Ursúa is then taken ashore and hanged in the jungle. The group attacks an Indian village, where many of the soldiers are killed by spears. The distraught Inez walks into the jungle and disappears.
Aguirre is now the ruler of a group of slowly starving, hallucinating men. The group gapes in awe at a wooden ship
perched in the highest branches of one of the tall trees. In a final Indian attack, all remaining survivors including Aguirre’s daughter are killed by arrows. Aguirre remains alone on the slowly circling raft. The raft becomes overrun by monkeys. The crazed Aguirre tells them: "I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together, we shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath of God!"
The screenplay was shot as written, with some minor differences. In an early scene in which Pizarro instructs Ursúa to lead the scouting team down the river, in the script Pizarro mentions that in the course of the expedition Ursúa could possibly discover what happened to Francisco de Orellana
's expedition, which had vanished without a trace years before (see "Historical Accuracy" section). Later in the screenplay, Aguirre and his men find a boat and the long dead remains of Orellana's soldiers. Further down the river, they discover another ship lodged in some tree tops. In the screenplay, Aguirre and others explore the boat but find no sign of Orellana or his men. Herzog ultimately eliminated any such references to Orellana's expedition from the film. The sequence with the boat caught in the upper branches of a tree remains, but as filmed it seems to be simply a hallucinatory vision.
The finale was considerably changed 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"..."
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 something "quieter, more menacing". In order to get the performance he desired, before each shot Herzog would deliberately infuriate Kinski. After waiting for the hot-tempered actor's inevitable tantrum to "burn itself out", Herzog would then roll the camera.
On one occasion, irritated by the noise from a hut where cast and crew were playing cards, the explosive Kinski fired three gunshots at it, blowing the top joint off one extra's finger. Subsequently, Kinski started leaving the jungle location (over Herzog's refusal to fire a sound assistant), only changing his mind after Herzog threatened to shoot first Kinski and then himself. The latter incident has given rise to the legend that Herzog made Kinski act for him at gunpoint. However, Herzog has repeatedly debunked the claim during interviews, explaining he only verbally threatened Kinski in the heat of the moment, in a desperate attempt to keep him from leaving the set.
The famous incident is parodied in Incident at Loch Ness
, which Herzog co-wrote.
370,000, with one-third of the budget paying for Kinski's salary. It was filmed on location in the Peru
vian rainforest
on the Amazon River
tributaries
of the Ucayali region
. Aguirre was shot in five weeks, following nine months' worth of pre-production planning. The film was shot in chronological order, as Herzog believed the film crew's progress on the river directly mirrored that of the explorers' journey in the story. The director and his cast and crew floated in rafts down the Huallaga
and Nanay
rivers through the Urubamba Valley in Peru.
All of the actors spoke their dialogue in English. The members of the cast and crew came from sixteen different countries, and English was the only common language among them. In addition, Herzog felt that shooting Aguirre in English would improve the film's chances for international distribution. However, the small amount of money that had been set aside for post-synchronization "left Peru with the man in charge of the process; both absconded en route." The English-language track was ultimately replaced by a higher-quality German language
version, which was post-synched
after production was completed. Herzog claims that Kinski requested too much money for the dubbing session, and so his lines were performed by another actor.
The low budget precluded the use of stunt men or elaborate special effects. The cast and crew climbed up mountains, hacked through thick jungle, and rode ferocious Amazonian river rapids on rafts built by natives. At one point, a storm caused a river to flood, burying the film sets underneath 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.
The camera used to shoot the film was stolen by Herzog from the Munich Film School.
Years later, Herzog recalled:
To obtain the monkeys used in the climactic sequence, Herzog paid several locals to trap 400 monkeys; he paid them half in advance and was to pay the other half upon receipt. The trappers sold the monkeys to someone in Los Angeles or Miami, and Herzog came to the airport just as the monkeys were being loaded to be shipped out of the country. He pretended to be a veterinarian and claimed that the monkeys needed vaccinations before leaving the country. Abashed, the handlers unloaded the monkeys, and Herzog loaded them into his jeep and drove away, used them in the shot they were required for, and released them afterwards into the jungle.
, which televised the film on the same day it opened in German theatres. Herzog has blamed this for the relatively poor commercial reception of the film in Germany. However, outside Germany the film became an "enormous cult
favorite" in "such places as Mexico
, Venezuela
, [and] Algiers
." 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.
In Germany, the Süddeutsche Zeitung
described the film as "a colourdrenched, violently physical moving painting". The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
described Kinski's acting as "too theatrical" to embody God's wrath.
In the US and the UK, the film received mostly positive critical notices upon release. Vincent Canby
, writing in The New York Times
, called it, "[A]bsolutely stunning...Mr. Herzog views all the proceedings with fixed detachment. He remains cool. He takes no sides. He may even be slightly amused. Mainly he is a poet who constantly surprises us with unexpected juxtapositions...This is a splendid and haunting work."
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
."
The film's reputation through the years has continued to grow. 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." Roger Ebert
has added it to his list of "Great Movies", and in a 2002 Sight & Sound
poll of critics and filmmakers on the best films ever made, Ebert listed it in his top ten. In the same poll, critic Nigel Andrews and director Santosh Sivan
also placed it in their top ten list. 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 Magazines "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
US gave it their "Best Cinematography" Award. It was nominated for a "Best Film" César Award
in 1976.
