Aguirre, the Wrath of God: Insights from Film on the Human Condition
Originally written while an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz
West German New Wave film director Werner Herzog’s 1972 film, Aguirre der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre the Wrath of God) came at a transformational time as Germany was grappling with its post-war history and negotiating an identity of the future. For Herzog, an education in history, literature, and music, gained in accompaniment with international travel and education, shaped a worldly perspective expressed through a pioneering role in West German cinema in collaboration with Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schloendorff. As Herzog analyzes the characteristics of the human condition in commentary with adapted historical events, the film constructs a multilateral model to the psychological progression within leadership and building civilizations, alluding to the reckoning and reflection within rebuilding Germany. By choosing to consider the fabled search for El Dorado, Herzog adapts history to construct an alternate impression where the Spanish expedition's desire to conquer is isolated to critique themes such as the commitment to unattainable goals. As the film chronicles the conquistador’s journey throughout the wild, beautiful, and treacherous Amazon rainforest, the expedition splits up, leaving one group led by Pedro de Ursua with one week to scout ahead and find signs of El Dorado or provide a reason to continue. The isolated group is soon faced with a mutiny led by Aguirre whereupon his maniacal leadership leads the expedition to its demise. In chronicling the dissonance between vision and the failed realization of the journey, Herzog sets expectation and reality into contrast with one another, paralleling the past sentiments associated with German history and newfound pathfinding experienced during the West German New Wave. By involving components of documentary, fiction, and narrative film, Herzog engages with how truth is created and ultimately perceived. As audiences are enthralled in the quasi-historical retelling of a popular tale and human fantasy for uncovering treasure and civilizing the unknown, the film simultaneously represents and tears down components of the human spirit through the contrast and omnipotent force of nature and time. By illuminating the historical view of the failed conquest of a fantastical goal, Herzog critiques the Third Reich’s ambitions and engages with Germany’s historical reckoning while also critiquing the practices and motives factoring into Germany and civilizations’ general approach to rebuild and grow into the future.
Following the conclusion of the Second World War, Germany was engaged in a difficult climate of division, control, and reeducation that led to questioning concepts of identity, ambition, and meaning in the past. After the war, foreign occupation and influence dominated German culture and socio-political autonomy. Split between east and west, Herzog’s location in Allied-occupied West Germany, and the “Federal Republic of Germany” (BDR) resulted in strong western and especially American influence, promoting ideals of “freedom,” “democracy,” and consumerism. Notably, Herzog’s education while in Munich exposed him to the remnants and roots of the Third Reich’s stilted construction and empire-building, contrasted by the US military’s strong influence in the same area to guide Germany into the future. The combination of these influences provided competing perspectives of the failed and new-found construction and sculpting of society.
While Aguirre was famously filmed on location in the arduous conditions of the Peruvian jungle, a far contrast from the centuries-long cultivated terrain of native Germany, the themes of perceived wild and negotiated reality are related in Herzog’s desire to isolate man in his misguided ambition. Specifically, scenes within the film are given sufficient time to become painfully clear in their contrast and nuances, and the dissonance between man’s tension and nature’s continuous calm is always in the background. As conversations wearily drag on with aggressive bouts at times, ambient environments become ever more clear as the wind keeps on blowing in the background, the rivers flow, leaves move, and lighting changes as clouds pass by. Actors’ positions within natural environments and the incongruous pace of action are contrasted by the eerie calm and predictability of nature, seeming like an onlooker and omnipresent pressure that will ultimately overtake all. Similarly, acknowledged by Zalewski with the New York Times, “Aguirre” achieves its potency by instilling the claustrophobic experience of the Spanish explorers: static shots of Amazonian river bends, in which the vegetation at the water’s edge blurs into a solid green wall, becoming highly agitating through repetition. The consistent stylistic choice to maintain the view of specific subjects, while the camera shakes ever so slightly with the filmer’s movements creates dissonance during statis, inviting the aforementioned feeling of discomfort. Throughout Aguirre, Herzog isolates and illuminates the power and ephemerality in human achievement as if to comment on the Third Reich’s mania and warn of the corrosive nature so easily touched in the rebuilding of Germany and the empires of the modern West. Effectively, “Herzog's work emerges from, and responds to, developments in the German film world as well as the nation's shifting fortunes in the evolution of post-war geopolitics.” However, the response in Herzog’s work looks far beyond any single context, working instead toward providing insight on fundamental truths around the human spirit and condition. As a part of the process and a product of Germany working to find its identity post-war, Aguirre has the unique capacity to apply historical remediation through the refraction of a different nation’s practices and negotiated history.
