Aguirre: Wrath of God

Film Review by Graeme Kemp

Walter Raleigh lost his son and then his own head. Gonzalo Pizarro and his expedition were reduced to eating horses, dogs, and saddle leather before abandoning their journey. Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesadas’ hunt left 250 Spaniards and nearly 1,500 Indian porters dead. Philipp Von Huttens’ tormented search concluded with his decapitation by a blunt machete, wielded by one of his followers. It is surprising then, that Director Werner Herzog was reading a children’s book[1] when he discovered, The Wrath of God, Prince of Freedom, King of Tierra Firme. This told the story of Lope de Aguirre, another deluded adventurer who, like others before him, was searching for the land of El Dorado, but found “nothing…but despair”[2].

Lope de Aguirre is one of the footnotes in the history of Spanish Conquistadors[3]. He provides an entertaining anecdote for New World historians to illustrate the cruelty, greed, dishonesty and deranged minds of the Conquistadors who went to New Spain. Certainly, the legend of Aguirre is apt to the task. A Basque mutineer who left a swathe of blood and chaos throughout New Spain, Aguirre began as a grave robber, plundering Indian burial sites. When a disagreement between him and the local governor erupted over the division of the loot, he rebelled, seized a ship and sailed to a nearby colony where got his tales of his enemy’s dishonesty resulted in the governor’s dismissal. He later seized from another rebellious governor the city of Nombre de Dios (in Panama) in the name of the king, but was later defeated in battle and fled. Seeking fortune once more he sought the silver mines of Potosi and found the wrath of a local magistrate who condemned him to 100 lashes strapped to the back of a donkey for the possession of Indian porters[4]. This punishment left Aguirre permanently maimed. Three and a half years later, Aguirre returned and stabbed the magistrate through the heart. After his vengeance Aguirre was part of a rebellion against new laws imposed by the viceroy of Peru. He was defeated and sentenced to death, but escaped into hiding for two years before switching sides in exchange for amnesty. Yet, the most notorious of his exploits was the homicidal search for El Dorado: an archetypal downward spiral into brutality and craziness[5].

The expedition set out from Lima in September 1560, led by a young nobleman from Navarre, Pedro de Ursua. On 1 January 1561, at their camp on the Putamayo River, Ursua was stabbed to death by thirteen mutineers led by Aguirre. Following this murder, another leader, Don Fernando de Guzman, was sworn in as general of El Dorado and Omagua, with Aguirre as maestro de campo. A document to this effect was drawn up. At the foot of it he signed himself “Lope de Aguirre, traitor”.

The journey now becomes synonymous with carnage. Singly, or in groups, men were stabbed, hanged, garroted, or drowned by Aguirre and his henchmen. Out of 370 Europeans on the expedition, about 150 were murdered or marooned, Guzman and Ursua’s wife among them[6]. They finally reached the Atlantic Ocean on 4 July 1561. Aguirre then ransacked the coast for a few months before attempting to invade the mainland of South America. In the end Aguirre was abandoned by all but one of his followers, the sadistic shoemaker Llamoso. He had just killed his own daughter, Elvira, to prevent her falling into enemy hands. Finally, the “Wrath of God” was killed, near Valencia in present day Venexuela, on 9 January 1562.

The theme of heroic effort and endeavor in mockingly futile situations, displayed within Aguirre’s lifetime, appealed to Herzog’s cinematic ideals. Herzog belonged to a movement within 1970s German cinema labeled New German Cinema. This movement can briefly be defined as a reaction to the collectivist aspirations of the 1960s, a turn towards a representation of the exemplary individual. This individual is often extreme, marginal and outside, in relation to the normal world, the world of history, that of ordinary beings[7]. Furthermore, the individual was counter-cultural and often a solitary rebel, incapable of solidarity due to his goal; he was also incapable of success. This insistence on failure is present in all of Herzogs’ films from Aguirre to Nosferatu (1979). Also present in all his films is an aesthetic that is almost fanatical in its insistence on physicality and presence, and in forcing the spectator to recognize and respect the strange ‘otherness’ of what he sees[8]. Within this realm of ‘otherness’ we witness the solitary rebel attempt to fix his obsession in reality and in doing so bringing about his own destruction.

Thus, one can see a search for El Dorado led by a rebel such as Aguirre as a perfect model for the representation of the cinematic ideals of New German Cinema. It is because Aguirre is historically the embodiment of the ideal Herzog wishes to express that he is presented so accurately. Herzog is not required to change features about the character, or create a historically false ideology for the character. By finding a historical character that embodies what he wishes to relate to the audience, Herzog is able to present an accurate vision of Aguirre. In contrast, a film such as Braveheart (1995), whereby William Wallace is fashioned into a character to express the ideal of freedom, an ideal that he is unlikely to have embdied during his own lifetime, can never present a historically accurate biography.