1979 film Apocalypse Now
, a film based on Joseph Conrad's
1902 novella
Heart of Darkness
, was influenced also by Aguirre, as it contains seemingly deliberate visual "quotations" of Herzog's film. Coppola himself has noted, "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)". J. Hoberman agreed, noting that Herzog’s "sui generis
Amazon fever dream” was “the influence Malick's over-inflated New World can't shake." Channel 4
opined "This is an astonishing, deceptively simple, pocket-sized epic whose influence, in terms of both style and narrative, is seen in films as diverse as Apocalypse Now, The Mission, Predator
, and The Blair Witch Project
(1999)."
was performed by Popol Vuh
, a German progressive
/Krautrock
band. The band was formed in 1970 by keyboardist Florian Fricke, who had known Herzog for several years prior to the formation of the band.
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."
In 1975, Popol Vuh released an album
entitled Aguirre. Although ostensibly a soundtrack album
to Herzog's film, the six-track LP
included only two songs ("Aguirre I (L'Acrime Di Rei)" and "Aguirre II") taken from Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The four remaining tracks were derived from various recordings done by the group circa 1972–1974. At the time of Aguirre, the band members were Fricke (piano
, Mellotron
), Fichelscher (electric guitar
, acoustic guitar
, drums
), Djong Yun (vocals), and Robert Eliscu (oboe
, pan pipe
).
mistress, Doña Inez. At one point during the journey, Aguirre, a professional soldier, decided that he could use the 300 men to overthrow the Spanish rule of Peru. Aguirre had Ursúa murdered and proclaimed Guzman as “The Prince of Peru”. Guzman himself was eventually murdered when he questioned Aguirre’s scheme of sailing to the Atlantic, conquering Panama, crossing the isthmus and invading Peru. Many others who attempted to rebel against Aguirre were also killed. The surviving soldiers conquered Isla Margarita
off the coast of Venezuela
and made preparations to attack the mainland. However, by that time Spanish authorities had learned of Aguirre’s plans, and when the rebels arrived in Venezuela, government agents offered full pardons to Aguirre’s men. All of them accepted the deal. Immediately prior to his arrest, Aguirre murdered his daughter Florés, who had remained by his side during the entire journey. He was then captured and dismembered.
Herzog’s screenplay merged the 1560 expedition with the events of an earlier Amazonian journey in 1541–1542. Like Ursúa, Gonzalo Pizarro
and his men 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 force and forge ahead, then return with news of what they had found. This group utilized a brigantine
to journey down the river. Accompanying Orellana was Gaspar de Carvajal
, who kept a journal of the group’s experiences. 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 river until he reached the estuary
of the Amazon in 1542. Other Spanish expeditions outside the Amazon influenced the story; the conversation in which the Indians refuse a Bible comes from events before the Battle of Cajamarca
, and the chronicle of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
mentions the appearance of a boat in a treetop.
Kinski’s crazed performance bore similarities to the real Aguirre. A “true homicidal megalomaniac”, many of his fellow soldiers considered his actions to be that of a madman. Kinski’s use of a limp reflected one that Aguirre actually had, the result of a battle injury. Aguirre’s frequent short but impassioned speeches to his men in the film were accurately based on the man’s noted “simple but effective rhetorical ability.”
1972 in film
The year 1972 in film involved some significant events.-Top grossing films :- Awards :Academy Awards:*Avanti!, directed by Billy Wilder, starring Jack Lemmon and Juliet MillsB...
West German
Cinema of Germany
Cinema in Germany can be traced back to the late 19th century. German cinema has made major technical and artistic contributions to film.Unlike any other national cinemas, which developed in the context of relatively continuous and stable political systems, Germany witnesses major changes to its...
adventure film
Adventure film
Adventure films are a genre of film.Unlike pure, low-budget action films they often use their action scenes preferably to display and explore exotic locations in an energetic way....
written and directed by Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog Stipetić , known as Werner Herzog, is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and opera director.He is often considered as one of the greatest figures of the New German Cinema, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner...
. Klaus Kinski
Klaus Kinski
Klaus Kinski, born Klaus Günter Karl Nakszynski , was a German actor. He appeared in more than 130 films, and is perhaps best-remembered as a leading role actor in Werner Herzog films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God , Nosferatu the Vampyre , Woyzeck , Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde .-Early...
stars in the title role. The soundtrack
Soundtrack
A soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, book, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the...
was composed and performed by German progressive
Progressive rock
Progressive rock is a subgenre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of...
/Krautrock
Krautrock
Krautrock is a generic name for the experimental music scenes that appeared in Germany in the late 1960s and gained popularity throughout the 1970s, especially in Britain. The term is a result of the English-speaking world's reception of the music at the time and not a reference to any one...
band Popol Vuh
Popol Vuh (German band)
Popol Vuh was a German electronic avantgarde band, in the mainstream-media so called Krautrock, founded by pianist and keyboardist Florian Fricke in 1969 together with Holger Trülzsch and Frank Fiedler...
. The story follows the travels of Spanish soldier Lope de Aguirre
Lope de Aguirre
Lope de Aguirre was a Basque Spanish conquistador in South America. Nicknamed El Loco, 'the Madman', Aguirre is best known for his final expedition, down the Amazon river, in search of the mythical El Dorado...
