Owned version: The DVD released by Anchor Bay in 2002, as part of the Herzog/Kinski box set.
Acquired: 2005 presumably, from my then-local Borders.
Seen before?: Twice - once in 1996 (or thereabouts) from a VHS I'd bought used from a Blockbuster, and once from this DVD on March 7th, 2010. (The latter viewing resulted in this review, and man did I write some dopey garbage back then. I was almost 30 already, you think I'd have learned some shit.)
The camera drifts from on high, through the clouds, until settling within view of a jungle mountain. On the mountain is a long line of tiny people, burdened and trudging like marching ants, fording their way over a thin road of mud and rock. Some are natives, kept in chains and made to bear the various possessions of the others, the conquerors who have enslaved them. Around this procession is naught but trees and mist and muck, dwarfing them and making the polished metal and fine clothing worn by the conquistadors seem foolish and incongruous. Already, it seems, Nature is doing its best to swallow these people whole.
Aguirre, one of the greatest - if not the greatest - work from one of our greatest - if not the greatest - living filmmakers, is a long and difficult journey towards an inevitable destination, as the hubris of Man finds no purchase within the implacable loamy soil of Nature. This is a theme that of course Herzog would return to again and again, but it was never so clear-eyed and pitiless and it was here. Man is represented by the Spanish conquistadors in general, with their absurd dreams of finding a legendary city of gold and complete unawareness of how to deal with the landscape, and Klaus Kinski's Aguirre in particular, a dagger-eyed ice-cold sadist straining at the power hierarchy he sees within his grasp yet never able to reconcile his own implacability with the far more implacable indifference of the country through which he storms. Noblemen become tinpot dictators, priests become inquisitors ("The Church was always on the side of the strong"), and a raft in the middle of the Amazon becomes a besieged island nation before then becoming a sinking sepulchre rapidly being reclaimed by the jungle in the form of mice, butterflies and what seems a thousand chittering monkeys. Aguirre, driven round the bed by his impossible ambition and the endless hostility of the immediate world around him, dreaming of sailing to and conquering Trinidad, stares unsteadily at a monkey he's managed to grasp before tossing it aside and croaking, "Who's with me?" Herzog then cuts to the Sun, beaming bright and dispassionate forever upon him.
So it's a tragedy, one built on vanity and imperiousness. But here's the thing: That cut is also objectively funny, a triumph of context and timing. Which leads into something I never really picked up on before, despite the general tone of most Herzog films - Aguirre is also a comedy, a bleak and mordant one that takes full advantage of the absurdity of the situation to find bitter laughs in a hopeless situation. Indeed, what jokes come are almost entirely rooted in irritation and/or exhaustion - there is, for instance, a great plant-and-payoff gag early on, for instance, involving Christian burial and ceremony that earns a shocked laugh when a frustrated Aguirre disposes of some troublesome unburied corpses by ordering a raft blown up. Later in the film, Aguirre's hand-picked Emperor gorges himself on fresh fruit as his underlings are forced to count grains of corn for sustenance, and the shot of the Emperor tearing through a mango is framed so that behind him, out of focus, we can see one man staring at him, unblinking, unmoving and scowling, as though trying to will his heart to explode right then and there, and the shot (and the actor) hold long enough that passes through ominous and earns a dark chuckle; another amusing bit sees Aguirre standing still and staring off into the distance, looking increasingly pained and annoyed as a native toots away on a pipe right near his ear. Even the famed decapitation sequence, a beautiful and grotesque burst of surrealism, is preceded by a one-liner. The distance between this and Nicolas Cage nattering on about iguanas on a coffee table is not so large after all.
Key to the peculiar effect of this film, both in its tragic and comedic dimensions, is the staggering performance from Kinski. And that was another revelation - because for years I'd remembered the mania, the frothing and crazed ranting. Except... that's not what this performance is at all. Kinski does of course have his moments of outsized lunacy (there's really no other way to deliver a line like, "The Earth I walk upon sees me and quakes!"), but it's a far chillier and more nuanced performance than I'd given it credit for all these years - there's even room for moments of tenderness in it, like the last scene with his daughter Flores, a mournful prelude to his mad soliloquy among the monkeys. Said soliloquy, crucially, is also in fact a fascinating underplay - all but the last line take place inside his head, so the hissing, spiraling insanity we hear bears little resemblance to the confused, staggering wretch on screen. This is crucial because while his madness is manifest early on, it's balanced by a control born of understanding of his place in the hierarchy, so that he comes of as ruthless and determined rather than flamboyantly mad. He stalks and smolders and swaggers, only exploding on occasions where his facade of unflappable megalomania is, by circumstances, flapped pretty fucking hard. My favorite instance of this comes after the wife of an enemy, knowing all too well Kinski's ill intentions towards her husband, exclaims at him, "God will punish you!" Kinski affects a haughty, mile-long stare and a faint grin, as if to say, "Neither you nor God can hurt me, I'm fuckin' Aguirre"... and then he turns and walks directly into a horse, leading to an eruption of arm-flailing and a peeved, "Get out of my way!" Aguirre, the man who thought himself the wrath of God, the man who dreamt of being the god-king over all the New World, is a tragic fool who can't even control a single animal.
Speaking of single animals: There's another scene with Flores, an earlier one where Aguirre finds a small sloth. This is a small and beautiful scene, with a genuinely happy Aguirre regaling his daughter about this little animal's unusual life: "He spends his whole life asleep. He's never really awake." Could that be the unspoken cosmic joke at the heart of it all? Are we all just the fevered dream an ever-slumbering rodent?
