Aguirre, the Wrath of God 9781844577538, 9781838713829, 9781844577552

Table of contents :
Cover
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Visionary History
2 The Descent
3 Assembling the Troops
4 Visions of the World
5 The Act of Conquest
6 Into the Quiet
7 Hallucination
8 Aguirre Lives
Appendix: Shooting with Kinski
Notes
Credits

Citation preview

BFI Film Classics

The BFI Film Classics is a series of books that introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles available in the series, please visit our website: www.bloomsbury.com/bfi ‘Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry.’ Uncut ‘A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema.’ Times Higher Education Supplement ‘The series is a landmark in film criticism.’ Quarterly Review of Film and Video ‘Possibly the most bountiful book series in the history of film criticism.’ Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film Comment

Editorial Advisory Board Geoff Andrew, British Film Institute James Bell, Sight & Sound Edward Buscombe William Germano, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art Lalitha Gopalan, University of Texas at Austin Lee Grieveson, University College London

Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck College, University of London Alastair Phillips, University of Warwick Dana Polan, New York University B. Ruby Rich, University of California, Santa Cruz Amy Villarejo, Cornell University

Aguirre, the Wrath of God Eric Ames

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain by Palgrave in 2016 Reprinted by Bloomsbury in 2018 on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk

The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Eric Ames, 2016 Eric Ames has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. 6 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ashley Western Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972), Werner Herzog Filmproduktion; My Best Fiend (Werner Herzog, 1999), Werner Herzog Filmproduktion; The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1927), Société Genérale de Films.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-8445-7753-8 978-1-8445-7755-2

Series: BFI Film Classics

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Contents

Acknowledgments

6

1 Visionary History

9

2 The Descent

16

3 Assembling the Troops

28

4 Visions of the World

39

5 The Act of Conquest

51

6 Into the Quiet

59

7 Hallucination

73

8 Aguirre Lives

77

Appendix: Shooting with Kinski

84

Notes

88

Credits

95

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the people who supported this project in so many different ways: to Paul Cronin, Noah Isenberg and Veronika Zantop, for inspiration and encouragement; to Jane Brown and Elaine Tennant, for constructive feedback on early versions of the manuscript; to Cordula Döhrer, Julia Riedel, Lisa Roth and Anke Vetter, for research assistance at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin; to Lucki Stipeti´ c of Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, for answering my many questions about the film; to Nicola Cattini, Sophia Contento and Jenna Steventon of Palgrave/BFI Publishing, for believing in the project and seeing it to completion. This book is for Anton Kaes, who taught me how to read, and for Jane Brown, who taught me how to write.

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There are epochs in which reason is bewildered by the contemplation of new and unusual objects. And even the most clear-sighted man, when exposed to a continuous series of violent impressions, ceases to analyze them and descends to the level of common intelligences, which exaggerate and marvel at everything. To comply with the sage precept of nil admirari (‘marvel at nothing’), one must be in full control of his faculties and have dominion over his senses, which are prone to bewitch and deceive him. How far were the conquistadors of America from this state of intellectual calm! Everything for them was an occasion for rapture. The spectacle of a new world, new peoples, new customs, and above all those inexhaustible fountains of riches – all this maintained in them a sweet and perpetual ecstasy. Without taking opium like the Muslims do, the conquistadors experienced the same sensations, and could hardly escape them.

Pedro de Angelis, Colección de obras y documentos relativos a la historia antigua y moderna de las provincias del Río de la Plata, 2nd edn (1836), vol. 1, p. 355

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The German film poster

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1 Visionary History

‘A Film by Werner Herzog’ holds a promise that originates with this one from 1972. Aguirre, the Wrath of God/Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) is and perhaps always will be the German director’s most important film, a source of tremendous influence not only on other directors and films (Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now [1979] being only the most well-known example), but also within Herzog’s own body of work, even on his documentaries, such as The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1973), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) and Grizzly Man (2005). Over time, Aguirre has become a ‘classic’ in many different senses of the word: as a film that inspires repeated viewings and new discoveries with each pass; as a film that was made in a particular context, yet speaks to audiences across time and space; as a film to which the most diverse artists and authors refer; and as a film that seems to encompass the entire world, offering a way to see it through the lens of a camera. What makes Aguirre so important? There are several things, some of them less obvious than others. Shot on location in the Amazon jungle, Aguirre took the historical adventure film out of the studio and moved it to the great outdoors. At the time of its release, the very experience of seeing ‘history’ from the perspective of a shoulder-mounted camera, its lens splashed with mud and water as the operator waded through swamps and floated down raging rivers – the experience of viewing itself was thrilling. As one reviewer put it, ‘If the conquistadors had brought a cameraman along with them, his footage might have looked like this.’1 From another perspective, that of the director, Aguirre marks Herzog’s international breakthrough. At home in West Germany he would remain little known, but in France, Italy, England, the United States and elsewhere, Herzog

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gained a surprising amount of attention, usually in association with the New German Cinema, and especially after Aguirre. In Paris, the film ran for more than twenty weeks straight at the famous Studio des Ursulines, the avant-garde theatre that premiered the work of Buñuel, Vigo and Vertov, among others. Though it never entered the commercial mainstream, Aguirre put Herzog on the map of world cinema. He was just twenty-eight years old when he began planning it. But the film’s importance also derives from his tense relationship on the set with the notoriously difficult actor Klaus Kinski. Did Herzog really direct him at gunpoint? Did they plot each other’s murder? The legends begin here. The very blurring of the film with the ordeal of its production makes Aguirre a key to understanding Herzog’s work. In a way, he has returned to this film again and again, making Fitzcarraldo (1982), Wings of Hope (1999), My Best Fiend (1999) and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009), all on or around the same locations in Peru. Add to these the many other films he has made about survival – and death – in hostile environments, and the seminal role of Aguirre becomes clear. At the time of its release, however, Aguirre was seen as ‘something of a departure for Herzog’. According to Tony Rayns in

Herzog returns to Aguirre in My Best Fiend (1999)

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Sight & Sound, the film’s ‘relatively lavish budget’ of $370,000 reflected more than just the participation of Kinski: ‘Herzog has used it to engage – for the first time – in a specific historical reconstruction.’2 Much of the film is admittedly invented by Herzog. But some of it comes from historical sources. In order to understand what he does with this material, and what he invents, we need at least a sense of the history behind the film. According to the written accounts, of which there are many, Lope de Aguirre was born around 1511 to a family of poor but noble Basques. As a young man, he travelled from Spain to the New World in search of adventure and riches, departing from Seville, arriving at Cartagena de Indias in 1536 and continuing on to Peru. There, he found employment first as a horse trainer, then as a soldier of fortune. He participated in numerous revolts and fought for many different, even opposing, sides (the civil wars that followed the conquest of the Inca Empire involved various groups, not just Spaniards versus Indians). Physically, Aguirre was ‘of short stature, and sparely made, ill-featured, the face small and lean, beard black, with eyes like a hawk’s, and when he looked, he fixed them sternly, particularly when angry’.3 Lame in the left foot as a result of being shot by a crossbow, he walked with a limp. Aguirre had been in Peru almost twenty-five years when he joined an expedition led by Pedro de Ursúa, an ambitious young nobleman who had made his reputation commanding a war against freed black slaves in Panama. Intent on becoming a conquistador on a par with Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, Ursúa acquired a licence in Lima to conquer El Dorado and Omagua, the legendary kingdoms of gold. The resulting expedition, one of the largest ever to explore the Amazon, consisted of 300 Spaniards, 100 mestizos (Indians who learned Spanish), 600 Indian servants and 20 African slaves (men and women). It also included a number of mestizas (women of mixed descent, Indian and Spanish), most notably Aguirre’s teenage daughter, Elvira, and Ursúa’s beautiful mistress, Inés de Atienza. But even before it began, the expedition went awry.

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An advance party, sent out to gather provisions, slaughtered a group of peaceful natives – news that quickly spread, so that the expedition would later encounter many abandoned villages. Back upstream, Ursúa’s men worked for months building ships, all but one of which sank upon launching. To avoid further delay, they built canoes and rafts to accommodate the people, and abandoned their livestock and luggage. On 26 September 1560, the expedition departed from its jungle base camp to head downriver. By the year’s end, having made little progress under increasingly drastic living conditions, discontent led to mutiny. A group of soldiers, including Aguirre and a young nobleman named Fernando de Guzmán, assassinated Ursúa on New Year’s Day. Later, they murdered his mistress. Taking command of the expedition, the rebels named Guzmán prince of Peru and all Tierra Firme, and swore their allegiance to him (as opposed to the Spanish king). They also changed their objective: rather than chase a fantasy through the wilderness, they would return and reconquer Peru. As the journey continued, so did the killing. ‘The cruise of Aguirre’, as chroniclers called it, was marked by the bodies of all those shot, strangled or garrotted – no fewer than sixty Spaniards – on various charges, real and invented. Guzmán himself, seven of his followers and a priest would soon be murdered, as would everyone suspected of conspiring against Aguirre. After the killing of Guzmán, in an impassioned speech, Aguirre declared himself to be the ‘wrath of God’, ‘prince of liberty’ and ruler of all the West Indies. Months later, having reached the Atlantic Ocean, the mutineers sailed to the island of Margarita, in Venezuela, where the atrocities multiplied in scale, number and capriciousness: the troops destroyed towns, pillaged estates and murdered civilians as they went. Moving inland, they reached the town of Valencia, where Aguirre proclaimed the country’s liberation and wrote an infamous letter to King Philip II. In it, he declared war on Spain, offered advice on how to administer the colonies, condemned the injustices of the vassal relationship and lamented the corruption of judges and

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missionaries, all the while boasting of his own crimes and virtues. The end came little more than a year later, on 27 October 1561, when, surrounded by loyalist troops, his soldiers deserted him. First, Aguirre stabbed and killed his own daughter, so that she wouldn’t be raped by soldiers. Then he was shot and killed by his own men, his body quartered and put on display along with his banners, the garments worn by his daughter and the dagger he used to kill her.4 The body count alone makes it easy to see why commentators frame the expedition in extreme terms. German explorer Alexander von Humboldt calls it ‘one of the most dramatic episodes of the history of the conquest’.5 With this expedition, writes British geographer Clements Markham, ‘all that is wildest, most romantic, most desperate, most appalling in the annals of Spanish enterprise seems to culminate in one wild orgie of madness and blood’.6 The perception of Aguirre himself becomes wildly exaggerated. American author Robert Silverberg (using a pseudonym) describes him as ‘perhaps the single most villainous figure in the annals of the Spanish conquest’. Writing after the Holocaust, Silverberg goes further: ‘Very much like Hitler in his bunker in Berlin in the spring of 1945, Aguirre refused to listen to any talk of defeat, urged his men wildly on to renewed confidence, and slaughtered anyone whose faith seemed to waver.’7 The widespread use of extreme hyperbole, however, points to a creative dynamic of fictionalisation that comes from the source material itself. Many documents narrating the expedition have been preserved, including ten reports written by soldiers and presented to legal authorities. All these reports, as Beatriz Pastor Bodmer observes, were written for the purpose of justifying the author’s ‘highly questionable involvement or direct participation in the uprising’. In order to prove his innocence, every writer had to separate himself from Aguirre and assert his loyalty to the king by condemning both the rebellion and its participants. So Aguirre and his followers ‘are characterized in absolutely negative terms’.8 Desperate efforts to win mercy from royal authorities, first-hand

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accounts can afford no room for ambiguity. On the contrary, Bodmer explains, ‘every aspect of rebellion must be misrepresented’ in order for Aguirre alone to be responsible.9 In a further twist, one that also has implications for our understanding of Herzog’s film, these documents have generally been taken at face value. Though written as narratives of self-exculpation, over time they have become factual accounts and recycled as such by other commentators, from Renaissance chroniclers to nineteenth-century historians, to contemporary authors and film directors.10 Herzog says that he found this material by chance, stumbling across a book about adventurers and discoverers, in which Aguirre receives a mere ten lines, the implication being that his story is essentially fabricated, the film created ex nihilo.11 But he must have read some of the historical materials, if only to find the film’s subtitle. That Aguirre once called himself ‘the wrath of God’ (ira de Dios) was not widely known before the appearance of Herzog’s film.12 Herzog certainly had access to a transcription of Aguirre’s letter to King Philip, even if he changed its content for the film.13 His unpublished ‘Preliminary Remarks on the Screenplay’ identify specific differences between the proposed film and its historical sources – a move that he makes in early interviews as well.14 Speaking with journalists in Peru, for instance, Herzog acknowledges that the film ‘deliberately confused some of Aguirre’s history with that of [Francisco de] Orellana’.15 The screenplay also demonstrates familiarity with the expeditions of Cortés and Pizarro, among others. All claims to the contrary notwithstanding, Herzog works with historical sources and adapts them to his own particular vision. The resulting film is more than just ‘fabricated’. It is an experiment in visualising the past from the viewpoint of the present and about seeing the world through the lens of a camera. This book proceeds from the conviction that Aguirre deserves a closer, more sustained appraisal than it usually receives. As we work our way through the scenes more or less chronologically, I will provide as much information as I can about the making of the film,

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some of it from Herzog’s production archive in Berlin. When I quote from the screenplay, I do so strategically, in order to demonstrate how Aguirre works as a film. And when I quote from historical reviews and interviews, I do so mainly in order to recover the language as well as the urgency that surrounded the film’s appearance, but also to pursue leads that commentators since then have either overlooked or neglected. Only by doing both close analysis and archival research did I come to understand how Aguirre engages the problem of vision in its relation to history. Both terms are doubled. Vision refers to images both internal and external, while history refers both to the past and to, simply, a story. Aguirre tells a story more clearly and explicitly than any of Herzog’s previous films. For this reason, critics regarded it as his most accessible film to date.16 And yet, the story is told through an elaborate choreography of magnified faces and looks that engages our own experience as film viewers. Aguirre is not a history film in the narrow sense, but it is based on a specific episode of the Spanish conquest. What distinguishes Herzog’s film from historical accounts and later films of this material is how it neither illustrates history nor exposes history to be a fiction, but rather explores it in terms of vision. Throughout this book, then, I will identify the different ways of seeing in Aguirre and show how they range from religious vision, to historical vision, to visions of the world, to hallucination, to vision as striving. All these ways of seeing become interrelated; the one doesn’t simply replace the other. The fact that they have yet to be identified, much less explored, has to do with the richness of this material. Aguirre is a film that we think we already know, only to find on the very next viewing that we hardly knew it at all.