, who leads a group of conquistador
Conquistador
Conquistadors were Spanish soldiers, explorers, and adventurers who brought much of the Americas under the control of Spain in the 15th to 16th centuries, following Europe's discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492...
es down the Amazon River
Amazon River
The Amazon of South America is the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by waterflow with an average discharge greater than the next seven largest rivers combined...
in South America in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. Using a minimalist
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
story and dialogue, the film creates a vision of madness and folly, counterpointed by the lush but unforgiving Amazonian jungle. Although based loosely on what is known of the historical figure of Aguirre, the film's story line is, as Herzog acknowledged years after the film's release, a work of imagination. Some of the people and situations may have been inspired by Gaspar de Carvajal's
Gaspar de Carvajal
Gaspar de Carvajal was a Spanish Dominican missionary to the New World, known for chronicling some of the explorations of the Amazon.-Arrival in the New World and the Amazonian Expedition:...
account of an earlier Amazonian expedition, although Carvajal was not on the historical voyage represented in the film. Other accounts state that the expedition went into the jungles but never returned to civilization.
Aguirre was the first of five collaborations between Herzog and the volatile Kinski. The director and the actor had differing views as to how the role should be played, and they clashed throughout the film's production, while Kinski's tantrums terrorized both the crew and the local natives who assisted the production. The production was shot entirely on location, and was fraught with difficulties. Filming took place in the Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
vian rainforest
Rainforest
Rainforests are forests characterized by high rainfall, with definitions based on a minimum normal annual rainfall of 1750-2000 mm...
on the Amazon River during an arduous five week period, shooting on tributaries
Tributary
A tributary or affluent is a stream or river that flows into a main stem river or a lake. A tributary does not flow directly into a sea or ocean...
of the Ucayali region
Ucayali Region
Ucayali is an inland region in Peru. Located in the Amazon rainforest, its name is derived from the Ucayali River. The regional capital is the city of Pucallpa.-Boundaries:...
. The cast and crew climbed mountains, cut through heavy vines to open routes to the various jungle locations, and rode treacherous river rapids on rafts built by natives.
Aguirre opened to widespread critical acclaim, and quickly developed a large international cult film
Cult film
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences...
following. It was given an extensive arthouse
Art film
An art film is the result of filmmaking which is typically a serious, independent film aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience...
theatrical release in the United States in 1977, and remains one of the director's
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
best known films. Several critics have declared the film a masterpiece, and it has appeared on Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine's list of "All Time 100 Best Films". Aguirre’s visual style and narrative elements had a strong influence on Francis Ford Coppola's
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors...
1979 film Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American war film set during the Vietnam War, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The central character is US Army special operations officer Captain Benjamin L. Willard , of MACV-SOG, an assassin sent to kill the renegade and presumed insane Special Forces...
.
Plot
In 1560, a thousand Spanish conquistadors, and a score of captured IndiansIndigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
, march down from Quito
Quito
San Francisco de Quito, most often called Quito , is the capital city of Ecuador in northwestern South America. It is located in north-central Ecuador in the Guayllabamba river basin, on the eastern slopes of Pichincha, an active stratovolcano in the Andes mountains...
in the Andes
Andes
The Andes is the world's longest continental mountain range. It is a continual range of highlands along the western coast of South America. This range is about long, about to wide , and of an average height of about .Along its length, the Andes is split into several ranges, which are separated...
mountains into the jungle below. Under the command of Gonzalo Pizarro
Gonzalo Pizarro
Gonzalo Pizarro y Alonso was a Spanish conquistador and younger paternal half-brother of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the Inca Empire...
(Alejandro Repullés), the party's mission is to find El Dorado. The men, clad in half armor
Personal armor
Personal armor is the whole of protecting clothing, designed to absorb and/or deflect slashing, bludgeoning, and penetrating attacks. They were historically used to protect soldiers, whereas today, they are also used to protect police forces, private citizens and private security guards or...
, pull cannons through narrow mountainous paths and hot, thickly humid jungle. After much difficulty, on New Year's Eve
New Year's Eve
New Year's Eve is observed annually on December 31, the final day of any given year in the Gregorian calendar. In modern societies, New Year's Eve is often celebrated at social gatherings, during which participants dance, eat, consume alcoholic beverages, and watch or light fireworks to mark the...
, Pizarro orders a small expeditionary group of forty men to continue ahead by rafting down a river on search for El Dorado. If they do not return to the main party within one week with news of what lies beyond, they will be considered lost. Pizarro chooses Don Pedro de Ursúa
Pedro de Ursúa
Pedro de Ursúa was a Spanish Basque conquistador from Baztan in the 16th century. In Panama, Ursúa subdued a Cimarron revolt by tricking Cimarron leader Bayano into coming unprepared to negotiate a truce, but then captured him and sent him back to King Philip II of Spain...
(Ruy Guerra
Ruy Guerra
Ruy Alexandre Guerra Coelho Pereira is a film director, screenwriter, film editor, and actor in Brazil. Guerra was born a Portuguese citizen in Lourenço Marques in Moçambique, when it was still a colony of Portugal....
) as the commander of the expedition, Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) as his second-in-command
Second-in-command
The Second-in-Command is the deputy commander of any British Army or Royal Marines unit, from battalion or regiment downwards. He or she is thus the equivalent of an Executive Officer in the United States Army...
, fat nobleman Don Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling
Peter Berling
Peter Berling is a German actor and writer. He has worked on several occasions with director Werner Herzog, in his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski....
) representing The Royal House of Spain
Spanish Royal Family
The Royal Family of the Kingdom of Spain consists of the current king, Juan Carlos, his spouse, Queen Sofia of Spain and their direct descendants. The Spanish royal family belongs to the House of Borbón...
and brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro
Del Negro
Del Negro, sometimes credited as simply Negro, is a Spanish film actor. He is probably best known for playing Brother Gaspar de Carvajal in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God.-External links:...