By intertwining historical narratives and imaginative fiction, Aguirre grounds itself in the past yet provides an opening for thematic significance in an unbounded scope of contexts. By isolating colonial processes, neocolonialism is better defined. Through the contrast of contexts, Herzog creates distance to address fundamental ideas more directly. “Herzog appears to use the history of an incident in a faraway place during the sixteenth century to comment on the momentous events occurring in his land in the twentieth century.” Specifically, the theme of the human desire to overcome nature and one another in the interest of civilizing and creating a sense of stability, as defined by self, is critiqued. Where history and perceived truth are most often defined by the victors, Herzog’s film embraces parts of the whole without committing to any single ideology except for revealing a greater truth applicable to relevant contexts such as post-war Germany. Aguirre is a fantasy inspired by truth or the inverse depending on the critic’s perspective and how the film’s themes are applied. The film takes on a role as a prompt and external mediator to reflect and guide in a variety of spaces. As noted by Dr. James Ramey’s perspective from comparative literature, film, and philosophy, “the film also fits into a larger formation of competing discourses that have recrudesced since the time of the conquest in different guises and under different historical conditions: the clash between the advocates of unrestrained Euro-imperialism and the promoters of American Indian rights who denounced the excesses of the conquest. In conversation within the film Flores, Aguirre's daughter, and Runo Rimac, a slave and former prince before the Spanish arrival notes, “My people have survived natural disasters of many kinds, yet what the Spanish have done is much worse. They have taken everything. Yet I also emphasize with you since there is no way out of this jungle.” While important in the interest of representing the damage and misdeeds and establishing dialogue, the representation is still one-dimensional, as Flores never responds to Runo, instead only listening until Herzog cuts to soldiers eating silently in the oppressive depths of the forest. Herzog acknowledges a conflict yet never shows the willingness to cross into the space of mediation and understanding. From Ramey’s perspective, “Though Aguirre does travesty Eurocentric imperialism, it nevertheless continues to assert European hegemony by representing its nature-based Indian communities as little more than cardboard cannibals, beings whose suffering and slaughter are hardly worthy of a European viewer’s sympathy.” In exercising the process of filming in a foreign nation and recording local populations via film, Herzog exercises a practice of neo-colonial representation and review. The film’s representation of conquest and explicit effort to illuminate the futility in such ventures reveals that the significance within action is most often defined in retrospect when the historical recounting constitutes the most tangible component of past action. Aguirre thereby reveals a multitude of insights about how truth and history are retold and often characterized differently according to the narratives in question. Ramey contributes that “from the standpoint of the New German Cinema, Herzog’s Aguirre can be seen as a conquest of the immorality of conquest itself. That is, it presents itself as a German morality tale that, through irony, shatters the glamour of conquest and hubris.” Through the bilateral process of exercising a conquest-like effort and recording the experience for audiences, the film is reflexive in its nature and the history it engages with. The same process provides unparalleled insight into Herzog’s negotiation with German history and practice of continuing on neo-colonial traditions and similarly critiquing them, revealing and turning back on the roots revealed with the film medium in the interest of illuminating perceived truth.
Throughout Herzog’s effort to delve into the human characteristics underpinning the colonial failure associated with the Spanish conquest of El Dorado, the allusions also work to understand and catharize the Third Reich’s rise to power and ultimate collapse. The film consistently applies an approach where topics are represented in the form of examples with powerful thematic significance and far-reaching applications. For example, after the mutiny, Aguirre determines that a new leader must be picked to represent the party. Aguirre, having clear control over all those around, states that the heaviest man must be the nobleman of choice. When a vote is called to accept the decision, only a few raise their hands until Aguirre looks directly at each individual until the group itself creates enough tension to invite all others to raise their hands. Thereupon Aguirre is designated as second in command and next in line for power. This display of coercion, unspoken dominance, and group dynamics communicates the irony of how power can be established, gained, and exerted. Notably, the ideals of democracy are wholeheartedly subverted as few ruthlessly dominate the many through the mechanics of fear. The act of declaring a puppet king to take on a symbolic role in the situation also illustrates how devious those in power can be and how easily labels without meaning can be applied. Beyond the humor, the display also applies a direct perspective on how manipulation and group sentiment provides the grounds for fascist fear-based leadership to take control, fluctuating between grand vision and oppression.