A further distinction between Herzog and other film-makers of historical subjects is how he presents his main character- heroically, pitifully, comically, superior, equal or inferior to the audience’s own moral judgment. Film theorist, Thomas Eisaesser, argues that in all Herzog’s films he makes it difficult, if not impossible, to entertain, by comparison with his characters, a stance of superiority, or derision or sentimentality. However grotesque, monstrous, or apparently pitiful, his heroes, we take them seriously because the director refuses to shoot and edit in a way that would permit an ironic distance, or an interpreting context, or commentary to interfere with the integrity of the image[9].

This style might be contrasted with Patrice Chereau’s La Reine Margot (1994). In this film, Catherine de Medici is presented as a crazed, intolerant autocrat in comparison to her daughter, Margot. For example, Margote attempts to save the Protestant Henry of Navarre in one scene, while in the next her mother plots to kill him. While Chereau’s shooting of the film provides the audience with a moral commentary, Herzog’s preference for the long-take and hand-held camera work, small crews and respectful narrators who let the subjects speak for themselves, allows the audience a morally detached view of the events in question.

Yet, while the historical presentation of the character of Aguirre is to be applauded, the other characters and events depicted are not historically accurate. Herzog wrote his scenario in three days while on a bus to a football game[10], inventing most of the narrative and characters, although in some cases he used historical figures placed in fictional roles. Indeed, Herzog even admitted to his embellishment of the truth,

Gonzalo Pizarro, the brother of the famous conquistador Francisco Pizarro, died six to eight years before my expedition in 1560. The monk Gaspar de Carvajal existed too, but his name is connected with another very obscure expedition which had nothing to do with that of Aguirre… the rest of the script is pure invention…the language isn’t realistic, its more a hallucinatory language, unreal. It’s like the ever slowing movement in the film which becomes immobility.[11]

Thus, Herzog admits that Aguirre: Wrath of God is not the history of the expedition. Rather, it is a psychological exploration into what it was like to be on the raft with Aguirre, sailing into a foreign landscape that ultimately leads to destruction. It provides to the viewer a sense of history that the book never could offer. As R. J. Raack argued, only film can provide an adequate “empathic reconstruction to convey how historical people witnessed, understood, and lived their lives”. Only film can “recover all the past’s liveliness.”[12]. Thus, while Aguirre commits overt fictionalization of the characters, it does demonstrate an ability to convey to the audience the psychological history of that chaotic journey into the ‘Heart of Darkness’.

The presentation of the landscape is critical to communicating the psychological history of the journey to the audience. It is the heat and unchanging nature of the landscape, the constant noise of the birds and the sudden silences that drive the characters mad. Herzog reminds us that it is the natural landscapes and environments over social factors that determine an individual’s fate. While one might read about Aguirre’s crazed exploits in books and determine that it was the harsh treatment by authority that shaped him, one gets no impression of the power of the landscape, or of how it could warp an individual’s fate or control his destiny. Indeed, it is a message communicated little in Conquistador history- the sheer extent of the landscape and its power of life and death over these men.

Finally, one must comment on the political theme within the film. Parallels to Hitler’s ‘Third Reich’, its desire to create an Aryan race, and its ultimate defeat at the hands of “lesser” peoples have been drawn[13]. Yet, it is likely that Herzog’s Aguirre was not a direct reference to the Third Reich but an allusion to the German question in the 1960s and 1970s. Those decades witnessed waves of urban terrorism and intense debates about the possibility of change and revolution in West Germany and industrial society[14]. Thus, Aguirre’s formulation of himself as a “traitor”, and his ultimate failure are used by Herzog to illustrate his attitude to revolutionary movements within the 1960s and 1970s.

In conclusion, Herzog’s Aguirre: Wrath of God is to a large degree fictional. The events, secondary characters and even the outcome of the El Dorado search are not accurate. For historical puritans this film fails to provide an accurate chronology and presentation of Aguirre’s search for El Dorado. Yet, this purist search for total accuracy within film may be the El Dorado of historians. For if we allow ourselves to consider this film in terms of psychological history it is worthy of praise. Indeed, it provides a detached view of the events without a moral comment- something even historians find difficult to accomplish. It offers us a detached sense of traveling upon the Amazon with the “Wrath of God” and in doing so opens up a presentation of history that for the book is virtually impossible.

Bibliography

Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (1989)

Werner Gerzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

Miles Harvy, The Island of Lost Maps, (2001)

Charles Nicholl, The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado, (1995)

G.V. Scammell, The First Imperial Age, (1992)

J. Rosenbaum, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, (1995)

E. Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, (1994)

Michael Wood, Conquistadores, (2001)

[2] Quoted from, Miles Harvy, The Island of Lost Maps, P. 301

[5] Charles Nicholl, The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado P. 27

[7] Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History

[12] Robert A. Rosenstone, AHR Froum (1980): History in Images/History in Words P.1176

[14]Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History P. 222