) as a chronicler. Also accompanying the expedition, against Pizarro's better judgment, are Doña Inéz (Ursúa's lady) and Aguirre's young daughter, Florés (Cecilia Rivera, in her only film role),
One of the four rafts becomes separated from the others and gets caught in a whirlpool
Whirlpool
A whirlpool is a swirling body of water usually produced by ocean tides. The vast majority of whirlpools are not very powerful. More powerful ones are more properly termed maelstroms. Vortex is the proper term for any whirlpool that has a downdraft...
. A rescue team is unable to approach the raft until the following day, when all men on the raft are found to have been killed by unknown attackers. Ursúa wants the bodies to be brought back to camp for proper burial. Knowing this would slow down the expedition, Aguirre orders Perucho (Daniel Ades) to fire a cannon at the raft, which sinks, and the corpses are lost in the river.
During the night, the remaining rafts are swept away by the rising river. Since supplies start to run out and things get progressively worse, Ursúa decides that their mission is hopeless and orders them to return to the main group. Wanting power, Aguirre takes the opportunity to lead a rebellion
Rebellion
Rebellion, uprising or insurrection, is a refusal of obedience or order. It may, therefore, be seen as encompassing a range of behaviors aimed at destroying or replacing an established authority such as a government or a head of state...
against Ursúa, telling the men that untold riches await them ahead. Ursúa and a soldier loyal to him are shot. Ursúa's mistress, Inez (Helena Rojo), cares for them. Aguirre coerces the soldiers to "elect" the fat, lazy Don Fernando de Guzman as the new leader of the expedition. Aguirre proclaims Guzman Emperor in the New World, “dethroning” Philip II
Philip II of Spain
Philip II was King of Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sicily, and, while married to Mary I, King of England and Ireland. He was lord of the Seventeen Provinces from 1556 until 1581, holding various titles for the individual territories such as duke or count....
. A farcical trial of Ursúa results in his being sentenced to death, but Guzman surprises Aguirre by refusing to allow this to happen. Instead, Guzman grants Ursúa clemency.
Aguirre proves to be an oppressive leader, so terrifying that few protest his leadership. Those who complain are killed. Only Inez has the courage to speak out against him. Knowing that some of the soldiers are still loyal to Ursúa, Aguirre simply ignores her.
The expedition continues on a single, newly built, large raft. An Indian couple approaching with a canoe is captured by the explorers, but when the man expresses confusion at the sight of a Bible, Brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro) has the man and his wife killed for blasphemy
Blasphemy
Blasphemy is irreverence towards religious or holy persons or things. Some countries have laws to punish blasphemy, while others have laws to give recourse to those who are offended by blasphemy...
. Guzman dines on the low food supplies while the men are starving, and has the expedition's only horse pushed off the raft because it annoys him. Soon after, he is found strangled near the raft's outhouse
Outhouse
An outhouse is a small structure separate from a main building which often contained a simple toilet and may possibly also be used for housing animals and storage.- Terminology :...
. After Guzman's death, Aguirre proclaims himself leader. Ursúa is then taken ashore and hanged in the jungle. The group attacks an Indian village, where many of the soldiers are killed by spears. The distraught Inez walks into the jungle and disappears.
Aguirre is now the ruler of a group of slowly starving, hallucinating men. The group gapes in awe at a wooden ship
Sailing ship
The term sailing ship is now used to refer to any large wind-powered vessel. In technical terms, a ship was a sailing vessel with a specific rig of at least three masts, square rigged on all of them, making the sailing adjective redundant. In popular usage "ship" became associated with all large...
perched in the highest branches of one of the tall trees. In a final Indian attack, all remaining survivors including Aguirre’s daughter are killed by arrows. Aguirre remains alone on the slowly circling raft. The raft becomes overrun by monkeys. The crazed Aguirre tells them: "I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together, we shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath of God!"
Cast
- Klaus KinskiKlaus KinskiKlaus Kinski, born Klaus Günter Karl Nakszynski , was a German actor. He appeared in more than 130 films, and is perhaps best-remembered as a leading role actor in Werner Herzog films: Aguirre, the Wrath of God , Nosferatu the Vampyre , Woyzeck , Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde .-Early...
as Lope de AguirreLope de AguirreLope de Aguirre was a Basque Spanish conquistador in South America. Nicknamed El Loco, 'the Madman', Aguirre is best known for his final expedition, down the Amazon river, in search of the mythical El Dorado... - Helena RojoHelena RojoHelena Rojo is a leading Mexican film, theater and television actress.-Biography:She began her career as a model in the early-1960s. Toward the end of the decade, she studied drama with renown Mexican directors Carlos Ancira and José Luis Ibáñez, making her film debut in 1968 in the film El club...
as Inez de Atienza - Ruy GuerraRuy GuerraRuy Alexandre Guerra Coelho Pereira is a film director, screenwriter, film editor, and actor in Brazil. Guerra was born a Portuguese citizen in Lourenço Marques in Moçambique, when it was still a colony of Portugal....
as Don Pedro de UrsúaPedro de UrsúaPedro de Ursúa was a Spanish Basque conquistador from Baztan in the 16th century. In Panama, Ursúa subdued a Cimarron revolt by tricking Cimarron leader Bayano into coming unprepared to negotiate a truce, but then captured him and sent him back to King Philip II of Spain... - Del NegroDel NegroDel Negro, sometimes credited as simply Negro, is a Spanish film actor. He is probably best known for playing Brother Gaspar de Carvajal in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God.-External links:...
as Brother Gaspar de CarvajalGaspar de CarvajalGaspar de Carvajal was a Spanish Dominican missionary to the New World, known for chronicling some of the explorations of the Amazon.-Arrival in the New World and the Amazonian Expedition:... - Peter BerlingPeter BerlingPeter Berling is a German actor and writer. He has worked on several occasions with director Werner Herzog, in his collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski....
as Don Fernando de Guzman, "Emperor in the New World" - Cecilia Rivera as Florés de Aguirre
- Daniel Ades as Perucho
- Edward Roland as Okello
- Armando Polanah as Armando
- Alejandro Repullés as Gonzalo PizarroGonzalo PizarroGonzalo Pizarro y Alonso was a Spanish conquistador and younger paternal half-brother of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the Inca Empire...