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2 The Descent

The film begins with three upward-scrolling titles: After the Spanish had conquered and sacked the Inca realm, the sorely oppressed Indians invented the legend of a golden kingdom, El Dorado. Its alleged location was in the impenetrable bogs of the Amazon tributaries. [/] Near the end of the year 1560, a large expedition of Spanish adventurers, under the leadership of Gonzalo Pizarro, set off from the Peruvian sierras. [/] The only document to survive from this lost expedition is the diary of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal.17

Never had such an adventure been filmed. Yet all the usual elements of an adventure film are represented: unknown territory, hostile nature, innocent victims, fabulous riches and a marauding force which pursues this goal for its own sake. As Herzog explains in the key interview on the film’s production, ‘I wanted to make an adventure movie that would have all the characteristics of the genre on the outside, but would offer something new on the inside, while drawing a large audience to the film.’18 The factual, disillusioned character of the text, with its overt references to myth, invention and futility, may seem to be at odds with the lure of adventure that launches the expedition. But the search for El Dorado was as much a historical phenomenon as it was a fool’s errand. Aguirre begins accordingly, hovering between fact and fiction, myth and reality. It should come as no surprise that the titles are invented. They draw on elements from multiple different expeditions, including those led by Pizarro, Ursúa and Orellana. It was Orellana’s 1541 descent down the Amazon and his own alleged mutiny against Gonzalo Pizarro that friar Gaspar de Carvajal recorded as witness.19 His account not only

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informs the film’s screenplay. It provides the idea for the monk’s diary and for the sole surviving document, both of which Herzog would use to define the voiceover narration. Together, these quotations of multiple ventures point beyond Aguirre to something more at stake. The film opens with a dazzling view: a horizon of mountain peaks extending as far as the eye can see, the camera positioned at the same high altitude, and quickly enveloped in clouds. Then another ethereal image: a green, rocky landscape descending from the clouds. This one is set in motion; the camera, looking down from a higher position, begins zooming, its mobile perspective gliding through the clouds, strangely rearranging the landscape, now to the sounds of an otherworldly choir. Far, far away, a line of people gradually comes into view, hundreds of them, winding their way down a steep and narrow trail. Cut to a closer view. The zoom repeats, while the camera pans just slightly back and forth, looking down on the line of people as it follows the zigzagging trail. The clouds are thick,

Axis mundi

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revealing only vague outlines of figures on the move. A voice begins to speak: ‘On Christmas Day, 1560, we crossed the last pass of the Andes and for the first time looked down into the legendary jungle. In the morning I read mass, and then we descended through the clouds.’ The pattern is set: language in this film follows on vision, and not the other way around. The voiceover, like the device of the monk’s diary, was not part of the original screenplay. It was invented at the editing table, after the production had ended, to regulate the narrative’s pacing and to make its chronology more explicit.20 Cut to another dazzling view, this one among the film’s most memorable. The screen is divided: mountain left, cloud right. For a moment, the landscape appears to be flat, an effect of the telescopic lens. But a downward tilt of the camera changes our view, dividing the screen now in depth. Yet another rearrangement of landscape: suddenly we can distinguish between background and foreground, and the line of people reappears in the interval. For the first time, A line of people seen from above

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Divided screen; native porters come into view

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individual figures – native porters – come into view and pass right in front of the camera. Cut to a final overview: an animal cage crashes against the almost vertical rock, tumbling down into the abyss. From this point forward, the camera is on the trail, not apart from the scene but within it. All the characters now appear as part of a long procession, with soldiers, ladies, porters and slaves. Their organisation suggests a social hierarchy. Period props – a statue of the Virgin Mary, weapons – serve as more than just markers of historical authenticity. They reveal the dual character of conquest: part religious mission, part military march. The sequence ends with a loud and ominous signal, the sound of a cannon’s explosion and the image of a tree falling into the river. The opening of Aguirre is usually singled out for its spectacular views.21 What makes them even more interesting is their relation to the process of film-making. ‘From the astounding opening sequence,’ writes Boston film critic David Ansen, ‘one feels a sense of awe that is hard to locate precisely – it’s as much at what we are seeing as at the fact that someone (Herzog) has actually

Setting up: assistant cameraman Francisco Joán (right) (Deutsche Kinemathek)

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staged the scene.’22 Herzog has often discussed the making of this scene: how the actors and animals (horses, pigs, llamas and chickens) were sent up the path in reverse order; how the director scaled the path numerous times, giving instructions to the actors as he went; how the entire scene had to be shot in one take, believing as he did that the actors would never be persuaded to climb the path again; how the weather and the terrain produced their own spectacular effects.23 Still photographs from Herzog’s production archive reveal the process of staging. A camera was set up on Huayna Picchu, and turned away from the ruins of the ancient Inca city (the tourist attraction), to show the trails leading up to it. The site was used not only for its spectacular landscape, but also for its vertiginous perspective. What is less obvious, and what has yet to be noticed, is that the visual splendour of the scene introduces the problem of vision. It does so primarily by means of the zoom, or what the screenplay describes as ‘the dizzying gaze’ of the camera.24 The zoom plunges us into space. The shifting relations between up and down, near and Organising the procession: Herzog with radio (centre) (Deutsche Kinemathek)

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far, figure and ground – all this has the effect of disorienting us. But there is another effect and (at least) another way of seeing. The voiceover makes it explicit. Looking down from the mountain pass, the Spaniards witness ‘the legendary jungle’, attesting to its actual existence. In this regard, ‘the dizzying gaze’ also suggests the experience of seeing the world as never before. That too is part of the film’s project, and it is closely associated with the camera. How interesting, then, that the film’s opening scenes draw on religious iconography with dazzling ethereal views. They begin with a vista of snowy cloud-covered mountains, which the screenplay describes as ‘Holy Cathedrals’ (p. 11). Here, as in some of Herzog’s later films, mountains serve to visualise the idea of an axis mundi, the mythical connection between heaven and earth.25 These are symbolic landscapes, inspired in part by the places where they were filmed – in this case, Machu Picchu. But the vast horizon in Aguirre is abruptly cut, the landscape replaced and rearranged by a vertical movement through space. Everything now travels from an upper region to a lower one, from heaven to earth, from the mountains to the jungle, in one co-ordinated movement of descent. It is expressed not only by the line of people coming down through the clouds, but also by the camera as it zooms and tracks the action that is both the landscape and the people within it. Every important element – the vertical sweep of the landscape, the dizzying gaze of the camera, the staging of the actors, even the final image of a falling tree – has been co-ordinated to that end. The screenplay describes a much longer, stepwise descent from a mountain pass to a high plateau, to a tropical valley, to the river below. There, the Spaniards build ships and watch them sink upon launching. They go on to find cinnamon trees and hear rumours of El Dorado (pp. 11–23). This more realistic sequence, which draws on the expeditions of Pizarro, Ursúa and Orellana, has been replaced by the reordering of vision in the movement of descent. Religious seeing provides a starting point, a first strategy to organise vision within the film, but then it is undermined, co-opted, transformed into something else.

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In fact, the music has already introduced this movement. A history film might use period music as a bid for authenticity, but Aguirre has an electronic score that is blatantly anachronistic. The music of Popol Vuh, or Florian Fricke, has since become associated with Herzog’s films from the period, including The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Nosferatu (1979). Aguirre marked their first collaboration. The music was recorded at a Munich studio in August 1972. Fricke invented for it a device he called the ‘choir organ’, consisting of several dozen magnetic tapes, each filled with pre-recorded sounds and voices, that could be played on an electronic keyboard (similar to a mellotron and other tape-replay instruments used by progressive rock bands of the period). For the film’s opening scenes, the music recalls sacred music, evoking a chorus of voices and instruments: a single motif repeats with variation, slowly descending into lower and lower pitches. ‘Finally,’ notes Rudolf Hohlweg in his analysis of the film’s music, ‘the sound curtain unfurls and dives into the rushing of the river.’26 The dialogue follows a similar trajectory. Having reached the river, Pizarro and Aguirre study the situation. Neither character has yet to be introduced (that happens in the following scene). Their first words contradict each other. Pizarro suggests that things are looking up; Aguirre retorts, ‘We’re all going down!’27 The spare use of dialogue adds power to the image. And what do we see? First, the eyes of Aguirre: he glares at Pizarro, sizing him up, with a look even more menacing than his comment. Then we see the river in two long takes, each held tight on the churning waters, each slowed down for an effect. The image shifts in and out of focus, blurring as it would if you stared at a river long enough. The effect is as hypnotic as it is ambiguous. What do the turbulent waters convey – a mood, a condition, an intensity? Whose perspective does the camera here adopt? Mixed with the sound of the river, a new musical motif is introduced, this one contemplative and static. Having ushered in the movement of descent, the music now suggests

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‘We’re all going down!’; the churning waters

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a state of inertia, a state that is clearly at odds with the thrust of conquest, but one that will later engulf the film. Cut to the jungle marshes. The music returns to the motif of descent, and the religious procession becomes an ordeal. The transcendent views from above are replaced by pictures of suffering. Seeing the fabled jungle is one thing, enduring it is another. The monk reports of fever and disease, of Indians ‘dropping like flies’. Images of physical hardship appear in quick succession: sweatcovered soldiers hacking through vines; corpses lying face down in the swamp; slaves, bound together with iron chains, dragging cannons through knee-deep mud; the Spanish brutally abusing native porters.28 These images foreground the material conditions of location shooting, too. The best example is the camera itself down in the muck, how it struggles against the environment. The visual absurdity of the Habsburg flag being borne through the jungle and put on display is almost lost on us because of the mud and water

‘The Indians are dropping like flies’

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stuck to the camera’s lens. Yet the elements do not merely obscure the view; they allow us to see history as never before. More important than the narrative it unfolds, Aguirre invites us to look at bodies, faces, objects and landscapes – surfaces that the camera clings to and makes available to our senses. What happens either behind or below these surfaces is left to our imaginations. Aguirre shows us adventure for what it really is: surface driven, covering the world and subjecting it to violence. As a result, the film’s relationship to adventure is paradoxical. Aguirre takes the genre to new extremes, traversing actual mountains, dense jungles and hazardous rivers, all in historical costume. The production itself resembles a daring adventure, as we shall see. But the film is predicated on the failure of the expedition it portrays. From the very beginning, the goal of El Dorado is described as a myth, a non-existent place invented by Indians out of sheer desperation. The searchers, for their part, discover nothing but The camera as participant

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a hostile environment and increasingly miserable conditions of existence. As Herzog put it, ‘The whole thing is about a large-scale failure.’29 So Aguirre begins with the end of heroic conquest. Indeed, this is precisely what the historical figure of Aguirre represents. According to Bodmer, the documents of his expedition reflect a major change in the discourse of colonialism: the collapse of mythic objectives in the face of grim reality. If the intensity of dreams and fantasies once allowed them to persist in spite of all failures and disappointments – as they did with Cortés in Mexico, for example – the physical experience of this reality, on the Amazon, made it very difficult to continue fantasising and consequently pushed men toward rebellion.30 Whether or not he is aware of it, Herzog taps into this problem – how Aguirre epitomises the end of adventure as a heroic enterprise. Aguirre takes failure as its starting point, but failure is just the beginning.

Flanked by native actors, Herzog and his first wife, Martje Grohmann (Deutsche Kinemathek)

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3 Assembling the Troops

As the film now pauses to introduce its cast, so I will do the same. Previously, Herzog had worked with small numbers of people, whether he was making a film in Germany or abroad. Aguirre was a relatively large operation. With ten professional actors from almost as many countries, the cast included Ruy Guerra (Ursúa), a film-maker in his own right and a key figure of the Cinema Novo in Brazil; Helena Rojo (Inés), an actress from Mexico City; Peter Berling (Guzmán), a West German producer and film actor, who was known for his work with Rainer Werner Fassbinder; and Daniel Ades (Perucho), a Cuban American who had a leading role in Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, filmed a few months earlier in Cuzco. The cast also included several hundred non-professional actors and native extras. Alejandro Repullés was working as a priest in Cuzco, when Herzog saw him on the street (according to Repullés, ‘he liked my face’) and asked him to play the role of Pizarro.31 Edward Roland, who plays the African slave named Okello, was an Arizona hippy who had been looking for a Buddhist monastery in the Andes, when he took up Herzog’s suggestion: ‘Come with us into the jungle and maybe you’ll find it there.’32 Most of the native actors were recruited from an agricultural co-operative at Lauramarca, a mountain village near Cuzco. Ordinarily, Herzog would have organised the crew and much of the staging himself, but this project – indeed, its logistics alone – required extensive collaboration and co-ordination. In addition to crew members from West Germany, most notably the director of photography Thomas Mauch, there was a group of seventeen technicians from Mexico responsible for stunts, special effects and trained animals, as well as countless locals providing services from cooking to carpentry. The scale of production needed an

