Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Do yourself a favor: watch this film in the subtitled original German, not the dubbed version. The crazy comes through much more forcefully in the German. Once again Werner Herzog offers the audience a study in hubris, and ultimately madness, in the setting of the Amazon jungle. There’s less a story here than a continuous thread of narrative travelogue as a group of would-be conquistadors and their various associates journey in search of El Dorado and presumed fortune and fame. Klaus Kinski shows us again how to make madness and villainy a featured element of a movie that rarely rises above a slow-moving pace yet never loses the viewer's attention either. (The most exciting scene comes right at the beginning, when we see the group descending an Andean path the looks like an unreal staircase—a visual that sets the tone for the entire rest of the movie's tableau of existing in the world of the unreal.) Again, as with Fitzcarraldo—the two films are almost a 1 and 1A exacta entry of South American man vs. nature studies—you get a movie that many people simply won’t get, but that those with adventurous viewing habits will appreciate for its unique vision and contemplative frame of mind. And if nothing else you’ll learn a valuable lesson: don’t trust crazy conquistadors.