- Justo González as González
Production
The idea for the film began when Herzog borrowed a book on historical adventurers from a friend. After reading a half page devoted to Lope de Aguirre, the filmmaker became inspired and immediately devised the story. He fabricated most of the plot details and characters, although he did use some historical figures in purely fictitious ways.Screenplay
Herzog wrote the screenplay "in a frenzy", and completed it in only two and a half days. Much of the script was written during a 200 miles (321.9 km) bus trip with Herzog's soccer team. During the bus trip, his teammates got drunk after winning a game and one of them subsequently vomited on several pages of Herzog's manuscript, which he immediately tossed out the window. Herzog claims he can't remember what he wrote on these pages.The screenplay was shot as written, with some minor differences. In an early scene in which Pizarro instructs Ursúa to lead the scouting team down the river, in the script Pizarro mentions that in the course of the expedition Ursúa could possibly discover what happened to Francisco de Orellana
Francisco de Orellana
Francisco de Orellana was a Spanish explorer and conquistador. He completed the first known navigation of the length of the Amazon River, which was originally named for him...
's expedition, which had vanished without a trace years before (see "Historical Accuracy" section). Later in the screenplay, Aguirre and his men find a boat and the long dead remains of Orellana's soldiers. Further down the river, they discover another ship lodged in some tree tops. In the screenplay, Aguirre and others explore the boat but find no sign of Orellana or his men. Herzog ultimately eliminated any such references to Orellana's expedition from the film. The sequence with the boat caught in the upper branches of a tree remains, but as filmed it seems to be simply a hallucinatory vision.
The finale was considerably changed 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"..."
Herzog and Kinski
Herzog's first choice for the role of Aguirre was actor Klaus Kinski. The two had met many years before when the then-struggling young actor rented a room in Herzog’s family apartment, and the boarder’s often terrifying and deranged antics during the three months he lived there left a lasting impression on the director. Years later, Herzog remembered the volatile actor and knew that he was the only possible man who could play the mad 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 something "quieter, more menacing". In order to get the performance he desired, before each shot Herzog would deliberately infuriate Kinski. After waiting for the hot-tempered actor's inevitable tantrum to "burn itself out", Herzog would then roll the camera.
On one occasion, irritated by the noise from a hut where cast and crew were playing cards, the explosive Kinski fired three gunshots at it, blowing the top joint off one extra's finger. Subsequently, Kinski started leaving the jungle location (over Herzog's refusal to fire a sound assistant), only changing his mind after Herzog threatened to shoot first Kinski and then himself. The latter incident has given rise to the legend that Herzog made Kinski act for him at gunpoint. However, Herzog has repeatedly debunked the claim during interviews, explaining he only verbally threatened Kinski in the heat of the moment, in a desperate attempt to keep him from leaving the set.
The famous incident is parodied in Incident at Loch Ness
Incident at Loch Ness
Incident at Loch Ness is a mockumentary starring, produced by and written by, Werner Herzog and Zak Penn. The small cast film follows Herzog and his crew while working on the production of an abandoned movie project on the Loch Ness Monster entitled Enigma of Loch Ness...
, which Herzog co-wrote.
Filming
The film was made for US$United States dollar
The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
370,000, with one-third of the budget paying for Kinski's salary. It was filmed on location in the Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
vian rainforest
Rainforest
Rainforests are forests characterized by high rainfall, with definitions based on a minimum normal annual rainfall of 1750-2000 mm...
on the Amazon River
Amazon River
The Amazon of South America is the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by waterflow with an average discharge greater than the next seven largest rivers combined...
tributaries
Tributary
A tributary or affluent is a stream or river that flows into a main stem river or a lake. A tributary does not flow directly into a sea or ocean...
of the Ucayali region
Ucayali Region
Ucayali is an inland region in Peru. Located in the Amazon rainforest, its name is derived from the Ucayali River. The regional capital is the city of Pucallpa.-Boundaries:...
. Aguirre was shot in five weeks, following nine months' worth of pre-production planning. The film was shot in chronological order, as Herzog believed the film crew's progress on the river directly mirrored that of the explorers' journey in the story. The director and his cast and crew floated in rafts down the Huallaga
Huallaga River
The Huallaga River is a tributary of the Marañón River, part of the Amazon Basin. Old names for this river include Guallaga and Rio de los Motilones. The Huallaga is born on the slopes of the Andes in central Peru and joins the Marañón before the latter reaches the Ucayali River to form the Amazon....
and Nanay
Nanay
The Nanay River is tributary river to the Amazon River, west of the Napo in Peru. The Nanay is one of the three rivers that surround the jungle city of Iquitos, making it an island. Other nearby settlements on the river include the villages of Santo Tomás, Padre Cocha, and Santa Clara. During...
rivers through the Urubamba Valley in Peru.