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infrastructure that didn’t exist in the area. All the food, equipment and personnel had to be transported to and from the main locations. Supporting the crew was a staff of pilots using rafts, motorboats and an amphibious plane supplied by the Peruvian Army. The military also set up a small radio station so that the film crew could communicate with the nearest towns. With such a diverse cast and crew, many different languages were used off camera. The film was shot in English because it was the most widely shared language in the group. But it also reflected Herzog’s ambition to enter a larger, more commercial market than his previous films had.33 The use of English, like that of genre, offered the greatest possibility for reaching new audiences. If shooting in English had the appeal of a lingua franca, it proved to be less than ideal. The delivery was so uneven among the international cast (Repullés, for one, could not even speak English) that the film would need to be dubbed. By the end of production, however, there was not enough money left over for adequate synchronisation. The resulting dub was so inferior that the German-language version would ultimately be used for international release.34 For all the work and planning that went into pre-production, there was little that Herzog and his team could do to prepare for the arrival of Kinski. Picture the scene in Cuzco, where they met his charter plane on the runway. Kinski stepped out with a little bag slung over his shoulder, and Herzog beamed. Then the plane’s cargo hatch opened, and it took several men to slide out eight aluminum containers. Inside of them was everything from a complete deep-sea diving suit to equipment for a team of mountain climbers – everything you needed for the jungle. There was a gas stove, a batterypowered television, and, most importantly, a wardrobe for every occasion. Herzog had already handed the actor his precious survival present, a real Winchester, and no longer dared to protest. Now the production team had the same transport problem.35

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More on that rifle later. For now, it’s enough to notice the sheer amount of paraphernalia, all of it excessive. And of course there is even more. For what Kinski brought to the film was, more than anything else, a reputation for trouble. Herzog knew what he was getting himself into when he cast the explosive actor. He had dreamed of working with Kinski since the 1960s, beginning with Signs of Life (1968). By then, Kinski had already ended a successful career in the theatre. On stage, his open displays of emotional intensity and transgressive penchant for women’s roles – both exemplified by his 1948 performance of Jean Cocteau’s solo show La Voix humaine – flew in the face of postwar German society, where an entire generation of men had been raised to be cold, hard, restrained and obedient. In that context, Kinski’s outbursts were not just unusual, they were provocative. Young people took notice. Critics called for him to be ‘tamed’ and ‘disciplined’ (terms that Herzog would later use to describe how he directed Kinski). Unable to cope with criticism, Kinski left the theatre in 1961. Since the late 1940s, and parallel to his stage career, he had

Outfitted for adventure: Kinski and his third wife, Minhoi Loanic (Deutsche Kinemathek)

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also worked in the West German cinema. It was there that he first became typecast as the ultimate villain. During the next two decades, working in Italy, Spain and elsewhere, he appeared in as many as ten productions a year, most of them low-budget genre films (spaghetti Westerns, war films, detective movies, spy thrillers, erotic horror and fantasy films – the list goes on), very often playing minor roles as a monster, a criminal or a sadistic madman, a figure that was immediately and almost invariably coded as evil, and seldom survived until the movie’s end.36 These are just some of the associations that Kinski brought with him to Aguirre. More interesting, though less well known outside of Germany, were his interpretive performances as a reader of literary texts. These were solo shows featuring Kinski in historical costume reciting, for example, ballads by Schiller or Villon, fragments by Büchner, poems by Rimbaud, and other materials. Some of the recitations were broadcast on radio; most of them were recorded and released on gramophone under the title ‘Kinski speaks …’ While the records were commercially successful, it was the live performances that established his reputation as an enfant terrible. Many of them involved aggressive (even physical) confrontations with the audience, as Kinski raged like Kinski as ‘Jesus Christ Saviour’ from My Best Fiend

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an arrogant maniac, and often quit the stage in open displays of contempt (only to later wade through crowds of autograph-seekers, offstage). In late November 1971, the ‘Jesus Christ Saviour’ tour, Kinski’s version of the New Testament, was cancelled after two shows. (Herzog’s homage to the late actor, My Best Fiend begins with a videotaped recording of the performance.) It was his last appearance onstage. Filming in Peru began one month later on 31 December 1971. Kinski brought with him a whole set of associations, behaviours and resources not only from the B-films, but also – more importantly, perhaps – from the recitations. As Herzog’s film unfolds, the speaking role of Aguirre expands from a few short lines

A quiet moment on the set (Deutsche Kinemathek)

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of dialogue to a succession of monologues, so that the film itself increasingly relies on Kinski’s physical presence, his literal and figurative command of an audience by means of voice. In some sense, Aguirre follows a trajectory similar to that of Kinski’s stage career, from working with troupes, where he is surrounded by other actors, to going solo, where he may be surrounded by the crew (or a pack of monkeys) but his character is seen as increasingly isolated. In the end – and I am not giving anything away here – he speaks only to himself and to ‘us’ as witnesses. In terms of the cast, the entire film can be seen as one long process of elimination, until Kinski is the last one standing. And yet, however important his voice may have been, Kinski ultimately withheld it. We never hear his actual voice in Aguirre, not even in the German-language version. Instead, his words are spoken by Gerd Martienzen, who was later hired when Kinski demanded $1 million to dub his own voice, ten times his fee for appearing in the film.37

Camp scene

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The camp scene gathers up all these actors and groups them around Pizarro. Addressing the troops, the commander acknowledges their desperate situation – the terrain is unpassable, their rations have been depleted, the entire army has stalled – and announces a change of plan: a group of forty men will be sent on rafts downriver in order to gather food and information. He then names all the key figures of the group, identifying the film’s main characters, and clarifying their relationship to one another. As he speaks, they appear in a series of tableaux: static shots of quiet intensity depicting almost motionless figures, whose arrangement in space says more than the words that we hear. Herzog’s use of the tableau as a pictorial form comes from painting. In early interviews, when asked about the ‘look’ of Aguirre, he speaks of his interest in Spanish art from the period. It is not a matter of imitating specific works. Renaissance painting serves very generally to suggest the period’s way of seeing.38 From this perspective, the film’s opening vista, with its dazzling view of descent from the clouds, can be related to Christian art. The tableau, however, provides not an iconography but a technique for arranging bodies in space, often held still for a noticeably long time. Herzog uses this technique in many different films, but in Aguirre it is surprising. A static form of stylisation, the tableau would seem to be anathema to an adventure film, a genre devoted to spectacles of physical action. Yes, the camp scene marks a pause in the action; the soldiers sit and listen to Pizarro’s speech. But Herzog uses this moment to introduce stasis into the film’s patterns of movement, while the stillness in turn calls our attention to the gathering of bodies and props within the scene, and gives us time to examine them. In this regard, the camp scene tells us something important about Herzog’s approach to casting. Look at Pizarro (Repullés), for example. There is a face he could interpret in terms of El Greco! Never mind the fact that the man’s voice would need to be dubbed. The emphasis on the face, and particularly the gaze, already appears in the screenplay. According to its ‘typology’ of characters, Aguirre

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should be ‘fanatical, obsessed … but extremely methodical’, as suggested by his piercing gaze, like that in ‘late photos of Kafka’ (p. 8).39 Even more telling is the description of the monk Carvajal, whose look of devotion recalls that of ‘Artaud in the film of Jeanne d’Arc by Dreyer’ (p. 10). With its dramaturgy of close-ups, its focus on the face of a visionary solider,

Pizarro, addressing the troops; Ursúa and Inés, foreground; Aguirre and his daughter, hidden; Carvajal, reminiscent of Artaud; Guzman, gorging himself

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The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is another visual source for Aguirre, a film that similarly choreographs faces and looks not just for their expressive values but also, more importantly, as a means of envisioning history. The wider shots establish the role of mise en scène, or the arrangement of elements before the camera to be photographed. Consider, for example, the image of Ursúa and Inés, with their ally Armando (played by Armando Polanah from Mozambique) behind them, and a Christianised Indian praying beside makeshift graves in the background. The visual density of the image is noteworthy; there are three different areas of stillness (as opposed to planes of action). In retrospect, it is a tableau of martyrdom: all the depicted figures will soon be dead. Then there is the obscene image of Guzmán, who is eating a mango while straddling a cannon, with llamas and chickens strutting around him. This tableau instantly identifies the nobleman with the grotesque and foreshadows the decadence that Artaud in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)

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leads to his own demise. Both examples demonstrate the power of the tableau to assemble bodies and props for others to see. The most remarkable quality of this pictorial form is its blatant theatricality, even though the film favours location shooting over the studio set. Herzog’s dramaturgy of faces, looks and gestures coalesces in the tableau. Take, for example, the image of Aguirre: his look exudes danger, his eyes scan the crowd of onlookers, his coiled pose suggests latent violence, his arms the protection of his daughter. These exaggerated gestures and expressions are strongly reminiscent of the stage. There is even a curtain, which Aguirre holds tight, controlling the view of his daughter, who is concealed. But the key example is that of Pizarro himself. Just as the camera participates in the action, so Pizarro looks directly at ‘us’ when he speaks, almost as if he were addressing the film audience. The frontal arrangement of the tableau, along with the use of direct address, makes explicit the staginess of the scene. And yet, the direct look also has a testimonial effect, which is common enough in documentary but not in historical fiction. In a way, we as viewers have been gathered to witness a performance. What direct address shows, without saying, is how we too are recruited to complicity, by looking and listening as we do. If the film opens with a symbolic landscape suggestive of myth, the tableau rearranges the view for history. These are secular images, and as such they represent a development from the religious vision of the film’s otherworldly beginning. The jungle becomes a stage on which history unfolds. This is the reason why we must ‘descend’ to it. Aguirre adopts the Baroque conceit of the world as a stage where life plays out before God. Indeed, the staging of history becomes a theme of film itself, one that is closely associated with Aguirre, but can already be seen in the process of assembling the troops. In calling attention to its own theatricality, however, the filmic tableau also opens up a fictional space within the realm of history. It’s not a contradiction in terms, but rather a dynamic

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tension between different ways of seeing and showing that drives the entire film. Aguirre brings together members of multiple different historical expeditions, to create an imaginary group in search of a place that never existed. (Pizarro and Ursúa, for example, never joined forces; they couldn’t have. Pizarro was beheaded for his own rebellion against the Spanish king twelve years before Ursúa set off for El Dorado.) Rather than illustrate history, the film reduces it to a selection of key figures and elements, a concentrated extract of conquest. But then, just as soon as it gathers up all the figures and puts them on display, the film proceeds to separate them. Pizarro and the rest remain behind as the troops – and the camera – go careening downriver.

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4 Visions of the World

The static, almost painterly act of vision which is achieved by the tableau stands apart from the conditions of filming on a raft being moved by a powerful current. The river thus opens a view of the larger world. All of a sudden, the tableau, with its fixed and controlled image of history, is swept away, and the camera begins responding to haphazard circumstances. With a 35mm camera held at eye level, Thomas Mauch stands, turns, crouches and moves around one of the rafts with Herzog close behind, steadying him. The rafts are laden with equipment, cast and crew. Everything has been tied down with ropes, even the horse and the actors. The camera observes the actors’ reactions to the river and the surrounding jungle. Wide-eyed, taking it all in, they turn their heads this way and that. Some of them smile, enjoying the ride, while others appear to be frightened, and with good reason. They are entering the rapids. The flow grows louder, more violent, and the characters begin shouting. ‘Stay in the middle!’ ‘The first raft got stuck in an eddy!’ ‘Look out for the rocks!’ Throughout this sequence, the camera shows the rafts and the actors in motion: they drift apart, dart off screen, bounce off boulders and battle the current. The river now determines what is possible to see and show. There are actually three different rivers in Aguirre, all tributaries of the Amazon: the Urubamba (in the mountains), the Huallaga (where the rafts go over the rapids) and the Nanay (in the lowlands, near Iquitos). As Herzog notes in his preliminary remarks on the screenplay, The historical expeditions took their departure from Quito, following the Rio Napo. But that doesn’t matter. The Urubamba near Machu Picchu is much better suited for filming, because it has sixty kilometers of navigable water that runs through the valley … The entire film could almost be shot here.40

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Shooting the rapids

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Almost, but not quite. Herzog spent weeks scouting locations in boats and airplanes, before he found what he needed on the Huallaga: three consecutive rapids that looked terrifying on screen, but would not be too dangerous for the cast and crew.41 The Nanay, finally, would give a sense of the Amazon delta, that vast area of jungle flatlands where the river opens wide and meets the sea. Beginning on 31 December 1971, and ending on 24 February 1972, the production took seven weeks. Six of them were spent filming. An additional week was needed for transportation alone. The crew had only one seaplane, which meant numerous flights back and forth. Even the horse had to be flown from one river to the next, and eventually back to its home. Most of the scenes were shot in chronological order. Filming began in the mountains, went through the valley, down the rapids and on to the delta. During the long stretch of filming on the Rio Nanay, Herzog recalls, the entire cast and crew lived in a floating village: We had, I think, fourteen rafts, really big ones with sort of houses on them, Indian-type houses with poles and thatched roofs and hammocks inside. We also had one raft just for the kitchen. We used to float down the river during the day, the shooting raft about a mile ahead, so we would shoot a few bends of the river ahead of the rest. At noon we would tie it onto some branches on the river and wait for the kitchen raft and floating village to arrive.42

From beginning to end, the production covered a distance of more than 1,600 kilometres. In the film, then, the river not only changes (each has its own rhythm and tempo). Seeing these changes, when edited together, creates a powerful sense of travel. When asked about his penchant for shooting in far-flung places, Herzog often refers to ‘the voodoo of location’, a phrase that is as suggestive as it is mystifying. For American film critic Roger Ebert, it means that location ‘carries a psychic, or emotional, or sensory charge to the screen’. Referring to Aguirre, he continues: ‘What you see is what was actually there. Many of the shots were done in one

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take … In some cases, the events shown could only take place one time.’43 After shooting the rapids, for example, Herzog and his team could not simply turn and paddle upriver, or carry the rafts back Crew members crossing the Urubamba via pull-cart; filming mid stream: Thomas Mauch (left) (Deutsche Kinemathek)

