البـــــوابـــة
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Films
I Love #49: Aguirre, The Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
Werner Herzog's view of nature as essentially
hostile and frightening is expressed most eloquently in Aguirre,
The Wrath of God, a poetic, dream-like film about the attempts
of a group of Spanish conquistadors to find El Dorado, the fabled South
American city of gold. The gold is just a myth, of course, and Herzog
underlines the folly of these explorers by opening his film with a
series of title cards that describe how the Indians of the region
invented the legend to fool the greedy, gold-obsessed Spanish. The
self-proclaimed leader of this expedition is the conquistador Aguirre
(Klaus Kinski), at least after he kills off and suppresses any potential
opposition. As the group ventures further and further into the heart of
the rain forest, losing men to disease, internal squabbling and brutal
attacks from local Indians, Aguirre loses control, focusing with
monomaniacal intensity on his impossible goal of wealth and conquest.
Aguirre is the archetypal Herzog hero, possessed by mad ambitions,
crazed in his determination to conquer any obstacles in his path, even
if nature itself seems to be conspiring against him.
This is one
of the finest performances of Kinski's career, perhaps because there is
so much of the conquistador in the actor to begin with. He channels the
intensity of the role through his wide blue eyes, and his rants have a
quiet purposefulness that does little to disguise this man's
increasingly unhinged mind. Herzog always knew how to get the best out
of the wild Kinski, giving him parts where his wide-eyed stare and
unstable personality would infuse the character with depths that
probably no other actor could bring to bear on these roles. But despite
Aguirre's disintegrating sanity, the film is mostly quiet and evenly
paced, with a poetic sensibility in its long shots of the river or the
eerily silent jungle surrounding it. Herzog has always viewed nature
with a combination of abhorrence and distanced respect, and his images
here are frequently gorgeous and haunting, admiring the killer beauty of
nature as it swallows up these men. 
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