All of the actors spoke their dialogue in English. The members of the cast and crew came from sixteen different countries, and English was the only common language among them. In addition, Herzog felt that shooting Aguirre in English would improve the film's chances for international distribution. However, the small amount of money that had been set aside for post-synchronization "left Peru with the man in charge of the process; both absconded en route." The English-language track was ultimately replaced by a higher-quality German language
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
version, which was post-synched
Dubbing (filmmaking)
Dubbing is the post-production process of recording and replacing voices on a motion picture or television soundtrack subsequent to the original shooting. The term most commonly refers to the substitution of the voices of the actors shown on the screen by those of different performers, who may be...
after production was completed. Herzog claims that Kinski requested too much money for the dubbing session, and so his lines were performed by another actor.
The low budget precluded the use of stunt men or elaborate special effects. The cast and crew climbed up mountains, hacked through thick jungle, and rode ferocious Amazonian river rapids on rafts built by natives. At one point, a storm caused a river to flood, burying the film sets underneath 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.
The camera used to shoot the film was stolen by Herzog from the Munich Film School.
Years later, Herzog recalled:
- "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."
To obtain the monkeys used in the climactic sequence, Herzog paid several locals to trap 400 monkeys; he paid them half in advance and was to pay the other half upon receipt. The trappers sold the monkeys to someone in Los Angeles or Miami, and Herzog came to the airport just as the monkeys were being loaded to be shipped out of the country. He pretended to be a veterinarian and claimed that the monkeys needed vaccinations before leaving the country. Abashed, the handlers unloaded the monkeys, and Herzog loaded them into his jeep and drove away, used them in the shot they were required for, and released them afterwards into the jungle.
Reception
The film was produced in part by German television station Hessischer RundfunkHessischer Rundfunk
Hessischer Rundfunk is the public broadcaster for the German state of Hesse. The main offices of HR are in Frankfurt am Main. HR is a member of the ARD.- Studios :...
, which televised the film on the same day it opened in German theatres. Herzog has blamed this for the relatively poor commercial reception of the film in Germany. However, outside Germany the film became an "enormous cult
Cult film
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences...
favorite" in "such places as Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
, [and] Algiers
Algiers
' is the capital and largest city of Algeria. According to the 1998 census, the population of the city proper was 1,519,570 and that of the urban agglomeration was 2,135,630. In 2009, the population was about 3,500,000...
." The film had a theatrical run of fifteen months in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
. Aguirre received a theatrical release in the United States in 1977 by New Yorker Films
New Yorker Films
New Yorker Films is an independent film distribution company founded by Daniel Talbot in 1965. It started as an extension of his Manhattan movie house, the New Yorker Theater, after he discovered he was unable to obtain certain foreign titles for exhibition....
. 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.
In Germany, the Süddeutsche Zeitung
Süddeutsche Zeitung
The Süddeutsche Zeitung , published in Munich, is the largest German national subscription daily newspaper.-Profile:The title literally translates as "South German Newspaper". It is read throughout Germany by 1.1 million readers daily and boasts a relatively high circulation abroad...
described the film as "a colourdrenched, violently physical moving painting". The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , short F.A.Z., also known as the FAZ, is a national German newspaper, founded in 1949. It is published daily in Frankfurt am Main. The Sunday edition is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung .F.A.Z...
described Kinski's acting as "too theatrical" to embody God's wrath.
In the US and the UK, the film received mostly positive critical notices upon release. Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby
Vincent Canby was an American film critic who became the chief film critic for The New York Times in 1969 and reviewed more than 1000 films during his tenure there.-Life and career:...
, writing in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, called it, "[A]bsolutely stunning...Mr. Herzog views all the proceedings with fixed detachment. He remains cool. He takes no sides. He may even be slightly amused. Mainly he is a poet who constantly surprises us with unexpected juxtapositions...This is a splendid and haunting work."
In Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
, Richard Schickel
Richard Schickel
Richard Warren Schickel is an American author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He is a film critic for Time magazine, having also written for Life magazine and the Los Angeles Times Book Review....
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
Tony Rayns
Antony Rayns is a British writer, commentator, film festival programmer and screenwriter. Much inspired in his youth by the films of Kenneth Anger, he wrote for the underground publication Cinema Rising before contributing to the Monthly Film Bulletin from the December 1970 issue until its demise...
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
Oneiric (film theory)
In a film theory context, the term oneiric refers to the depiction of dream-like states in films, or to the use of the metaphor of a dream or the dream-state to analyze a film. The connection between dreams and films has been long established; "The dream factory" “...has become a household...
."
The film's reputation through the years has continued to grow. J. Hoberman
J. Hoberman
James Lewis Hoberman , also known as J. Hoberman, is an American film critic. He is currently the senior film critic for The Village Voice, a post he has held since 1988.-Education:...
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
Danny Peary
Danny Peary is an American film critic and sports writer. He has written many books on cinema and sports-related topics.-Biography:...
wrote, "To see Aguirre for the first time is to discover a genuine masterpiece
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....
. It is overwhelming, spellbinding; at first dreamlike, and then hallucinatory." Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert is an American film critic and screenwriter. He is the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.Ebert is known for his film review column and for the television programs Sneak Previews, At the Movies with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, and Siskel and Ebert and The...
has added it to his list of "Great Movies", and in a 2002 Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound
Sight & Sound is a British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute .Sight & Sound was first published in 1932 and in 1934 management of the magazine was handed to the nascent BFI, which still publishes the magazine today...
poll of critics and filmmakers on the best films ever made, Ebert listed it in his top ten. In the same poll, critic Nigel Andrews and director Santosh Sivan
Santosh Sivan
Santosh Sivan is an Indian cinematographer, film director, and producer who has worked in Malayalam, Kannada, Tamil, and Hindi cinema....
also placed it in their top ten list. In 1999, Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
included the film on the magazine's "100 Maverick Movies of the Last 100 Years" list. Aguirre was included in Time Magazines "All Time 100 Best Films", compiled by Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss
Richard Corliss
Richard Nelson Corliss is a writer for Time magazine who focuses on movies, with the occasional article on music or sports. Corliss is the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment...
. Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
named it the 46th greatest cult film
Cult film
A cult film, also commonly referred to as a cult classic, is a film that has acquired a highly devoted but specific group of fans. Often, cult movies have failed to achieve fame outside the small fanbases; however, there have been exceptions that have managed to gain fame among mainstream audiences...
ever made. The film was ranked #19 in Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...
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
Deutscher Filmpreis
The Deutscher Filmpreis is the highest German movie award. From 1951 to 2004 it was awarded by a commission, since 2005 the award has been given by the Deutsche Filmakademie...
(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
National Society of Film Critics
The National Society of Film Critics is an American film critic organization. As of December 2007 the NSFC had approximately 60 members who wrote for a variety of weekly and daily newspapers.-History:...
US gave it their "Best Cinematography" Award. It was nominated for a "Best Film" César Award
César Award
The César Award is the national film award of France, first given out in 1975. The nominations are selected by the members of the Académie des arts et techniques du cinéma....
in 1976.
Legacy
Francis Ford Coppola'sFrancis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola is an American film director, producer and screenwriter. He is widely acclaimed as one of Hollywood's most innovative and influential film directors...
1979 film Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American war film set during the Vietnam War, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The central character is US Army special operations officer Captain Benjamin L. Willard , of MACV-SOG, an assassin sent to kill the renegade and presumed insane Special Forces...
, a film based on Joseph Conrad's
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist.Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, although he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties...
1902 novella
Novella
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" and part of the Western canon.The story centres on Charles...
, was influenced also by Aguirre, as it contains seemingly deliberate visual "quotations" of Herzog's film. Coppola himself has noted, "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
Terrence Malick
Terrence Frederick Malick is a U.S. film director, screenwriter, and producer. In a career spanning almost four decades, Malick has directed five feature films....
's The New World (2005)". J. Hoberman agreed, noting that Herzog’s "sui generis
Sui generis
Sui generis is a Latin expression, literally meaning of its own kind/genus or unique in its characteristics. The expression is often used in analytic philosophy to indicate an idea, an entity, or a reality which cannot be included in a wider concept....
Amazon fever dream” was “the influence Malick's over-inflated New World can't shake." Channel 4
Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British public-service television broadcaster which began working on 2 November 1982. Although largely commercially self-funded, it is ultimately publicly owned; originally a subsidiary of the Independent Broadcasting Authority , the station is now owned and operated by the Channel...
opined "This is an astonishing, deceptively simple, pocket-sized epic whose influence, in terms of both style and narrative, is seen in films as diverse as Apocalypse Now, The Mission, Predator
Predator (film)
Predator is a 1987 American science fiction action film directed by John McTiernan, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, and Kevin Peter Hall. It was distributed by 20th Century Fox....
, and The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American horror film pieced together from amateur footage. The film was produced by the Haxan Films production company. The film relates the story of three student filmmakers The Blair Witch Project is a 1999 American horror film pieced together from amateur...
(1999)."
Soundtrack
Aguirres musical scoreFilm score
A film score is original music written specifically to accompany a film, forming part of the film's soundtrack, which also usually includes dialogue and sound effects...
was performed by Popol Vuh
Popol Vuh (German band)
Popol Vuh was a German electronic avantgarde band, in the mainstream-media so called Krautrock, founded by pianist and keyboardist Florian Fricke in 1969 together with Holger Trülzsch and Frank Fiedler...
, a German progressive
Progressive rock
Progressive rock is a subgenre of rock music that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of a "mostly British attempt to elevate rock music to new levels of artistic credibility." John Covach, in Contemporary Music Review, says that many thought it would not just "succeed the pop of...
/Krautrock
Krautrock
Krautrock is a generic name for the experimental music scenes that appeared in Germany in the late 1960s and gained popularity throughout the 1970s, especially in Britain. The term is a result of the English-speaking world's reception of the music at the time and not a reference to any one...
band. The band was formed in 1970 by keyboardist Florian Fricke, who had known Herzog for several years prior to the formation of the band.
He had appeared as an actor in the director’s first full length film, Signs of Life
Signs of Life (1968 film)
Signs of Life is a 1968 feature film written, directed, and produced by Werner Herzog. It was his first feature film, and his first major commercial and critical success...
(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
Motif (narrative)
In narrative, a motif is any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story. Through its repetition, a motif can help produce other narrative aspects such as theme or mood....
blends pulsing Moog
Moog synthesizer
Moog synthesizer may refer to any number of analog synthesizers designed by Dr. Robert Moog or manufactured by Moog Music, and is commonly used as a generic term for older-generation analog music synthesizers. The Moog company pioneered the commercial manufacture of modular voltage-controlled...
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
Mise en scène
Mise-en-scène is an expression used to describe the design aspects of a theatre or film production, which essentially means "visual theme" or "telling a story"—both in visually artful ways through storyboarding, cinematography and stage design, and in poetically artful ways through direction...
.”
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."