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through the jungle, and have another go. So the conditions on the ground and in the water play into an aesthetic of singularity. The rafting scenes in particular show how location shooting for Herzog goes beyond what would be needed to tell the story of Aguirre, and how the camera serves a style of vision that is witness to its action. The film itself testifies to an action that is impossible to repeat. But there are other site-specific effects that add to what Herzog calls ‘the voodoo of location’. Consider the feeling of immensity that comes with these images of mountains, rivers and forests. By means of photography, Aguirre creates a convincing impression of the surrounding environment as vast, unlimited by the frame and resistant to simulation in a studio set. The camera’s movement enhances this impression of vastness. No matter how the raft turns, we see the world extending afar, and it doubtless continues in every direction. Then there is the sense of uncertainty that comes with these same images, how the immensity of space is indifferent to the camera, constrained neither by the representation of history nor the director’s intention (whatever it may be), but open to any number of possibilities. Last but not least, consider how the rapids stir a feeling of danger. ‘The danger is not created in a studio,’ says Herzog. ‘The people you see in danger were in danger when they were shooting the film.’44 Their wrists may be tied to the rafts, but that precaution itself calls into question the ethics of his approach. Here is what actor Peter Berling had to say about it: ‘Like a bad general, Herzog leads “his men” into very dangerous situations and then has Thomas Mauch record, almost in documentary fashion, how people deal with it.’45 With Aguirre, location shooting itself becomes a risk-taking adventure. As they go over the rapids, it is not so much the actors who interest us as what André Bazin, writing on the cinema’s affinity for exploration, calls ‘the photograph of the danger’. Following Bazin, we can see how even the apparent flaws in Aguirre – the wobble of the camera, its failure to keep the other rafts in frame, the makeshift compositions, the water spots on the lens, the abrupt cuts between rapids – are ‘equally witness to its authenticity’.46 In such moments,

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the film and its production are almost indistinguishable, so that the reality claim of location shooting becomes crossed with that of the action. The effect is doubly remarkable, because the one event takes place in the present while the other is set in the past. Although the actors are dressed in period costumes which obviously recall the theatre, the role of the camera on location creates a powerful documentary effect. But the effect can also be reversed. Take the following scene, when a raft becomes trapped in a whirlpool. This part of the film was unscripted; nowhere is it mentioned in the screenplay. And yet, even an improvised scene can be integrated by the governing metaphor of the world as stage. Here, and throughout the film, the rafts serve to create floor space for the actors, a space where they can stand and strike poses, make speeches, look out at the jungle and – above all – be seen in the act of looking. By steering one into a whirlpool, the raft in effect becomes a wildly rotating stage. Shot over the course of two days,

A wildly rotating stage

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the scene required the actors to be extricated by rope and lowered back down to the raft the next morning. The other characters, by contrast, watch from a safe distance. Their journey comes to a stop, and the shore becomes a viewing space. But the decisive actions go unseen; they are merely suggested. Night falls, and the scene goes dark. Over the water, an explosion erupts, then another, and another, flashes of fire and smoke. ‘What’s that?’ the monk asks. ‘There’s shooting over there,’ a soldier observes. ‘They’re trying to send us a signal.’ Daylight clarifies nothing. Standing atop a cliff, Armando and his men look down at the raft below. Six men are dead, their bodies strewn about and pierced with arrows; two others are missing. What happened? Mystery gives way to fear. Warily, the soldiers return to camp, crossbows at the ready. ‘Keep your eyes open!’ But what is there to see? As he tiptoes through the jungle, a soldier is snared, his body lifted straight up and out of the frame. Only a gasp is heard. The camera holds steady. It never tilts to show what lurks off screen. Rather, we see another soldier looking around and then up, reacting to the horror above. Here, as on the raft, the scene is first visually filled and then violently evacuated. The surrounding world becomes imbued with murderous energy, while the act of killing remains hidden, out of sight, shrouded in mystery. In this way, the actual location, so tangible to the senses, so necessary to the film’s project, transforms into a theatre of the mind, and the work of envisioning momentarily shifts from the camera to the imagination. What we actually see are the looks of others figured as spectators. This is another pattern that repeats throughout the film, even when violence is shown. Aguirre’s first act of rebellion offers a case in point. Rather than wait for the dead to be given a proper burial, as ordered by Ursúa, Aguirre signals to his henchman and has the raft blown to pieces. Notice what the camera then does. With help from an assistant, Mauch wades out into the river and turns to show Aguirre at water level, admiring his work. So Aguirre not only converts nature into a stage, it also

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Eyewitness to atrocity

Reacting to the horror

Admiring his work

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foregrounds the act of viewing: that of the characters and that of our own. The visions of the world that the film opens up are as much about the theatre of the mind as they are about the surrounding environment. But the world in Aguirre is not just staged. It is also in a sense ‘found’ on location – indeed, discovered. To the extent that it works as a history film, Aguirre recalls the spectacle of the New World as seen through Renaissance eyes. Throughout, images of beauty, danger and immensity all work to create an experience of enraptured looking that was historically understood in terms of wonder.47 This experience is linked to Herzog’s own ambitions as a film-maker: he wants to arouse wonder in the audience. In Aguirre, both the marvels of the world and the intensity of looking are directly associated with the camera as a form of encounter. There are various examples, beginning with the churning waters and the rapids, where the river clearly has a life of its own, but the point can best be illustrated by the images that put animals on display, such as Aguirre’s presentation of a miniature sloth in the very next scene. ‘Look!’ he says to his daughter, who in the film is called Flores, a name that suggests her own connection to the natural world. ‘Look at what I’ve found for you! This little animal sleeps its whole life away. It’s never really awake.’ The camera shows Aguirre cupping the creature in his hands, holding it out for her (and for us) to see. As she looks through the window of her sedan chair, the daughter is figured as spectator, the animal a marvellous sight to behold. To look in this way is to wonder as the Renaissance did. But now its meaning changes. Aguirre’s language, for instance, anticipates the dream state that later takes hold of the crew. And then there is the butterfly, near the end of the film. This scene has no dialogue, but it too features acts of display and spectatorship. Whether it’s the spectacle of life caught unawares, as in the sloth, or the beauty of life on the wing that is the butterfly, these are unmotivated shots in which the acts of looking bear no obvious or immediate relationship to the narrative.

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Marvelling at the world

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In such moments, the film breaks with the project of representing history in order to capture what Siegfried Kracauer, in his Theory of Film from 1960, describes as ‘camera-reality’ or the ‘flow of life’.48 For Kracauer, film is essentially an extension of photography. As such, it shares with that medium a penchant for observing the physical world, especially the transient, open-ended phenomena that cannot be predicted. But Herzog is not an observer by disposition. Seeing the world is not enough; he wants to direct it. So chance encounters feature side by side with scripted as well as blatantly theatrical scenes. The camera records the world, but also serves to reshape it. What emerges, then, is a creative principle of combining different elements that film theory tends to keep apart: chance and invention, recording and staging, observation and artifice. On the scenic level, we find a similar mixing of static tableaux, dynamic action scenes and fleeting marvels of the Amazon. For every tableau, which is a closed and stylised arrangement of figures within the frame, there is a view of the physical world that is open, unlimited and uncontrollable. Their interrelation derives from the film’s experiment with different ways of seeing. Each puts the other in relief, calling attention to its effect, and then changing it, reversing it, in an endless dynamic that is the film itself. There are practical reasons, too, for these variations in style. For instance, much of the film was shot ‘blind’. Because they were unable to develop the film negative on site, Herzog and his crew had no way of knowing what exactly they had photographed, how it looked and how much of it was even usable. Their first chance to see rushes came five weeks into the shoot, shortly before its completion.49 So they shot twice the number of takes (at a ratio of 1:8) than Herzog had on previous films (approximately 1:4). But there is a further complication. It is flood season. One night, the water level of the Urubamba rose almost four metres. Their location was suddenly gone, the rafts swept away. The crew had to build new ones. All these contingencies – the flood, the loss of rafts,

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the building of rafts on site – all of them are integrated into the film’s narrative, while the camera attests to the river’s danger and immensity. At almost every turn, Aguirre thus reminds us of how the director has managed to stage all this, to bring us as viewers to farflung places, to show us the world and how he sees it. Like the camera, we are asked to take on the role of witness, a role understood as a form of significant viewing. To see Aguirre is to wonder at the truth of its images and of Herzog’s way of looking at the world – that is the film’s logic, at least. Everything in the film rests on witnessing, even its critical stance toward colonialism.

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5 The Act of Conquest

What follows, then, is a dramatic turn from the failures and disappointments of the expedition to Aguirre’s rebellion and its consequences. This movement, which distinguishes ‘the cruise of Aguirre’, takes a turn in Herzog’s film that is different from the one that we find in written accounts. Historically, Ursúa came to be seen as an incompetent leader who attended to his lover at the expedition’s expense, resulting in a gradual loss of control and authority and, ultimately, in his assassination.50 Add to this the extreme hardship and disillusionment that the conquistadors experienced in the Amazon, and the conditions for revolt become clear. In the film, by contrast, mutiny breaks out when Ursúa announces his decision to abandon the search for El Dorado and return by land to Pizarro. ‘I am not a man who retreats!’ hisses Aguirre. ‘I say we conquer on our own!’ In Herzog’s film, Aguirre rebels in the name of conquest itself. ‘Do you remember Hernán Cortés?’ he asks the men, urging them to insurrection. ‘On the way to Mexico he was ordered to return, but he just kept on going. He ignored the order and conquered Mexico! And that’s how he became rich and famous, because he disobeyed!’ Cortés provides the example to be followed. Rather than abandon the search for El Dorado as futile, which is what Aguirre and his men actually did (and a reason why historians would later find him so impressive), Herzog’s Aguirre advances.51 His rebellion reflects the act of conquest in the film: it is paramount, repeated and rehearsed, with a forward-driving impulse. It also unleashes the violence that is directed against everything and everybody, beginning with Ursúa. So why in the film does Ursúa survive the mutiny? Why not kill him on the spot, as Aguirre and his men actually did? That is what they do in the screenplay, too. Within seconds, he is a corpse:

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‘Inés kneels beside Ursúa who has turned to stone, and Carvajal the monk has pressed a small crucifix into his hands’ (p. 39). The film alone delays his execution. We see Ursúa’s closed hand, but not what lies within it (the crucifix was apparently shot but omitted, which gives this gesture of the fist an almost palpable sense of mystery and defiance). He observes the events to follow, but never speaks another word. Consider the effect of these changes. Whereas the screenplay figures Ursúa as a martyr, the film treats him as a stubborn presence and, with the monk Carvajal, yet another eyewitness to Aguirre’s crimes. His silent gaze is not unlike that of the film camera – and that of our own as viewers. Here, again, we need to think through the implications of Herzog’s choices. In Aguirre, the act of conquest plays out before an audience. And location, far from serving as a bid for authenticity, transforms into something like its opposite – that is, a site of performance. But what kind of performance are we being asked to witness? As Ursúa, the Brazilian film-maker Ruy Guerra mostly lies on the ground, mute and motionless. As Aguirre, Kinski scowls, hunches, yells and stares off into the distance. What are the actors doing in this film? Viewers wondered, too. In West Germany, the federal film ratings board saw Aguirre as a shallow adventure film and initially declared that it had no cultural value (which meant that cinemas would not receive tax incentives for screening the film), censuring it as ‘too superficial’, and citing in particular Kinski’s ‘superficially decorative’ and ‘formulaic’ acting style.52 In the United States, some reviewers hardly knew what to make of it. One described the actors as ‘silent, sullen zombies’.53 Another compared their movements to that of deep-sea divers: There are no performances to speak of. There is mostly glowering and ponderous posturing, some speechifying, and virtually no conversation. … Even the action is inchoate, draggy, almost as if shot in slow motion. There are long periods of dawdling, after which the film has a brief,

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spastic forward lurch, only to sink back again into lethargy. No doubt Herzog thinks this is Art, and perhaps it is meant to convey heat, uncertainty, helplessness. But what it really does is make it all look not like a river expedition but like underwater exploration, with the helmets and bits of armor more like divers’ suits, and the movements peculiarly suitable to a deep ocean bottom. These men seem to be following not so much Ursúa or Aguirre as Jacques Yves Cousteau.54

Reviews are important evidence, because they indicate what contemporaries found strange, impressive or distinctive about the film. This one at least demonstrates that they struggled to accept its acting. With hindsight, rather than simply dismiss the acting, we can explore it and connect it to the issue of performance in the film more generally. Take, for instance, the election scene. Now that Ursúa is out of the way, Aguirre proposes that ‘the widest and weightiest

‘Election’ by intimidation

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nobleman’, Guzmán, be elected as their new leader. Perucho so moves and immediately calls the question, ‘All in favour?’ One by one, the soldiers raise their hands, as if they had a choice, with Aguirre looking hard at those who hesitate. Choosing a leader is one thing, voting is another. And how it transpires is strongly reminiscent of fascist and communist ‘elections’ by intimidation. This is the way of the modern totalitarian state, not the Habsburg court. The acting is not just over the top; it points to the role of anachronism within the film. The vote, which is invented by Herzog, creates an unexpected connection between the past and the present, not by illustrating history or asserting its authenticity (the soldiers didn’t vote), but rather by flaunting its artifice. The language of the screenplay makes this point explicit: ‘Aguirre has directed this farce almost in the style of an operetta’ (p. 44). The coronation scene represents a further development. Artifice now defines both the dialogue and the staging. ‘Because of our mutiny,’ Aguirre proclaims, ‘we must legalise the situation. Read this document,’ he commands the priest, who does what he is told: Imperial King, by the grace of God, through our Holy Mother, the Holy Roman Church, King Philip the Second of Castile, we, the undersigned, have until yesterday, the seventh day of the year 1561, after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, regarded ourselves as your servants and subjects … We have decided to put an end to the quirks of fate. We are the course of history, and no fruit of this earth shall henceforth be shared. We rebel unto death! And we hereby do solemnly declare – may our hands be torn off and our tongues dry up, if this is not so – the House of Habsburg has forfeited its rights, and you, Philip the Second, King of Castile, dethroned. By dint of this declaration, thou art annihilated! In your stead, we proclaim the nobleman from Seville, Don Fernando de Guzmán, to be Emperor of El Dorado. Flee, flee from hence, O King! And may God protect your soul.55

With a grin on his face, Aguirre spouts a cliché (‘Fortune smiles on the brave and spits on the coward’), rolls up the proclamation and

