This weekend I watched the movie Aguirre, The Wrath of God by acclaimed German director Werner Herzog. Then I watched it again. And then a third time, just the opening scene, to be there on that mountain pass, listening to the haunting music while climbing down the treacherous slopes of the Andes single file with the rest of them men and women.
Set in the mid-16th Century in South America, it’s the story of Don Lope de Aguirre, a megalomaniac who leads himself and his army of conquistadors down the Amazon to doom in pursuit of his hopeless dream of building an empire bigger than Spain.
Klaus Kinski did not act in this movie – he was living the role of Aguirre. He was Aguirre. Was it his controlled, powerful performance that drew me back to the movie again and again? Yes, but no, there was more to it.
I was right there on that raft, going down the river, the hopeless frustration of those men and women seeping into me as surely as the sheer beauty of pristine nature all around. But curiously, I did not share the fear of those men. I was not one of them. As clear as the sweet gurgle of the calmly flowing river to me was the whistle of the arrow as it shot through the air with purpose – but it was not me it sought. Something about the way the movie was crafted made me rather an observer. Was it because I knew they wouldn’t make it? Maybe this triggered some sort of survival mechanism that made me dissociate myself from the group? I was there, but I didn’t want to be there – just like every other person on that raft, so while there was distance, there was also empathy. Was this what Herzog wanted to do, what the movie ultimately achieved?
It was also the way death came to each of them, and how they took it. One by one. For most of them, it came silently, swiftly, out of the unknown. No drama, except for that one man who was pulled up among the trees in a trap set by the Indians. Nobody cried out or if someone did, no one heard. There was the woman who just walked off into the jungle – for a welcome death at the hands of the cannibals she knew were there – after Ursúa, her man, the usurped commander of the group, was hanged at Aguirre’s orders. There was the emporer, who was just found that way – dead. Just as swiftly and easily as he had found himself an emporer, at Aguirre’s fancy one fine day on the river. There was the one whose sole response to the final predicament in his life was amusement that it didn’t pain as much as he thought it would. There was the monk who found it hard to accept that he had to go this way. Then there was the truly silent one, Aguirre’s own daughter, the one who accepted it all. Her calmness as she slipped away had a power that neither the arrow that so unmercifully took her life nor even Aguirre’s fiery wrath could match.
The two women in the movie, who you would easily judge to be the weakest members in the party, zealously protected as they were by the burly men who bore the brunt of the environment, their fancy frills remarkably untouched by the elements, turned out to be the strongest, each in her own way. They remained undefeated, just like Ursúa, just like Aguirre. (Aguirre? I have my reasons for thinking he was undefeated. More about it later.)
In fact, I saw the juxtaposition of contradictions everywhere, in ways big and small. Close to the beginning of the movie is this scene where a cannon slips down the slope and explodes. The next scene is brought up before you recover from the shock of the violent outburst - your eyes are taken down to the river where three piglets are standing in knee-deep water, wet all over and obviously enjoying it, the very picture of domicile peace and calm. What relevance did these animals have to the story? Nothing at all. Yet Herzog had a purpose in turning your attention to them.
There was subtle, powerful humor stitched into the bloodsmeared fabric of the story. You might miss it. The monk’s solemn and quite rational advice to the woman who approached him as the only person she thought who could deliver the group from doom – from Aguirre – that the church would always remain on the side of the strong. The way Aguirre, floating down that remote river, dethroned King Phillip II in far away Spain and installed his own. For the new emporer, conquering a country several times the size of Spain was as simple as looking to your left and saying all the land you saw was yours, and then looking to your right and saying the same. The best part was that with every inch that you moved down the river, that land just got bigger and bigger. Humor touched even Aguirre once, when he asked the emporer who had just declared his sovereign authority over all the land that he saw around him while floating down the river entirely at the mercy of the elements and the Indians – and of Aguirre himself – “Have you found land that can hold your weight?” Reminding him how precarious his state was.
For the emporer was no Emporer. He could only go as far as Aguirre would let him. Though he showed that he had a mind of his own when he pardoned the one that Aguirre wanted executed. Though that didn’t stop Aguirre from doing what he wanted.
Amidst all that rage and madness, Aguirre gave himself up to a tender moment or two. When he brought the armadillo baby he found in the woods to his daughter. When he had the Indian play the melody of his pipes. Once for himself, and you could see he was lost in the music. And once (in a moment of weakness?) for the man who had just been killed.
The ending is one of the best I have seen of any movie. All the power of the story – or should I say storytelling - is consummated here. With every single member of his party gone, Aguirre continues on his quest down the river with dreams of conquering Trinidad and Mexico. But just moments later, a few yards down the river, circumstances close in on him and in an instance he is frozen in time and space. Aguirre the immovable becomes Aguirre the immobilized. Only, it was not just him. The raft, the trees on both banks, why, even the river… nothing moves, nothing happens beyond that point. Aguirre is not defeated because he does not give up. Aguirre is the Wrath of God – when he cannot go any further, everything stops.
And to think that this movie, one of the greatest ever, was made with a camera that its director borrowed without the owner’s permission!