Adding a further dimension to the critique of the establishment of power, the same practice of constructing one meaning with another is bilaterally represented in the film. According to Ramey, “It is possible that the film’s overt critique of the Spanish conquest would have been too remote a subject for many Eurocentric viewers to lock onto emotionally. That is one reason why, as a 1972 German film, Aguirre has tended to invite interpretation as a study of realpolitik power relations metonymically critical of Hitler and the Nazis.” Throughout the film, there are a variety of parallels to the Third Reich ranging from simple to abstract. A glaring representation is the acting of Klaus Kinski as Aguirre, a blonde and blue-eyed figure disjointed in his gate and intense in his far-off gaze, most often looking past the audiences into the unknown or maniacally at the camera. Similarly, Aguirre only contrasts his commanding statements and judgments with all-encompassing statements of vision and power. At first, these words inspire the mutiny and continuous journey, yet later evolve into outright fanaticism as the universe and all around it mocked. Aguirre at one point states “If I want the birds to fall dead from the trees then the birds will fall dead from the trees. I am the wrath of God.” According to the film critique of Wilmington, “His madness is a logical extension of his adventuring, conquering spirit. When he starts murdering and destroying, he is both fulfilling his own bloody destiny and exposing the insanity behind much of history's wars, conquests, and gold hunting.” While Wilmington takes on a broader view, the perspective is characteristic of Herzog’s film at large, establishing parallels yet always inviting the debate between the application to specific contexts and larger themes.
Within the fundamental concepts that Herzog illuminates throughout the film, the madness within ambition and the narrow divide between achievement, ruin, and the illusions of each are the product of contexts of the past yet applicable far beyond any single scope. As Dr. Stiles reveals from her background in German literature “As we have come to expect by now, Herzog is not interested in documented history, for reality’s sake but in a symbolic reality, in a deeper truth. To achieve this symbolic reality, he adapts facts to suit his vision.” In the same spirit, Germany in the 1970s was an environment ripe for reconsidering sociopolitical norms and practices. By applying the alternative context defined by the film, Herzog looks inward into the German practice of empire building and the dangers in rebuilding and moving forward as a nation. As stated by Cabrita, “Aguirre, The Wrath of God is an allegory of the madness that took over Germany during the Nazi’s reign. There are uncanny similarities between Aguirre’s journey to El Dorado and Hitler’s conquest of Europe: the lack of respect for other cultures, the enslavement and murder, the imperialist ambitions, the hubris, and the guiding myths of superiority of race.” In overlaying these ideas on a different culture, Herzog allows for dialogue and intertwines difficult truths about West German rebuilding in narrative and formal elements of the film. Additionally, “Herzog’s use and adaptation of history in Aguirre operates in three different ways. The film contains elements of contemporary allegory, historical allegory, and existential commentary on the human condition.“ From the contrast of the forest’s calm and human presence causing tension to the Galleon in the treetops questioning what is fantasy, illusion, and what is not, the film consistently invites a questioning of reality. Notably, “Herzog has stated that the distance between the seemingly clear sense of direction these people are moving in’ is juxtaposed with ‘the fact that they are looking for a place that does not even exist. Aguirre’s expedition is clearly doomed to failure from the start…we know that what these people are undertaking is almost the mechanical pursuit of defeat and death” In building an illusion that is compromised from the start, Herzog again provides conflicting meaning as if to embrace the end-all of the natural world and illustrate the duality within the process of creating. Thereby the film refracts the way-finding and mediation exhibited during the Zeitgeist of 1970’s Germany.
In conclusion, Aguirre the Wrath of God provides insight into the difficult environment of Germany's post-war rebuilding where the lessons and fears of the past stood in contrast to the possibility of civilizing and negotiating a future of adhering to standards while providing the opportunity for change. While the context of production and reception afforded a certain ideal of progress, Herzog’s film strategically identifies the flaws and challenges in the process of empire-building and organizing communities around common goals and concepts of progress. In the same spirit, the film addresses the specific issues of misguided growth and the general dichotomy of building and being conquered, and the relative futility of all such efforts when compared to the natural pace of the universe. Yet in reflecting on and refracting philosophical concepts fundamental to the direction of German regrowth, Herzog’s film is in itself an exercise of exploration and way-finding, the result of which was a powerful contribution to the burgeoning West German New Wave and West Germany's process of post-war assimilation.
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