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pushes Guzmán into a makeshift throne. ‘What, that’s supposed to be a throne?’ asks Guzmán. ‘What is a throne?’ Aguirre replies, ‘but a plank covered with a piece of velvet’ (a line from Napoleon, which Herzog gives to his main character). In the screenplay, the coronation takes place on a wooden dais that the soldiers have built for the occasion. The mood is triumphant. ‘The Spaniards rejoice’, the monk intones the Te Deum and the soldiers, one by one, kneel down and kiss Guzmán’s hand – yet another scene that comes from the chronicles. Now they all form a great operatic tableau, and, with ritualistic gestures, Guzmán is led by Carvajal and Aguirre from his throne to the earth. Guzmán boards the raft with solemn steps and, amidst the universal rejoicing of his people, gives the signal for departure. (p. 45)

The entire scene was imagined as a spectacle to behold, a Renaissance display of power rehearsed and revised as an act of defiance. In the film, by contrast, the mood is tense; the soldiers are fearfully silent and immobile; the spectacle is played for what it is: a mere formality. But it is more than that, as indicated by the dialogue, with its heady mix of cliché, hyperbole, oratory and violence (‘By dint of this declaration, thou art annihilated!’). Aguirre creates a unique idiom by combining formal sixteenthcentury speech with twentieth-century school German and a touch of the surreal. No wonder some reviewers were bewildered. The stilted use of language is not just historical, it’s histrionic. And that is where Herzog puts the emphasis. Both the film and the screenplay transform a written document into a form of spectacle, one which is literally addressed to a European audience both contemporaneous and anticipated. Unlike the screenplay, however, the film abruptly stops at the ‘operatic tableau’. Aguirre puts the rolled-up proclamation, like a puny sceptre, in Guzmán’s hand. He and the other characters, who are organised in a semicircle around the new monarch, all turn,

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face the camera and hold for a long take, almost as if they were posing for a court photographer. Although the film has no interiors, such moments of deliberate theatricality create a closed world, complete with its own repertoire of scripts, gestures and rituals. At the symbolic centre of this improvised theatre we watch Guzmán on the royal seat, playing at being king – and sobbing. Could there be a more ridiculous Emperor of El Dorado? The impetus for such blatant staginess is not simply to ridicule a figure of authority, but something larger. Aguirre explores a vision of history in which staging and artifice are actually central to the operations of power. We see them at work in the trial, another scene that Herzog invented on location (it is not in the screenplay, or in its historical sources, because there Ursúa dies in the mutiny). Overnight, a guard has been slain and Armando, Ursúa’s right-hand man, has escaped. Aguirre would have Ursúa executed, only this time Guzmán upholds the law, declaring ‘no capital punishment

An operatic tableau

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without a trial’. ‘Then hold a trial,’ Aguirre retorts, ‘and kill him.’ What follows is another farce (the trial lasts a few minutes). The role of the monk is multiplied to that of judge and jury. Indeed, the entire scene works to implicate the Church in the abuse of power. It is an interpretation (as the monk himself comments, ‘the Church was always on the side of the strong’), which is presumably the reason for creating this scene in the first place. As jury, he finds Ursúa guilty of treason. As judge, he imposes a sentence of death by hanging. Guzmán, for his part, confirms the decision, but stays the execution on the condition that Ursúa forfeit all his rights and benefits as a citizen of El Dorado. This last-minute reprieve only adds to the situation’s absurdity. As a result, Ursúa will remain and watch for a while longer, until the puppet king himself is out of the way. Together, all these scenes – the mutiny, the election, the coronation and the trial – frame the expedition and its events in terms of performance. It is a framework that would later be explored by scholars of colonialism. Stephen Greenblatt, Patricia Seed and Diana Taylor, among others, have each demonstrated, albeit with different interests and emphases, how the so-called discovery of America was literally scripted, repeated and performed on site, how Europeans across the board initiated colonial rule through grandiose speeches, protocols and ceremonies.56 Aguirre already explores this dynamic by means of film. Herzog himself emphasised this point in interviews and taped conversations made around the film’s release. After one of the first screenings in West Germany, he said that Aguirre allows us ‘to take a reading of the fundamental structures of colonialism’, such as ‘the role of the church, the situation of the Indians, even the theatrical, farcical moments, when history becomes staged’.57 He makes a similar comment in a short film made parallel to Aguirre by his cameraman Thomas Mauch, Der Welt zeigen, dass man noch da ist, which happens to be the first time that Herzog’s voice is heard on film. ‘Back then,’ he says over an image of the coronation scene, ‘they staged history as one stages a play. What’s remarkable is that

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history was actually the result. Not with Aguirre, but with others, for example, Cortés. That is a man who was conscious of the fact that all of a sudden history could be staged with cheap and shabby theatrical tricks.’58 Herzog thus goes beyond Aguirre for one of the film’s key strategies. He knows that this strategy is preposterous and nonetheless effective, not only in its address to an audience, but also in its production of reality effects. That is another reason why this material lends itself to film. The deliberate theatricality of Aguirre shows that the organising performances of colonialism were formulaic, reiterated and also conditioned by their own procedures, whether as speech or as ceremony. In so doing, however, the film repeats these very performances in the course of its own production, which is also what makes Aguirre so problematic. This is where Herzog’s critics feel particularly justified in dismissing both the film and its director as ‘neo-colonial’.59 It is a point that needs to be considered more carefully with regard to the entire film and especially in terms of vision. Before we can do that, however, we need to recognise, as Herzog does, that vision in Aguirre extends only so far.

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6 Into the Quiet

The limits of vision themselves are often put on display in the film, sometimes to great effect, the most obvious example being the treatment of the jungle landscape. This holds particularly in the second half of the film, when the journey enters the flatlands of the Amazon delta and the river almost comes to a standstill. The expedition’s failure to advance finds its parallel in the conquistadors’ failure to see, to visually penetrate the motionless trees and lianas that surround them. In these passages, the jungle becomes almost like a theatre curtain, permitting only partial or blocked views of what lies behind it. For Lutz Koepnick, the limits of visual perception in Aguirre reflect the cultural shortsightedness of the conquistadors. Blinded by their notion of the Amazon as mere nature, so the argument runs, they cannot see beyond the jungle’s opaque surface.60 But Aguirre doesn’t stop there. The film explores other modes of perception as well. There is touch, for example – how the camera struggles with the environment, its lens brushing up against leaves and spotted with water. ‘It is tactile,’ wrote Vincent Canby in his review for the New York Times. ‘One can feel the colors of the jungle and see the heat.’61 There is even taste. The emperor gorges himself on plates of food, the soldiers vie for the scraps at his table, and their greatest collective fear is that they might be eaten. When they raid an Indian village, which turns out to be empty – an action scene without action – they are nevertheless horrified by the signs of cannibalism that they find there. Yet the only mode of perception to rival vision in Aguirre is that of hearing. What the characters can and cannot hear becomes a problem within the film. Herzog’s preliminary remarks on the screenplay call for ‘as much original sound as possible’, especially ambient sound, such as

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rushing water and bird calls, but also music and dialogue recorded on location; silence, too, notes Herzog, ‘for even silence in the cinema is audible as atmosphere’. The resulting film explores all the main forms of sound on screen – speech, noise, music and silence – all of them ‘made’ and used to various effects. And the variations matter. For all the proclamations, performances and diary entries that are given, the film has very little dialogue. Parts of Aguirre almost play as if it were a silent film, an effect that is anticipated by the screenplay, where the words ‘still’, ‘quiet’ and ‘silent’ recur with great frequency. Today, the soundtrack may be the film’s greatest flaw, not just because of the shoddy synchronisations, but also compared with the image quality of the recent digital transfer, which is excellent. Yet the soundtrack nevertheless opens up a spectrum of variation that is stylised and expressive both in its own right and in relation to the image it supports. The problem of voice in Aguirre has to do with the power of speech. Who is allowed to speak, and who is not? It is particularly pressing in a film about conquest. Of all the native actors in the film, only two have speaking parts. First is the Indian slave whom the Spaniards call Balthasar, taken captive evidently to serve as their interpreter. His real name, he explains, is Runo Rimac. ‘It means “He who speaks.” I was a prince in this land. Everyone else had to look at the ground before me; no one was allowed to look into my eyes.’ Once an unseen voice, its sound was the very sign of his power and prestige. Now a voiceless body, his silence and visibility mark his subjugation. Through this series of changes, however schematic it may be, the figure of Runo Rimac alludes to the existence of other voices, other perspectives and other histories, and his story bears witness to their suppression. The second native character who speaks is unnamed, his story even more enigmatic. An Indian couple paddles out from the shore in a dugout canoe. As soon as the man and woman are dragged onto the raft, the encounter becomes theatrical, with its choreography of gazes: we look at the Spanish as they look at

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Runo Rimac and the Yagua; listening for the Word of God

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the Indians, who are put on display by the camera. If the camera objectifies the bare-breasted woman in particular, her direct look into its lens would seem to confront and thereby implicate us as viewers. Balthasar and the man are conversing (they actually speak different languages, the film just pretends they understand each other), and this goes on for some time, without subtitles, until Aguirre asks that Balthasar at least translate. ‘He says he’s from the Yagua tribe. He knows from his ancestors that one day, the Sons of the Sun would come from afar, through great perils, to this area … For here, on this river, God has not finished the work of Creation.’ If the Yagua suggests another way of seeing, the conquistadors fail to notice. All that they see is the ornament around his neck. ‘Look,’ says Guzmán, ‘gold!’ ‘Gold!’ the monk repeats, his eyes wide with frenzy. ‘Ask him where he got it.’ Now the monk invokes his mission: ‘This is a Bible. It contains the Word of God.’ The Yagua puts the book to his ear, listens and throws it down – it doesn’t speak to him.62 What follows is more than just a show of Spanish cruelty; it is a brutal example of the gap between what we see and what we hear in this film. In this case, we see the monk stab and kill the Yagua, only to then comment on the voiceover, ‘These savages are hard to convert.’ Here, as in the trial, the procedure is ridiculously brief; there is no time for conversion, it is an excuse. The Spanish, for their part, remain unchanged by the encounter. If anything, their lust for possession has intensified. The crazed look of the monk, the madness of vision that it seems to express and how the camera lingers on that expression – all this tells us something important about the relation of voice and vision in Aguirre. To a certain extent, that is, language features prominently.63 But the entire scene works to reduce the role of speech. Here, as elsewhere in the film, vision dominates and even kills. Nevertheless, we are again confronted by the limits of vision. The overt display of the Yagua couple is exceptional. Typically, the film just hints at the presence of others. According to Koepnick,

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The madness of vision; what the soldiers do not see

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the indigenous people are present through their absence alone; it is only by means of synecdochic extensions, in the form of arrows, huts, screams and drumming, that the natives make their existence perceptible to the limited vision of the soldiers.64

But, in fact, some native characters do appear on screen (the pilots and porters, for instance) – they are either killed or enslaved. Those that we don’t see, or barely see through the trees, are defending themselves against their own enslavement. Resistance to slavery in Aguirre means resistance to visibility. Sometimes the power of vision is even appropriated and reversed: the invisible natives are in the best position to see the conquistadors, or at least that is the power attributed to them. Even more interesting, however, is how this visual strategy is coded in terms of sound. Aguirre and his men may be seen from the shore, but none of these views are treated as native perspectives. We only know that the conquistadors are being watched – and hunted – by the eerie calm that overwhelms the scene. The pattern begins in the screenplay: ‘All has become deathly still’ (p. 33). ‘A strange silence reigns over the raft when, suddenly, the jungle petrifies. All sounds have died as if by some blow, with deathly threatening stillness spreading’ (p. 50). ‘Danger would only arise from the silence’ (p. 58). ‘Suddenly there is dead silence all around. […] The jungle lies in horrible silence, maliciously still, the woodland waiting’ (p. 59). ‘Again, the jungle lies in utter stillness, full of danger and mystery’ (p. 64). And so it continues. Each instance is immediately followed by the discovery of another dead soldier. Silence as prelude to death, that’s the pattern.65 The film then develops it acoustically through the suppression of territory sound: ambient noise is abruptly cut, bird calls are dropped in volume and the vast extension of the environment that those sounds usually suggest is reduced to almost zero. What we hear is now restricted to the sound around the soldiers, and they strain to hear anything at all. A reverse shot reveals a stirring at the water’s edge. We see Indians,

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Listening to the silence; playing over the silence

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armed with bows and arrows, quickly peek through the trees, then turn and run back behind the curtain that is the jungle. The conquistadors, however, see nothing. By the time they discover the next man down, a blow-dart sticking in his neck, it’s too late. As the pattern repeats, the soldiers not only learn to fear silence, but also try and ‘play over’ it (Herzog uses the German word überspielen, which also means to dub). So they shoot about wildly, listen to music – in the screenplay they bang on pots and pans – and wait for the jungle to sound again. When they don’t have to listen to the silence, the soldiers feel relatively safe. Of particular interest is the use of pan-flute music, because (unlike the electronic music of Popol Vuh) it is both integral to the action and recorded on location. Herzog has much to say about the actor who plays the flute, a nameless beggar whom he found on the streets of Cuzco.66 A marginal character, he has no name and no voice, only an instrument and a tune, which he plays three times in the film.67 He may be mute, but his instrument takes on the function of a comforting voice. He distracts them from the descent into the elemental and primeval quiet that is death in this film. So he is a soothing presence, but a haunting one, too. By distracting from it, the mute servant indirectly refers to the jungle’s silence and to everything that is off screen, unseen and therefore dangerous. By warding it off for a moment, his music heralds the death to come, and that is what makes this character so disturbing.68 The rhythms of sound and silence in Aguirre relate directly to its treatment of violence and death. Where acts of violence go unseen (the murders in the whirlpool, for instance, or the many deaths by blow-dart), either sound or silence works to cover them. Where violence manifests, we see and hear not the act itself but rather its evocative traces: bloodstains on a rock or a sword, boiled skulls and human bones picked clean, drumbeats in the distance. We register these traces and imagine the rest. What the imagination brings to our senses in effect expands the perceptual field so that it encompasses the act of violence as a whole, and the part that has

