I've seen a lot of movies in my lifetime, but nothing quite like Aguirre, Wrath of God. To try and relate it to something familiar isn't easy; if I had to try, I might describe it as Herzog's own sort of Apocalypse Now, a Conrad-style descent into madness on a river. But hard as it might be to imagine, Aguirre makes Apocalypse Now look like the Hollywood version with its expensive sets and wealthy movie stars; in contrast, Herzog's film feels like the real deal. Shot cheap and filmed on location in South America with an authentic cast, genuine death and agony seem to linger at the edge of every frame. The jungle doesn't get paid to perform and there's a very real sense in every sequence that it's barely 10 feet away from devouring the cast and crew. If Klaus Kinski doesn't get them first.
What makes Aguirre astonishing, like so many other Herzog films, is the tremendous sense of awe that envelopes it. This isn't a movie that is quickly digested and forgotten and there's at least a half dozen images that startled me as much as anything I've seen on screen. Many of those images happen right at the jungle's edge which surrounds and swallows men (and horses) as easily as it produces surprises. A baby sloth. A raft full of monkeys. A tall ship stranded atop a tree. These images float into the frame like dreams and in that particular Herzog way get deep deep under the skin. Plot and character, rendered so spare in this kind of movie, seem like secondary considerations. An elysian score, sounding neither like a pure synthesizer or human voice, carries the entire experience into a different dimension. Or at alternate stretches, silence, which betrays the dream-like quality of the visuals into a much more dreadful place, and invites the jungle to add its own hungry soundtrack.
Beyond these visuals and flourishes, there's Kinski. Well of course Kinski is a magnificent visual unto himself, loping and twisting through every shot and eyeing the jungle as if he could glare it into submission. But more important than that glassy look is that performance that bleeds madness. Watching My Best Fiend early this week and hearing first-hand about Kinski's ferocity on-set, it's clear from that terrific face that he might as well be a wild animal carefully photographed with handlers and meat incentives just off-screen. There's the legend that Herzog directed him at gunpoint, dispelled by Herzog himself in the Kinski documentary as only a threat to shoot him in the head if he tried to abandon the production. Even so, it's clear that Kinski walks a fine line between performance and reality. At one point, as he lifts a small monkey in one hand, I was actually terrified that he might actually bite its head off. Such an awful thing wouldn't be unexpected in a movie like this.
Aguirre won't be for everyone. Despite the immediate sense of danger, the movie drifts slowly down river, silent for long stretches and detached at the most curious points. Perhaps the most interesting instance of this is when a parallel raft of explorers becomes trapped in an eddy, spinning out of control for hours. The action (and subsequent doom) of the raft is regarded from such a distance that it's virtually background to the main story. The fate of the raft is delivered off-screen and left intentionally mysterious. And in this way, it's most effective, adding to the growing sense of dread and anxiety and foreshadowing the castatrophe to come.
O Sweet Movie Goodness, this is the stuff of legend! Herzog and Kinski floating deliriously down the Amazon river, butchery at their backs. I can't wait to continue deeper into this Herzog-Kinski box set...
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