Herzog, Aguirre: Dreams in the Green Hell

 

The first time I saw Aguirre, the Wrath of God, I was about twelve years old. It happened on a Betamax VCR at my cousins’ house, just across the street from where I lived. Back then, to buy a VCR in Mexico you had to go to a smuggler and make the purchase in secret. Very few people had one. We didn’t have one at home. My uncle bought his from a smuggler in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, along with several movies. Star Wars was one of them. Also arriving were Romancing the Stone, Rocky, Platoon, and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. For some strange reason, one Saturday afternoon we watched Romancing the Stone first, with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, and then Aguirre. Today it strikes me as ironic that we saw both films set in the South American jungle on the same day.

Aguirre stayed in my head for many years, more like a dream than a movie. Something I wasn’t entirely sure had really happened. Almost ten years later I saw the poster at the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City and had a flashback. It was a Werner Herzog retrospective. That day they were screening Aguirre. Coincidence? I don’t know. I went in to see it and was fascinated. It wasn’t a dream. The film was real. From then on Herzog became one of my favorite directors.

When I think of Herzog, especially those films in which nature becomes one of the protagonists, I think of the Swamp Thing comic, particularly the stories written by Alan Moore. I believe Herzog should have made a film with that swamp character. It would have been a mix of Aguirre and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Wes Craven made a version of Swamp Thing, but it left a lot to be desired.

Returning to Aguirre, it is one of my favorite Herzog films. For many it is one of his best. What moves me most about the film is its dreamlike quality. It is like a dream, like a nightmare, and that is how it remained in my mind for nearly a decade. The performances and the cinematography are hypnotic. The music by Popol Vuh, that German krautrock band of the 1970s, deepens the trance even further.

Like much of Herzog’s cinema, Aguirre is a kamikaze film. It was win or die. Like the old Spanish conquistadors, Herzog burned his ships and never looked back. On one side was furious nature, always an antagonist in his films. On the other, managing around three hundred actors under difficult conditions. Also the tight budget. And as if that weren’t enough, Klaus Kinski, who took a large part of the film’s money as his salary. Herzog kept him constantly furious and exhausted so that he would better portray his character. Most of the crew and the actors wanted to kill Kinski.

Legend has it that Herzog wrote the story on a typewriter with one hand on the way back from a soccer match. It is also said that a fellow traveler vomited on some pages of the script and those pages were lost forever. People claimed he had been inspired by the stories of the Spanish conquistadors. In the end Herzog clarified that this was not the case. The story was fictional and he had only been inspired by the figure of Lope de Aguirre, known as “the Madman.”

The film shows a group of Spaniards descending from the Inca region in the Andes toward the jungle and the Amazon in search of a supposed city of gold called El Dorado. That descent is in reality a descent into a green hell, as in the Misfits song, or a descent into madness. Aguirre in Kinski’s hands and Kinski in Herzog’s hands is the embodiment of madness. Of the madness of both. While Aguirre is reduced to nothing by the ferocious nature, Herzog conquers the Andes and the Amazon and asks the actors not to kill Kinski, at least not until filming is finished.

As in much of his filmography, Aguirre represents Herzog’s obsession with human obsession. A few years later, Herzog would return to the same lands, once again obsessed with the same force, to reconquer that hostile territory and haul a ship over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo.