Best Fiends Season: Aguirre, Wrath of God (Dir. Werner Herzog, 1h34m, 1972)

The boy watches as the house guest storms his way across the apartment, screaming at his mother, who cowers in a side room. Outside the apartment where this mismatched trio of the boy, his mother and this screaming maniac, who sometimes acts, and whose underperformance has left him this bellowing creature, this tornado, post-war Munich's healing exteriors loom. This isn't the first time the man has exploded into these rages before, triggered by un-ironed shirts, or critique of his performances, but there's another constant to these explosions of anger, and, as the man finally calms down, the shattered remnants of plates, and smashed furniture at his feet, the boy observes him, levelly, more amazed than frightened by these teutonic-tectonic outbursts. Klaus Kinski stares at the boy, his anger quelled, and not for the first time, nor the last in their shared lives, Werner Herzog stares back, as Kinski comes back to himself.

Several thousand miles away, and nearly twenty years later, it is Herzog that Kinski is raging against, the actor in full armour, helmeted, and blonde hair falling to his jutting jawline, practically screaming into Herzog's face, as the director impassively stares back. The difference, aside from the years, and the distance, being that Herzog has deliberately infuriated Kinski, setting off his hair-trigger temper to get the best possible performance, the duo, along with an army of camera-men, actors, and local tribesmen, together with 400 monkeys that Herzog has liberated from traders, are trying to make a film, and said film is being shot verité in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. The film is Aguirre, Wrath of God, a nigh-apocalyptic tale of consquistadorial madness, as they plunge deep into uncharted territory in search of El Dorado, that becomes a nightmarish, otherworldly descent into the human condition, and it will bring both Herzog and Kinski cult status as a duo and influence films as wide apart as Apocalypse Now, Predator, The Mission and Terrance Malick's The New World.

Simply put, Aguirre is a film about conquistadors hunting for El Dorado; we begin with Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés) and his men running out of supplies, deciding to send a scouting party further into the jungle. This is lead by Ursúa, (Ruy Guerra), with Kinski's character, Aguirre, alongside a nobleman and a priest, to represent the Royal House of Spain and the Catholic Church, and with Ursúa's mistress and Aguirre's daughter brought along. In short, we begin with fact, or, at least, elements of fact, with almost all of the film's central figures, from Aguirre outward, based upon real people, whilst the expedition into the interior of the Amazon is a composite of two expeditions-their fate lies very different from the film. From here, Herzog leaps off into the nightmarish, the fantastical, and the visceral-at his fingertips, the historical becomes the artistic.

Yet even here, before Ursúa's inevitably doomed expedition splits, Herzog's eye, his ambition, are on full display. From the film's first frame, to its last, the jungle presses in, and, as the camera drifts across the terrain, as the film opens, and the haunting organ led by German experimental supremos Popol Vuh's score hums into existence, the first of many dramatic, awe-inspiring moments make themselves known; the figures of the expedition snaking their way across the landscape as the priest, the chronicler of this expedition (played by Del Negro), narrates, the dramatic drop, the scrabbling figures clear to see on camera. It's just the beginning of Herzog's often breathtaking cinematic risk-taking. With the party now split, with the group commanded by Ursúa being introduced in a panning shot that introduces the key figures in the group as the priest narrates, before, inevitably, we are introduced to Aguirre himself.

It is around the nobleman that the film essentially proceeds to revolve-whilst he plays the title character in all four of the major films he made with Herzog, nowhere else does he become as all-encompassing, as colossal a figure as in Aguirre. Much of this is down to just how utterly he dominates the film as a whole-he begins as a glowering presence, half-squinting off into the gloom, helmet slung low. Compared to the handsome if clearly out-of-his-depth Ursúa, there is something malign, almost ill-looking about Kinski-he exudes silent, often sinister menace, his movements in the shadows around the action, to slowly push the rest of the expedition into enacting his plan, from the cannon that he convinces its operator to fire to rid the expedition of dead weight in the form of men who have been trapped by the river and killed by the native population, to the sudden and brutal attack on Ursúa that slowly tilts the balance of power toward Aguirre.

Aguirre though, is more than this. There is, from the moment that his mutiny, his lust for power and his quixotic quest into the heart of the Amazon in search of El Dorado, puts the weak-willed Guzmán (Peter Berling) in charge, and renounces the very government that sent them to claim the lands, a sense of barely restrained insanity, a maniacal sense of purpose as the natives, illness and infighting begins to winnow down the group, Aguirre's sense of power, of becoming, as the film builds to its inevitable climax, more than human, either gazing off straight at camera as though somehow preternaturally aware that he is in a film, or else aware of the viewer, or inflicting barbarism on the men around him. By the time the film leaves him alone, delivering crazed deluded speeches of power to monkey aboard the raft, among the mutilated bodies of the last survivors, he has become little more than a madman, carried along by his own sense of destiny, to his own doom.

That much of this comes directly from Kinski as an actor is undeniable-that this comes from an actor who blew another actor's fingers off with a handgun, that Kinski's rage is essentially set to work in service to the film is, whilst unfortunate, perhaps the film's best aspect. He is electrifying-you cannot take your eyes off him; he rules every single scene he is on screen, malevolent and just a twitch of the brow or a slow shift of his body language away from inflicting violence or setting the remaining men against each other, tightening his grip on utter power. Against this masterclass, this wild, untamed performance, this caged and sinister man who, as the film progresses, slowly unravels into utter insanity, is the jungle and his compatriots. Against Kinski's raging madness, his unpredictability, this raging unstoppable force that smoulders at the centre of Aguirre, Wrath of God, is the immovable object of Werner Herzog, an equal but opposing slightly unhinged ambition against the backdrop of the Amazon.

Herzog's films have always walked the fine line between genius and madness, on-screen and indeed off-screen, and even barely half a decade into his career, Aguirre-Wrath of God is his daring sensibility behind the camera perfectly matched by his anti-hero's quest to find and rule El Dorado. It's, in this modern age of safety-conscious cinema where even minor stunts are expertly choreographed, almost disturbing, and at the very least disconcerting, and yet cinematically exhilarating to see just how much of Aguirre is utterly verité. These, you almost have to remind yourself, are real rafts, carrying real actors down the real, (and at points almost horrifyingly turbulent) Amazon River. At points the film feels like its actors barely need to project their performances, as very real chaos, and the very real perils of shooting much of the film, churn around them.

At many points, Herzog's style turns practically verité-the structure of the film, as the expedition increasingly goes off the rails, little more than a series of vignettes to cage Aguirre, to keep Kinski's performance within the vague auspices of the plot-it, in a word, directs the volcanic fury of the German. Around him, though, the rest of the film is an equally superb mirror to this motiveless malignity, this ferociously mad performance. We see his men commit great barbarism-the film's river-based bulk is punctuated by death, by violence, by cruelty enacted by an ever-dwindling crew of increasingly mad figures as they attack villages, murder well-meaning natives, and are promptly offed by the (largely unseen) figures of the indigenous population-but the film returns, over and over, to the mad-eyed Aguirre, as his wrath slowly unspools on friend and foe alike, till he stands alone, gazing into the abyss. 

Herzog, of course, stares back. Aguirre is not merely Herzog's crystalisation of the key themes that dominate his films-human struggle against the seemingly impossible, the madness of ambition, and, at base, the human condition-but his emergence as an artist in cinema-Herzog has gone on to explore these topics in over fifty other films, and become perhaps the last great voyager of cinema, in his narrative and documentary films. Against him, he finds the perfect mirror, the sublime avatar, in a man that once scared his mother and practically destroyed rooms in his childhood house, for these themes to be cast across. Herzog may have made many beautiful, strange, and often affecting films, but the quartet we will come on to discuss across January that he made with Klaus Kinski are among the greatest films ever made.

But to Aguirre, Wrath of God, itself. It is a film about human arrogance, about madness, about God and gods, about colonialism, and, unquestionably, it is the moment that Herzog and Kinski's decades long friendship and animosity and hatred begins, in front and behind the camera. It is the moment that Herzog finds the muse that will come to define his work for the next decade. It is the moment he finds his best friend, his colleague across some of his best work, and in the screaming form of the figure of Klaus Kinski, all wild hair and hair-trigger temper and wide, staring, eyes, the perfect avatar for his larger than life, madly ambitious heroes. In Kinski, Werner Herzog finds his best fiend.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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