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actually been seen or heard stands in for the whole. But the mediating part, the trace, is all that the film provides. This technique represents a development over the screenplay. There we find scenes of more explicit violence, reminiscent of a horror film (see pp. 50–1, 64–5 and 68–9). One could certainly argue that filming the story of Aguirre or any episode of the conquest would almost require the blunt instrument of a horror movie, and the screenplay seems to try out this idea. But the film steps away from violence, especially compared with historical accounts, which specify dozens of murders and other atrocities committed by Aguirre and his men. Herzog decides on a more subtle, evocative approach (none of these horror-movie scenes are included in the final cut), an approach that relies for its effect on the vicissitudes of sight and sound and on the power of the viewer’s imagination. Aguirre has its own series of murderous events. It begins, not surprisingly, with rituals of power and possession. Seated at a table, Guzmán looks out from the raft and declares: ‘All the land here to our left, and all the land to our right, now belongs to us.’ Standing up, he continues, with a grandiose wave of the hand: ‘I solemnly and formally take possession of all this land.’ Sitting back down, he makes a few notes on paper, then smiles and comments: ‘Our country is already six times larger than Spain, and every day we drift makes it bigger.’ Notice the connection between the passive look outward and the formal claim to possession. His complacency and corpulence make him an obvious target of the film’s criticism: he is acting out what Mary Louise Pratt, writing in another context, has called ‘the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene’, a stock scenario of colonial history which is here subjected to caricature.69 Relishing the power of his new role, Guzmán dines alone, while the soldiers ration grains of corn; he is served at table, a private banquet with all the ceremony of a real king.70 But the horse, which is stomping and kicking wildly about the raft, disrupts his meal. ‘Get that horse away from me!’ he cries, and orders that it be thrown overboard. The frightened animal swims to shore. We see the men looking

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back, then Aguirre in close-up, as the raft drifts away. A reverse shot shows what he sees: the horse, standing still in a little clearing at the jungle’s edge, its eyes outlined in white by the hood that it wears. The emperor is a marked man. The horse represented a week’s supply of food. What makes this scene so troubling, however, is its blatant display of cruelty and the reverse shot that follows, as if the men and the horse were exchanging looks. From the ensuing silence comes the idea that the horse represents yet another type of victim and another mute witness to atrocity.71 That’s how the series begins. Now it proceeds apace. Guzmán is found dead, behind the outhouse, strangled with his own white napkin. The emperor’s assassination means that Ursúa’s fate is sealed, too. Soldiers take him into the jungle and hang him from a tree. Below his dangling feet sits Perucho, chewing on a corncob. The raft drifts on, and soon encounters another native village. This time we see people rushing about, their voices audible, too. Balthasar translates: ‘Meat, meat, meat is floating by.’ The soldiers land, exchange fire with the natives and set their huts ablaze. A handheld camera roams about the carnage. But the strangest sight is that of Inés, changed into a golden gown, her gaze fixed straight ahead, beyond the camera, walking a direct line from the river into the jungle. The camera turns, follows her for a few steps and stops at the jungle’s threshold. She vanishes without a trace, swallowed by the forest and the silence.72 The series, however, continues. In the background, there are murmurs of desertion. ‘I’d rather join the Indians than stay with this madman,’ one soldier says to another. ‘That man is a head taller than me,’ Aguirre says to Perucho, adding wryly, ‘That may change.’73 As if on cue, Perucho begins his ‘La, la, la, la’ refrain, its steady pitch virtually broadcasting danger. Machete in hand, he ambles over to the soldier, who fails to notice him. ‘One, two, three,’ he counts the number of bends in the river, explaining a map that he has drawn in the sand, ‘… seven, eight, nine …’ Perucho swings, we hear a chop in rhythm with the count. Sound makes a hole, and the imagination fills it. A swish pan traces

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‘The Emperor is dead!’

Queen of the jungle

‘Ten!’

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the flight of the severed head. With a thud, it lands on the ground, and then – out of time – croaks ‘ten!’ Without missing a beat, Aguirre breaks into a fiery speech. ‘I am the great traitor. There can be no greater!’ In sync with the act of killing, his speech becomes the verbal extension of it. ‘Whoever so much as thinks about deserting will be cut into 198 pieces!’ Indignant and furious, he goes ballistic with his claims: If I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees, then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the wrath of God! The earth I walk upon sees me and quakes! Whosoever follows me and the river, shall win untold riches. But whosoever deserts …

The speech trails off, the worst goes unsaid. The screenplay imagines a somewhat different scenario. Aguirre calls forth the scribe, dictates a document in front of

‘I am the wrath of God’

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everyone and then signs it with a flourish, recalling the Old Testament God of wrath. ‘The men are duly impressed and shout with joy.’ Some fire their muskets into the sky. ‘Even Carvajal displays great enthusiasm’ (p. 83). In the film, then, the document becomes a speech, the scribe is replaced by the camera and the men are not jubilant but rather dazed, overcome. Aguirre, for his part, plays to the camera, looking off and beyond it, which is the visionary gaze into the distance, but then staring into the camera, addressing it directly. Kinski’s twitching sneers may seem to anticipate his later role as Nosferatu, but his performance definitely recalls his earlier work as a stage actor and spoken-word interpreter. The speech is in fact yet another recitation, ‘Kinski speaks …’, only now he speaks with several different voices at once. Kinski speaks Aguirre, rehearsing his impassioned speech on the Amazon. But he also speaks Okello, the East African revolutionary, religious zealot and self-named ‘field marshal’ John Okello, who was known for instigating the massacre of Zanzibar’s Arab population in 1964, and whose outlandish radio speeches provided Herzog, referring to this scene in particular, with ‘a sort of model for Aguirre’.74 Though their voices are blended together, they both bring us back to the power of speech in the film. When Aguirre takes control of the expedition, he does so by speaking up. But it is the look into the distance that propels him. In a great film, every element of sound supports and elevates the image. Aguirre relies on a mix of both, but their relation is not equal. Vision drives the film.

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7 Hallucination

The gradual transition from a state of wonder, at the beginning of the film, to a state of madness, near the end, entails more than just plot development and character psychology. It involves a change in perception. Weeks of relentless suffering – hunger, fatigue, exposure and battle – have taken a tremendous physical toll on the crew. In his last diary entry, the monk describes their deteriorating situation: ‘Most of the men have fevers and hallucinations. Hardly anyone can stand upright. The soldier Justo Gonzalo drank my ink, thinking it was medicine. I can no longer write. We’re going in circles.’ The voiceover becomes that of ‘the almost-dead’, the person who is only waiting to die.75 These are the monk’s last words. Or rather, they mark the end of writing, of the diary, and thus anticipate the end of his life, but they do not mark the end of the film. The raft drifts on, and the camera continues to roll. At this point, it is circling the raft, a move that famously repeats at the end of the film, but one that begins here. It is the camera that carries us into a hallucinatory realm and thereby introduces yet another way of seeing, this one associated with dreamlike states, imagined perceptions and wanderings of the mind. It is also related to Herzog’s own experiments with film as a means of visionary perception, including Fata Morgana (1969) and Heart of Glass (1976).76 The circling of the raft in turn gives shape to the sense of madness, which is not, however, restricted to Aguirre and his crew. In fact, the film expands this circle of madness, and it does so by means of hallucination. The key image is that of the ship in the tree, what the screenplay calls ‘a ghostly vision’ (p. 92). When the slave Okello describes what he sees, the monk dismisses it as mere illusion: ‘We all have the fever. It is only a mirage.’ They both look up and

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Seeing things; the ship in the tree

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off into the distance. A reverse shot reveals the image in question. In this case, it is not the circling camera, but rather the stasis, immediacy and veracity of the image that justifies its appearance as hallucination. It is a real ship, according to Herzog: We built a huge scaffolding about thirty meters high all around the tree. It took thirty-five men and a week of work. We had the boat cut into five separate pieces that we hauled up into the tree and reassembled there.77

With hindsight, it is difficult not to see Fitzcarraldo already in the making. In fact, Herzog had greater plans for this ship. In the screenplay, Aguirre and Perucho investigate. They land the raft, climb the giant tree and reach the ship’s deck. Its sails are mouldy and disintegrating, lianas hang down from the hull. ‘This cannot be,’ Perucho repeats (p. 92). Aguirre searches high and low, but the ship is empty. In the film, of course, they stay on the raft, Aguirre proclaims he would haul the ship down and sail it to the Atlantic. The ship will be their salvation. Either way, hallucination becomes a vehicle for envisioning something more, a further dream of conquest. What makes this image so powerful, apart from its surreal appearance and all the time and effort that went into its production, is that it achieves a double effect, both hallucinatory and insightful. The ship in the tree may be empty, or it may be an illusion, but this is a vision that points to those who came before Aguirre – and after him. In a way, the ship is that of Columbus; it is also that of Cortés, of Pizarro, of Orellana, of Humboldt, and others. It helps to remember that Aguirre was made for a general European and American audience. A pre-production anecdote, noted earlier, now becomes more interesting. When asked about the film’s origins, Herzog recalls stumbling across a book of explorers and conquerors, naming, for example, Alexander the Great, Magellan, Columbus, Livingston, Amundsen and Scott, among others. A marginal figure of history, Aguirre warrants a mere ten lines of

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the book. Even if this origin story is apocryphal – with Herzog, you never know – it still supports the point: in the dream of conquest, Aguirre is never alone. The ship in the tree, like the film itself, is indeed a ghostly vision, a haunting image of the West’s ‘discovery’ of America, of European colonialism and slavery, of the modern imperialistic drive to exploit others and nature. It is also, finally, an image of what the West has done to itself. According to Bodmer, ‘Aguirre’s terrible actions exemplify in a condensed, intensified way all the forms of violence that characterised the conquest.’78 That is how Herzog understood him, too, as early interviews make clear.79 In thinking of Aguirre as ‘the West’, there is certainly an argument to be made that he represents the visionary side and his crew the material side of imperialism. There is also the irony that Aguirre, apparently punished for his hubris, becomes the punishing agent of other conquistadors who seek to turn the New World into gold. Even so, the phantom ship reminds us of what they all share. However strange and solitary Herzog’s Aguirre may seem to be – and he tends to be treated by film critics as the ultimate rebel – he is really a figure of connection and continuity, and not one of absolute difference. This is the reason why, even after his entire crew has been killed, their bodies strewn about the raft, Aguirre continues to speak in the first-person plural. ‘We will endure,’ he insists. The madness of vision that the film depicts as hallucination goes beyond the story of Aguirre.

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8 Aguirre Lives

Historians of the conquest have shown that, when it came to exploring the Amazon, the hostile environment made it particularly difficult for explorers to continue fantasising about fountains of youth and cities of gold. The fabulous treasures that once lay ahead began to seem unreal. This is a historical problem, one that is associated with ‘the cruise of Aguirre’ and also informs the film. Near the end, the monk confronts Aguirre with the facts (again, notice both the language and the limits of vision): ‘Things haven’t turned out as we had expected. We see nothing but hunger and death. We lose men, but we never see the enemy. Even El Dorado has been nothing but an illusion.’ At last, it seems that the monk puts reality before myth. Not so with Aguirre. His crew may be dead, but Aguirre goes on to dream of building even bigger ships, to fantasise about future conquests, to yearn for power and fame. In the end, what distinguishes Herzog’s film is the persistence of mythical goals in spite of all evidence to the contrary; it’s the persistence of vision as striving. The key pose for this way of seeing is the look into the distance. It appears throughout the film, both on its own and mixed with other ways of seeing. Take religious vision, for example. When Aguirre’s daughter is shot by an arrow and killed, he cradles her body and looks down on it. They silently exchange glances, and the moment is held for some time in order for us to examine it. The staging marks a significant and pictorial development over the screenplay. There, as in the historical materials on which it is based, ‘Aguirre realizes that he will not have the majority on his side anymore.’ So he summons his daughter, stabs and kills her, and then turns to fight his own men (p. 94). The film obviously changes the story. What is less obvious, but even more important, is how it does

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so by drawing on religious iconography. In this case, the film image reverses the Christian Pietà, a painful and emotional scene from the Passion of Christ, one that ordinarily depicts the wounded body of Jesus in the lap of his mother, Mary, the ‘Mother of Sorrows’. The film not only rearranges this scene, and empties it of pain and emotion, but also – and here is the twist – turns away from it. After examining the blood that is literally on his hands, Aguirre looks up and off into the distance. (This is also the image that is used for the film’s poster, a further indication of its iconic power.) The conquest continues. So it almost comes as no surprise when, a moment later, Aguirre speaks of new and even greater plans. He would sail to Mexico and take it from Cortés (who was by then long dead). He dreams of marrying his daughter (also dead), to found with her ‘the purest dynasty’ and ‘rule over this entire continent’. A figure of innocence thus gives rise to colonial fantasies of power and possession that are as disturbing as they are incestuous.80 What begins with religious iconography becomes a vision of striving and builds on that of madness. One way of seeing transforms into another, but the pose – the look into the distance – remains. In the final scene of the film, the relation of voice and image changes. All of a sudden the voiceover belongs to Aguirre, trailed by the camera as he hobbles about the raft. No longer does the voice follow the image, as it had with the monk’s diary. Their relationship becomes ambiguous, a quality which extends to the problem of Pietà by Luis Morales (1560)

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vision and how we interpret it. Consider the work of Kinski in this scene. It evokes the figure of Richard III, from the limp in his gait to the final soliloquy, but it also recalls his own performances as a reader of literary texts. These one-man shows featured Kinski, often in historical costume, declaiming, for example, monologues from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Goethe’s Faust, or on one occasion, which directly preceded the filming of Aguirre, the New Testament. Unlike the recitations, however, the final scene of the film becomes an inner monologue. Here he is onstage again, strutting around, striking poses, holding forth and mistreating others. Only he doesn’t move his lips until the final line, and the people have been replaced by monkeys, hundreds of them. The crew becomes multiplied, the scenario of conquest exaggerated to the extreme. But how do we interpret this scenario? Is it a sign of Aguirre’s madness or a cliché about colonialism, or both? Does the theatre of the world become a theatre of the mind? When Aguirre speaks of Herzog’s Pietà

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Ersatz conquistadors; ‘Who else is with me?’