In 1975, Popol Vuh released an album
Album
An album is a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution. The word derives from the Latin word for list .Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album...
entitled Aguirre. Although ostensibly a soundtrack album
Soundtrack album
A soundtrack album is any album that incorporates music directly recorded from the soundtrack of a particular feature film or television program. In some cases, not all the tracks from the movie are included in the album; however there are rare cases of songs in the trailers that do not appear in...
to Herzog's film, the six-track LP
LP album
The LP, or long-playing microgroove record, is a format for phonograph records, an analog sound storage medium. Introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire record industry...
included only two songs ("Aguirre I (L'Acrime Di Rei)" and "Aguirre II") taken from Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The four remaining tracks were derived from various recordings done by the group circa 1972–1974. At the time of Aguirre, the band members were Fricke (piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...
, Mellotron
Mellotron
The Mellotron is an electro-mechanical, polyphonic tape replay keyboard originally developed and built in Birmingham, England in the early 1960s. It superseded the Chamberlin Music Master, which was the world's first sample-playback keyboard intended for music...
), Fichelscher (electric guitar
Electric guitar
An electric guitar is a guitar that uses the principle of direct electromagnetic induction to convert vibrations of its metal strings into electric audio signals. The signal generated by an electric guitar is too weak to drive a loudspeaker, so it is amplified before sending it to a loudspeaker...
, acoustic guitar
Steel-string acoustic guitar
A steel-string acoustic guitar is a modern form of guitar descended from the classical guitar, but strung with steel strings for a brighter, louder sound...
, drums
Drum kit
A drum kit is a collection of drums, cymbals and often other percussion instruments, such as cowbells, wood blocks, triangles, chimes, or tambourines, arranged for convenient playing by a single person ....
), Djong Yun (vocals), and Robert Eliscu (oboe
Oboe
The oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois" , "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca...
, pan pipe
Pan flute
The pan flute or pan pipe is an ancient musical instrument based on the principle of the closed tube, consisting usually of five or more pipes of gradually increasing length...
).
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. The film’s major characters, Aguirre, Ursúa, Guzman, Inez, and Florés, were indeed involved in a 1560 expedition that left Peru to find the city of El Dorado. Commissioned by Peru’s governor, Ursúa organized an expeditionary group of 300 men to travel by way of the Amazon River. He was accompanied by his mixed-raceMestizo
Mestizo is a term traditionally used in Latin America, Philippines and Spain for people of mixed European and Native American heritage or descent...
mistress, Doña Inez. At one point during the journey, Aguirre, a professional soldier, decided that he could use the 300 men to overthrow the Spanish rule of Peru. Aguirre had Ursúa murdered and proclaimed Guzman as “The Prince of Peru”. Guzman himself was eventually murdered when he questioned Aguirre’s scheme of sailing to the Atlantic, conquering Panama, crossing the isthmus and invading Peru. Many others who attempted to rebel against Aguirre were also killed. The surviving soldiers conquered Isla Margarita
Isla Margarita
Margarita Island is the largest island of the state of Nueva Esparta in Venezuela, situated in the Caribbean Sea, off the northeastern coast of the country. The state also contains two other smaller islands: Coche and Cubagua. The capital city of Nueva Esparta is La Asunción, located in a river...
off the coast of Venezuela
Venezuela
Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...
and made preparations to attack the mainland. However, by that time Spanish authorities had learned of Aguirre’s plans, and when the rebels arrived in Venezuela, government agents offered full pardons to Aguirre’s men. All of them accepted the deal. Immediately prior to his arrest, Aguirre murdered his daughter Florés, who had remained by his side during the entire journey. He was then captured and dismembered.
Herzog’s screenplay merged the 1560 expedition with the events of an earlier Amazonian journey in 1541–1542. Like Ursúa, Gonzalo Pizarro
Gonzalo Pizarro
Gonzalo Pizarro y Alonso was a Spanish conquistador and younger paternal half-brother of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of the Inca Empire...
and his men 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
Francisco de Orellana
Francisco de Orellana was a Spanish explorer and conquistador. He completed the first known navigation of the length of the Amazon River, which was originally named for him...
to break off from the main force and forge ahead, then return with news of what they had found. This group utilized a brigantine
Brigantine
In sailing, a brigantine or hermaphrodite brig is a vessel with two masts, only the forward of which is square rigged.-Origins of the term:...
to journey down the river. Accompanying Orellana was Gaspar de Carvajal
Gaspar de Carvajal
Gaspar de Carvajal was a Spanish Dominican missionary to the New World, known for chronicling some of the explorations of the Amazon.-Arrival in the New World and the Amazonian Expedition:...
, who kept a journal of the group’s experiences. 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 river until he reached the estuary
Estuary
An estuary is a partly enclosed coastal body of water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, and with a free connection to the open sea....
of the Amazon in 1542. Other Spanish expeditions outside the Amazon influenced the story; the conversation in which the Indians refuse a Bible comes from events before the Battle of Cajamarca
Battle of Cajamarca
The Battle of Cajamarca was a surprise attack on the Inca royal entourage orchestrated by Francisco Pizarro. Sprung on the evening of November 16, 1532, in the great plaza of Cajamarca, the ambush achieved the goal of capturing the Inca, Atahualpa, and claimed the lives of thousands of his...
, and the chronicle of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish explorer of the New World, one of four survivors of the Narváez expedition...
mentions the appearance of a boat in a treetop.
Kinski’s crazed performance bore similarities to the real Aguirre. A “true homicidal megalomaniac”, many of his fellow soldiers considered his actions to be that of a madman. Kinski’s use of a limp reflected one that Aguirre actually had, the result of a battle injury. Aguirre’s frequent short but impassioned speeches to his men in the film were accurately based on the man’s noted “simple but effective rhetorical ability.”