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Last night a university film series was screening Werner Herzog's 1972 Aguirre: Der Zorn Gottes, which is immediately spellbinding. I hadn't heard of it before (or actually been at all familiar with Herzog's films, besides the excellent Grizzly Man), and I'm not surprised to learn how much acclaim it's picked up.
The storyline (which Herzog fabricated almost entirely, though it's presented as a historical event) concerns a party of Spanish conquistadors, split off from Pizarro's expedition in 1561, rafting down a jungle river into a slow death from starvation and Indian attacks; Klaus Kinski is Aguirre, the lurching, increasingly power-mad instigator of their doomed conquest. The camera work is fantastic and documentary-standoffish; the tone of the film, similarly, is usually remote and morbidly bemused, with a healthy dose of satire on the trappings of royalty. A couple of bizarrely jokey dissonant touches near the end help to underline the party's final hallucinatory descent.
Looking at German-speaking conquistadors is kind of striking.
Crucially, the film is a trim 1 hour and 40 minutes long; it is miraculous that something with this kind of drifting dramatic rhythm doesn't feel overlong. The music and soundtrack are spot-on, too. Pretty instantaneously unforgettable.
The production anecdotes in Wikipedia (hopefully accurate) are pretty fascinating, and I'd recommend them as a teaser for the film too. If you don't want to spoil an element of the final scene, stop reading after the paragraph about Herzog threatening Kinski with committing a murder-suicide.
The storyline (which Herzog fabricated almost entirely, though it's presented as a historical event) concerns a party of Spanish conquistadors, split off from Pizarro's expedition in 1561, rafting down a jungle river into a slow death from starvation and Indian attacks; Klaus Kinski is Aguirre, the lurching, increasingly power-mad instigator of their doomed conquest. The camera work is fantastic and documentary-standoffish; the tone of the film, similarly, is usually remote and morbidly bemused, with a healthy dose of satire on the trappings of royalty. A couple of bizarrely jokey dissonant touches near the end help to underline the party's final hallucinatory descent.
Looking at German-speaking conquistadors is kind of striking.
Crucially, the film is a trim 1 hour and 40 minutes long; it is miraculous that something with this kind of drifting dramatic rhythm doesn't feel overlong. The music and soundtrack are spot-on, too. Pretty instantaneously unforgettable.
The production anecdotes in Wikipedia (hopefully accurate) are pretty fascinating, and I'd recommend them as a teaser for the film too. If you don't want to spoil an element of the final scene, stop reading after the paragraph about Herzog threatening Kinski with committing a murder-suicide.
1 Comments:
Pete recommended a raft of Herzog's movies to me a while back so I've been slowly Netflixing through them, but I haven't gotten to Aguirre yet. I'm surprised Pete hasn't mentioned any of them to you at some point.
It sounds similar in some of its elements to Fitzcarraldo, a fictional movie about hauling a riverboat over a mountain deep in the South American jungle, which Herzog filmed by actually hauling a riverboat over a mountain deep in the South American jungle. The anecdotes from that production are fun too; most movie crews aren't attacked with poison darts. The obsessive motivation of Klaus Kinski's character (somewhat jarringly named Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald) is to construct a grand opera house in the New World; that's where Alex Ross gets the picture of Kinski scowling over a gramophone in the jungle that he sometimes puts in his posts about classical music doomsayers.
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