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‘making history as others put plays upon the stage’, is he also speaking for Herzog and his film? The next image, though documentary in a sense, is even more enigmatic: the camera looks up at the sun, its golden rays extending in all directions. We hear the choir organ, the music from the beginning of the film. It repeats the motif of descent, only now it is mixed and embellished with the sounds of birds and monkeys, the music of the jungle. Is the sun one last vision of the world? A burst of hope in a hopeless film? A dazzling view of God above? The dream of El Dorado? Cut to the last shot, perhaps the film’s most haunting image: a final tableau, this one approached from a distance at great speed. Mounted on an unseen motorboat, the camera skims across the water and ‘circles like a curious divinity around the strange apparition of Aguirre’s raft’.81 Whose vision is this? And why does Aguirre remain standing? In the end, we have to ask these questions. And with Herzog the additional question, how can there be such beauty in the face of such madness?

The dream of El Dorado?

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A question made all the more pressing because we, as viewers from a later historical moment, know about the destruction to come. If Aguirre builds on ways of seeing that are specific to the period (Renaissance painting and wonder), it does so in order to present a more general and more modern vision of colonial enterprises across the board. Aguirre’s ‘cruise’ is but one in a series of conquests and barbarisms that continues to this day. Rather than deny a future to that history, as though it were an isolated incident which had come to an inglorious end, the film at least points to its repetition in other places and times. (I suspect the film’s staying power, and the fact that we call it a ‘classic’, has partly to do with its continued relevance.) Surely, this explains why in Herzog’s film – contrary to all the historical accounts and other treatments of this material – Aguirre lives. He’s still out there on the raft, leading the charge. ‘Who else is with me?’ Aguirre asks, and tosses a monkey over his back. He has no plans to die.

Aguirre lives

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Aguirre explores the madness and the hopelessness of Western striving, what Oswald Spengler, writing of the cinema in 1917, called ‘the unrestrainable Faustian impulse to conquer and discover’.82 Within the film, vision works both to engage certain beliefs about Western culture, its wilful dynamism and problematic achievements, and to show us as viewers how to see them. Yet from this perspective, we also see how vision as striving is a problem that arises from the way the film is made. While Aguirre critiques Western striving at the level of colonialism, the film itself is fully engaged in its creative endeavour, in its faith in the director’s imaginative power, in its deployment of western technology, in its willingness to face dangers, and in its striving to overcome obstacles, all for the sake of making a film. Aguirre not only criticises the colonialism that the cinema had celebrated a generation ago. It does so with profound awareness that the striving it critiques is also what enables the beauty of the film.

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Appendix: Shooting with Kinski

The stand-off between Herzog and Kinski behind the scenes continues to fascinate audiences. A master storyteller, Herzog himself has been the key source of information about this episode. But there are other, less well-known sources. The most extensive retelling comes, unexpectedly, from the travelling German football manager Rudi Gutendorf. In 1972, when Aguirre was in production, Gutendorf was coaching a professional club in Peru. At Herzog’s invitation, he visited the crew on location and ended up accompanying them for some time. In a short film made by Herzog’s son, Rudolf, The Ball Is a Scumbag/Der Ball ist ein Sauhund (2000), the coach recalls Kinski’s mutiny on the set, how he quit and threatened to leave before the end of filming, because the assistant cameraman was ‘grinning at him’ (and here we should note that the instigator varies, depending on who is telling the story). At that point, Herzog threatened to get a gun – the Winchester he had given Kinski on his arrival – and shoot the actor dead. There also exists an audiotape, made in secret by the sound engineer, which records a discussion between Herzog and Kinski during the preparation of a single shot. Brief excerpts from this recording can be heard in several documentaries: Der Welt zeigen, dass man noch da ist, which is unfortunately unavailable; I Am My Films/Was ich bin sind meine Filme (dir. Christian Weisenborn and Erwin Keusch, 1978), which is available from Herzog’s production company; and Herzog’s own documentary about working with Kinski, My Best Fiend. Even before Aguirre had its theatrical release, a transcript of this recording appeared in the West German film press. Aguirre only achieved an effective presence outside of Germany; the film’s phenomenal reception abroad never set the

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stage for its revival at home. But the transcript, previously unpublished in English, already makes clear the problem of shooting with Kinski. From: ‘Klaus Kinski, der Zorn der Filmgötter: Mitschnitt einer Einstellungs-Diskussion mit Werner Herzog’, Film-Telegramm vol. 8 (19 March 1973), pp. 2–4. … Noise … KINSKI

I was doing a technical rehearsal. Don’t try and direct me. I alone know what I should do … Well, maybe if it’s technical. But don’t tell me how I should do it, only I know that.

HERZOG

… not entirely.

KINSKI

Oh, yes, I alone. Or you stand up and do it. You always want things halfway, consequences scare you shitless. And when somebody makes me upset … You remind me of [German actor Gustaf] Gründgens. They always said he was scared shitless. That’s why he couldn’t do it. If you want somebody upset, then let him be upset, and just say that he’s not upset!

HERZOG

Fine, I can …

KINSKI

There you go.

HERZOG

Yes, but I’d like …

KINSKI

… now come on, let’s shoot it now. Get going! And get this shit in the can.

HERZOG

We are not filming now.

KINSKI

I’ll do it however I want. Right now. End of discussion.

HERZOG

Good, but first we need to know …

KINSKI

… you have got to stop giving me housewives’ instructions. Just make sure it’s quiet. I don’t want a director. You have to learn from me.

HERZOG KINSKI

No, of course I won’t learn … You are a beginner. A dwarf director is what you are, but not a director for me!

HERZOG

You’d better stop insulting me now …

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KINSKI

Insulting?! Insulting. You couldn’t insult me any more than you

HERZOG

I’m giving you …

KINSKI

You can’t just come and say to me, ‘Herr Kinski, do you think …?’

have by giving me directions. That alone is an insult.

Even David Lean did that, so did Brecht, and so will you, my dear! HERZOG

No, I will not.

KINSKI

Well, we’ll see about that!

HERZOG

I will not do that, Herr Kinski.

KINSKI

You’ll see.

HERZOG

I will not, Herr Kinski.

KINSKI

We’ll see! You’ll do it, we’ll see. We’ll see, whether you do it … You’re doing it as wrong as you possibly could. Your behavior is so inept and so stupid. You must have already known that one can handle me very easily, just by being careful around me. You must have heard that. You’re inept, more so than anyone I’ve ever encountered in my work. You stumble from one bit of nonsense to the next, talking and talking and talking, and your brain doesn’t function as quickly as mine does.

FRAU HERZOG [MARTJE, HIS FIRST WIFE]

Stop it!

KINSKI

You shut your trap! You don’t have a role here.

FRAU HERZOG

No?

KINSKI

Well, that’s different. That’s private. We’re talking about the film.

FRAU HERZOG

You are talking about whether my husband is a director or not.

KINSKI

I can say what I please about that. If you knew anything about how things work in the theater and in film, people have said things like that thousands of times. All their private insults! There I’d be constantly insulted. But I’m not privately insulted here. I’ve been disrupted in my work.

HERZOG

But what Brecht or David Lean or whoever did, that doesn’t

KINSKI

That doesn’t matter to you, because of your megalomania.

matter to me. And you’ll have to get over that, my dear! HERZOG

Is that so …

AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD

KINSKI

Too much for you? Man, just roll your fucking camera, and I’ll do something or other. I’ll just do it off the cuff.

HERZOG

‘Something or other’ is not what we’re doing here …

KINSKI

Oh, so you come and ask me …

HERZOG

I am not asking. I am the director here. I wrote the screenplay …

KINSKI

… and so you determine what I do? Aha. Well, we’ll see about that. We’ll see what happens next.

KINSKI

Now you have me at exactly the right point, on exactly the level where I need to be. If only you weren’t so slow-witted from the start, you wouldn’t have had to go through this whole thing.

HERZOG

Is that so?

KINSKI

Terribly, in fact. I speak, and speak precisely about individual words, and you come back ten times like an old fool and start over with a line that no longer even exists. Tell me, what is that, anyway? What is that? That line was cut long ago. That’s what we decided, together – you and he and I. It’s already out, glory, and you come back to it twenty times.

HERZOG

Yes, I’m also saying that … so now it dies …

KINSKI

But you have to understand that …

HERZOG

Yes, of course.

KINSKI

Exactly, and you have to get rid of it. Get rid of it!

HERZOG

And if he gets a good shot?

KINSKI

Get rid of it! You always become unsure of yourself, when someone gives an opinion. And that’s the biggest mistake you can make. That’s the best evidence of uncertainty there is. You understand?

HERZOG

Let’s try and …

KINSKI

Oh, just start shooting. Just shoot this nonsense.

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Notes 1 David Ansen, ‘Magnificent Obsessions’, The Real Paper [Boston], 16 July 1977, p. 30. 2 Tony Rayns, ‘Aguirre, Wrath of God’, Sight & Sound vol. 44 no. 1 (Winter 1974–5), p. 56. 3 Fray Pedro Simón, The Expedition of Pedro de Ursúa and Lope de Aguirre in Search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560–1, trans. by William Bollaert from Primera parte de las noticias historiales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme (1626), The Hakluyt Society no. 28 (1861; New York: Burt Franklin, 1971), p. 230. The description comes from Francisco Vásquez, whose 1562 report, Relación de la jornada de Omagua y el Dorado, was copied by Simón almost verbatim and without acknowledgment. 4 Robert Southey, The Expedition of Orsua and the Crimes of Aguirre (London: Longman, 1821), p. 211. 5 Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, during the Years 1799–1804, trans. Helen Maria Williams (London: Longman, 1819), vol. 2, p. 192. Part of Aguirre’s letter to Philip appears in vol. 5, pp. 257–60. 6 Clements R. Markham, introduction to Simón, Expedition, p. i. 7 Walker Chapman [Robert Silverberg], The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 207, 258. If Herzog had Englishlanguage sources, this or its youngreader edition, The Search for El Dorado, was likely one of them. Each book contains a chapter on Aguirre’s forerunners, ‘The German Conquistadores’ – Ambrosius Ehinger,

Nikolaus Federmann, Georg Hohemut and Philipp von Hutten. 8 Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America, 1492–1589, trans. Lydia Longstreth Hunt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 187. 9 Ibid., p. 188. 10 For a recent example, see Hugh Thomas, World without End: Spain, Philip II, and the First Global Empire (New York: Random House, 2014), pp. 177–83. 11 The English audio commentary to the Blu-ray edition by Shout! Factory (US, 2014) is exemplary. Asked if he did historical research on Aguirre, Herzog replies, ‘No, not at all.’ 12 For historians, it is associated with the chronicler Toribio de Ortigueira, whose 1585 Jornada de Omagua y Dorado was first published in 1909. 13 In an interview conducted by his French publicity agent in 1975, Herzog discusses his effort ‘to find out more’. He acknowledges the many chronicles, novels and plays about Aguirre. ‘There are about 50 books,’ he says. ‘I haven’t read them all; I just tried to find original documents,’ such as Aguirre’s letter to King Philip. ‘This letter was very interesting to me, because of its language, its tone of defiance and utter insanity.’ Simon Mizrahi, ‘Entretien avec Werner Herzog’, from the unpublished press book ‘Aguirre, la colere de dieu’, Sammlung Werner Herzog, Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin, n.p. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. I thank Catherine Lehmann-Reide for assistance in translating this interview.

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14 Werner Herzog, ‘Vorausbemerkungen zu dem Drehbuch Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes’, Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin, n.d., n.p. 15 Nelson García Miranda, Isaac Leon Frias, et al., ‘Entrevista con Werner Herzog’, Hablemos de cíne vol. 8 no. 63 (January–March 1972), pp. 63–4. 16 See, for example, Noureddine Ghali, ‘Werner Herzog: le reel saisi par le rêve’, Jeune cinéma no. 82 (November 1974), p. 15; Roger Ebert, ‘Aguirre, the Wrath of God’, Chicago Sun Times, 9 February 1977. Available at: ; David Denby, ‘“Heart of Darkness” on the Amazon’, Boston Phoenix, 19 July 1977, p. 4. 17 The English titles contain two punctuation errors, which I have corrected for ease of reading, but I mention them here to acknowledge that this film was made in translation – a point that I’ll explore later in terms of dubbing. The German dialogue list in Herzog’s production archive includes an alternative set of opening titles, which highlight the expedition’s scale and gender disparity (‘eleven hundred men, two women’), adding finally that ‘the jungle swallows them up. Its secret is preserved.’ There is no mention of a diary or a surviving document of any kind. A translation of this text was used for the English-language trailer, which is available as an ‘extra’ on the Anchor Bay Entertainment DVD (US, 2000). 18 Mizrahi, ‘Entretien’, n.p. 19 See José Toribio Medina, The Discovery of the Amazon According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other

Documents, trans. Bertram T. Lee, ed. H. C. Heaton (1894; New York: American Geographical Society, 1934). 20 See Werner Herzog, ‘On The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Paris, February 1975’, in Michel Ciment, Film World: Interviews with Cinema’s Leading Directors, trans. Julie Rose (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2009), pp. 164–5. 21 Reviews focused on the first and last scenes. Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice said they ‘are as stunning as anything in the history of the cinema’, but for him these are the only scenes in the film that are worthy of discussion: ‘in between is a tedious, confused, jumbled narrative that makes one cry out for the professional services of the least talented Hollywood hack’ (quoted in Filmfacts vol. 20 no. 11 [1977], p. 257). Yes, Aguirre frustrates certain expectations of narrative, because the film’s governing logic is visual (and not narrative). 22 Ansen, ‘Magnificent Obsessions’, p. 25. 23 See, for example, the English audio commentaries on the DVD and Blu-ray editions. 24 Werner Herzog, Screenplays, trans. Alan Greenberg and Martje Herzog (New York: Tanam, 1980), p. 11. 25 Wheel of Time (2003), for example, revolves around Mt Kailash in Tibet, and how pilgrims see it as the symbolic centre of the world. 26 Rudolf Hohlweg, ‘Musik für Film – Film für Musik: Annäherung an Herzog, Kluge, Straub’, in Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte (eds), Herzog/Kluge/Straub (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser, 1976), p. 46.

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For more on the music, see Holly Rogers, ‘Fitzcarraldo’s Search for Aguirre: Music and Text in the Amazonian Films of Werner Herzog’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association vol. 129 no. 1 (2004), pp. 77–99. 27 Following Herzog, I take the German version to be definitive. Aguirre’s line reads: ‘Jetzt geht es bergab!’ It echoes the word hinab (down), which has already been voiced twice by the monk. In a film with so little dialogue, repetition is conspicuous. 28 Notice the behaviour of the non-professional actors in this scene. Some of them appear to be frightened by the professional actors, especially Kinski. Others can be seen smiling. Still others look at the film crew behind the camera, waiting perhaps for instructions. Because of Kinski’s behaviour in shooting this scene, some of the native actors reportedly went silent and didn’t speak for days. ‘So I did the nearly impossible,’ says Herzog, ‘and explained Kinski’s personality to them. Then they understood.’ Quoted in ‘Da waren die Indianer stumm’, interview by Barbara Bronnen, Abendzeitung [Munich], 1–2 July 1972. 29 Quoted in Wolfgang Ruf, ‘Im Strudel des Irrsinns’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16 January 1973. 30 Bodmer, Armature of Conquest, pp. 176–7. See also Walker Lowry, Lope Aguirre, the Wanderer (New York: Bookman Associates, 1952), p. 31. 31 Quoted in Stephen Minta, Aguirre: The Re-creation of a Sixteenth-Century Journey across South America (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), p. 98.

32 Mizrahi, ‘Entretien’, n.p. 33 See ‘Werner Herzog’, interview by Barbara Bronnen, in Barbara Bronnen and Corinna Brocher (eds), Die Filmmemacher: Zur neuen deutschen Produktion nach Oberhausen 1962 (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1972), p. 16. 34 Scott Murray, ‘Werner Herzog: Interview’, Cinema Papers [Perth], December 1974, p. 320. 35 Peter Berling, Die 13 Jahre des Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Seine Filme, seine Freunde, seine Feinde (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe, 1992), pp. 170–1. 36 On Kinski’s work, see especially Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert (eds), Ich, Kinski (Frankfurt: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 2001). 37 Although he appeared in more than a hundred films, Kinski’s own voice is heard on just a few. His lines were usually synchronised by others. Martienzen, for example, who was also the German voice of Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr, had already voiced Kinski’s part as the hunchback in Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More (1965). See Christian Appelt, ‘In guten wie in schlechten Filmen: Klaus Kinski vor der Kamera’, in Hoffmann and Schobert (eds), Ich, Kinski, p. 83. Voice parts for the German dub of Aguirre are listed on Deutsche Synchronkartei. Available at: . 38 See, for example, Hans Günther Pflaum, ‘Ein Kinofilm am Bildschirm: Gespräch mit Werner Herzog über die Fernsehausstrahlung von “Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes”’, Film-Korrespondenz, 13 February 1973, p. 7; and Mizrahi, ‘Entretien’, n.p.

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39 Although Kinski bears no resemblance to Kafka, this description helps explain why Herzog considered Algerian president Houari Boumediene to be ‘the ideal actor’ to play Aguirre (Mizrahi, ‘Entretien’, n.p.). Herzog first saw him in 1969, while filming Fata Morgana. Mauch recalls this moment in Der Welt zeigen, dass man noch da ist (‘Showing the World We’re Still Here’, 1972). The first personal portrait of Herzog, which also includes out-takes, still photos and rare footage from the making of Aguirre, the film ends with a photograph of Boumediene. The wild glare in his eyes not only captured Herzog’s imagination, it gives us a sense of the film-maker’s vision, too. 40 Herzog, ‘Vorausbemerkungen zu dem Drehbuch’, n.p. 41 Herzog recalls: ‘The first time I went over the rapids our raft broke into two pieces. I remained with two other people on one half, and the other half drifted away with the oarsmen and got stuck in a whirlpool. It took them two days to get out of it. Our half of the raft stopped by itself on the shore three kilometers downriver’ (Mizrahi, ‘Entretien’, n.p.). 42 Murray, Herzog: Interview, p. 319. 43 Roger Ebert, ‘The Ecstasy of the Filmmaker Herzog’, posted 6 April 2010, RogerEbert.com. Available at: . 44 Ciment, Film World, p. 160. 45 Berling, 13 Jahre, p. 174. 46 André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 161, 162.

47 See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 48 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 71. 49 Herzog’s brother and business manager, Lucki Stipeti´c, took the exposed negative and flew with it to Mexico City, only to have it ‘lost’ in transit and found two days later in a custom’s storage room back at the Lima airport. After finally having it shipped and developed, he viewed the rushes for five days straight, and then phoned his notes to Herzog in Peru, so they could repeat some of the scenes, as needed. Personal email from Lucki Stipeti´c, 3 October 2013. 50 See Bodmer, Armature of Conquest, pp. 185–6, 189. The problem of the decadent lover is restored in Carlos Saura’s El Dorado (1998), a film that answers back to Aguirre by adhering to the chronicles and serving to illustrate them. 51 Cf. Chapman, Golden Dream, pp. 222, 228; Bodmer, Armature of Conquest, ch. 4, ‘The Model in Crisis’; and Evan L. Balkan, The Wrath of God: Lope de Aguirre, Revolutionary of the Americas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), pp. 33, 94–5. 52 The evaluation of the federal ratings board (‘BA-Gutachten zu: “Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes” Prüf-Nr.: 14 605’) and Herzog’s reply of 26 February 1973 are both available at the Deutsche Kinemathek. According to Herzog,

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‘the formulaic in Kinski’s acting has a very specific function’, which has nothing to do with character identification, because the character of Aguirre is ‘not based on psychological empathy’. On the contrary, he ‘diverges from the humanly understandable’. The board later reversed its decision, rating Aguirre as ‘valuable’ (wertvoll), citing ‘the director’s intention to make visible human behavior under extreme conditions’ and the fact that ‘the film was made under extraordinary shooting conditions’, Deutsche Film- und Medienbewertung. Available at: . 53 Frank Rich, ‘Herzog’s “Wrath” One-Sided’, publisher unknown. A copy is available in the Werner Herzog Collection, Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin. 54 John Simon, ‘Good Germans, Bad Spaniards, Naughty Computers’, New York Magazine, 18 April 1977, pp. 95–6. 55 Herzog here draws on two documents: the oath of treason that Aguirre and his men signed after Ursúa’s murder and the letter to Philip that Aguirre wrote later in Venezuela. For a translation of the letter in its entirety, see Felix Jay (ed.), Sin, Crimes and Retribution in Early Latin America: A Translation and Critique of Sources – Lope de Aguirre, Francisco de Carvajal, Juan Rodríguez Freyle, Latin American Studies vol. 4 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1999), pp. 114–22. 56 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions; Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–

1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 57 Claus Huebner and Kraft Wetzel (eds), Werner Herzog: Werkstudie, Filmographie, Gespräch (Stuttgart: Kommunales Kino Stuttgart, 1973), p. 42. 58 See also Peter Schumann, ‘South American Experiences’ (1973), in Eric Ames (ed.), Werner Herzog: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), p. 13. 59 See, for example, John E. Davidson, ‘As Others Put Plays upon the Stage: Aguirre, Neocolonialism, and the New German Cinema’, New German Critique no. 60 (Autumn 1993), pp. 101–30. 60 See Lutz P. Koepnick, ‘Colonial Forestry: Sylvan Politics in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo’, New German Critique no. 60 (Autumn 1993), pp. 133–59. 61 Vincent Canby, ‘“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” Haunting Film by Herzog’, New York Times, 4 April 1977, p. 43. Here, I would add that Herzog began work on Aguirre shortly after completing a documentary on the connective power of touch, Land of Silence and Darkness (1971). 62 This scene reworks a dramatic moment in the conquest of Peru: the encounter between the Spaniards and the Inca ruler Atahualpa, who reportedly throws the Bible to the ground. See Patricia Seed, ‘“Failing to Marvel”: Atahualpa’s Encounter with the Word’, Latin American Research Review vol. 26 no. 1 (1991), pp. 7–32.

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63 In interviews, Herzog points to the use of Quechua as evidence of the film’s authenticity. See, for example, Mizrahi, ‘Entretien’, n.p.; Schumann, ‘South American Experiences’, p. 15. 64 Koepnick, ‘Colonial Forestry’, p. 139. 65 In interviews, Herzog extends this dynamic to characterise his relationship with Kinski behind the scenes. Kinski always screamed, he says, but ‘I kept deadly silent.’ It is a perception that he also attributes to the native actors: ‘At the end of the film one chief told me, “We were so scared, not of Kinski who was yelling and behaving like a madman, but of you because you were so silent”’ (Murray, Herzog: Interview, p. 320). See also Judy Stone, ‘“Aguirre” Plagued with Difficulties’, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 May 1977, p. 41. 66 See especially Kraft Wetzel, ‘Interview with Werner Herzog’ (1976), in Ames, Werner Herzog, p. 34. 67 The uncredited tune comes from ‘Cholitas puneñas’, a traditional Peruvian song as arranged by Moisés Vivanco and sung by Yma Súmac since the 1950s. When the source was brought to his attention, several years after the film’s release, Herzog claimed ignorance, requested permission and paid for the rights to use it. 68 In many ways, he corresponds to the mute character as outlined by Michel Chion in The Voice in Cinema, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 95–100. 69 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 201.

70 The image of Guzmán as a dissolute and gluttonous ‘king’ comes from historical sources. See, for example, Simón, Expedition, p. 71; Southey, Expedition of Orsua, pp. 67, 74; Chapman, Golden Dream, p. 228. 71 This notion of the horse as mute witness also comes from the screenplay, where the traumatised survivor of a cannibal attack is described as having ‘lost his speech, horselike’ (p. 65). 72 Unlike the historical figure, who took up with another officer, before she was raped and butchered by two of Aguirre’s men, Herzog’s character remains pure and dignified to the very end, when she leaves them all in favour of the cannibals, as queen of the jungle. In the screenplay, it is reported that Inés was raped by five soldiers before she disappeared (p. 80). The film, again, omits such graphic detail. 73 Aguirre is remembered for his ‘rancid sense of humor. And death was sometimes part of the joke’ (Lowry, Lope Aguirre, p. 50). On this point, too, Herzog borrows from history. But it also reflects the director’s own penchant for gallows humour. Hit by a spear, one soldier pauses and comments before he drops dead, ‘Long arrows are coming back in fashion.’ This borrowing comes from a fourteenth-century Icelandic text, The Saga of Grettir the Strong, the story of another outlaw that Herzog evidently appreciated. See Herbert Golder, ‘Shooting on the Lam’, in Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), p. 480.

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74 In a further echo, the African slave in Aguirre is named Okello. The quotation comes from the English audio commentary on the Shout! Factory Blu-ray edition. 75 Chion, The Voice in Cinema, p. 47. 76 During the production of Heart of Glass, Herzog showed Aguirre to a private audience that he had literally hypnotised for the occasion. For many of them, he said, ‘it was an incredible visionary experience. One person had the feeling he was in a helicopter, flying around within the film, circling the characters.’ From Horst Wiedemann, ‘Hypnosis as Means of Stylization’ (1976), in Ames, Werner Herzog, p. 45. 77 Mizrahi, ‘Entretien’, n.p. 78 Bodmer, Armature of Conquest, p. 204. 79 See, for example, Werner Herzog, ‘Schauplatz Amazonas’, interview by Harald Greve and Siegfried Schober, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 22–3 April 1972.

80 Our perception of Kinski in this scene and throughout the film has changed over time, especially since the publication of Pola Kinski’s memoir, Kindermund (Berlin: Insel, 2013). In it, she reveals that her father, Klaus Kinski, sexually abused her as a child. She was five years old when he raped her for the first time. She was nineteen when he wanted her to accompany him to Peru for Aguirre. ‘This time,’ she writes, ‘my “No” was so firm that he didn’t try and force me’ (p. 210). 81 Richard Combs, ‘Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes’, Monthly Film Bulletin vol. 42 no. 492 (January 1975), p. 4. 82 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1932), vol. 1, p. 322.

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Credits Aguirre, the Wrath of God/Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes West Germany/1972 Directed by Werner Herzog Production Company Werner Herzog Filmproduktion Screenplay Werner Herzog Photography Thomas Mauch Assistant Cinematographer Francisco Joán Orlando Macchiavello Sound Herbert Prasch Editing Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus Production Manager Walter Saxer Wolf (Lucki) Stipeti´c Production Assistants Gustavo Cerff Arbulú Martje Grohmann Dr Georg Hagmüller Ina Fritsche René Lechleitner Ovidio Ore Music Popol Vuh (Florian Fricke) Special Effects Juvenal Herrera Miguel Vazquez Synchronisation Bob Oliver

CAST Klaus Kinski Don Lope de Aguirre Helena Rojo Inés de Atienza Del Negro Fray Gaspar de Carvajal Ruy Guerra Don Pedro de Ursúa Peter Berling Don Fernando de Guzmán Cecilia Rivera Flores, daughter of Aguirre Daniel Ades Perucho Edward Roland Okello Armando Polanah Armando Alejandro Repullés Gonzalo Pizarro With Alejandro Chavez, Daniel Farfán, Julio Martinez And the Indians of the Lauramarca Co-operative.

Filmed from 31 December 1971 to 24 February 1972 in the Urubamba Valley and on the Huallaga and Nanay Rivers, in Peru. West German theatrical release by Filmverlag der Autoren on 29 December 1972. West German television premiere on ARD, 16 January 1973. US theatrical release by New Yorker Films on 3 April 1977. 35mm in Eastman Color, mono. 8,511 feet Running time: 93 minutes

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