Aguirre, the Wrath of God: real history and Herzog’s otherworldly allegory of empire

A pinnacle of the New German Cinema movement, Werner Herzog’s hypnotic third feature Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) is a film of extremes about extreme actions. Its first few images are as sublime as the nature paintings of the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. But that mood is swiftly dispelled by the ensuing documentary-like sequences showing Spanish conquistadors and their Inca porters – some bear a sedan chair for the comfort of a finely dressed lady – labouring down a mountain and through the tangles and snares of the Peruvian rainforest. 

When they’re rafting down the Amazon, realism blends with theatricalism as the principals perform a kind of play. The verisimilitude of the physical ordeal suffered by the travellers is counterpointed by the ambient krautrock score, the water and mud that spatter the lens of Thomas Mauch’s camera in the jungle, and fourth-wall breaking shots of characters looking directly at the camera. Such Brechtian distancing devices, which emphasise the film’s artifice, limit the suspension of disbelief and make viewers consider the wider implications of Herzog’s otherworldly exploration epic.

It depicts the mutiny of the psychotic soldier of fortune Lope de Aguirre (1510 to 1561) against his captain, Pedro de Ursúa, during the part-fictionalised 1560 to 1561 voyage. Herzog, 29 when he directed the film, conceived it as a mythopoeic neo-historicist allegory of the all-encompassing ruinousness of Western colonialism; its message resounds at a time when Russia and Israel are waging devastating expansionist wars. Herzog’s most damning evocation of imperialist avarice and folly in a career that has repeatedly condemned the destruction of what he calls “the embarrassed landscapes of our world” ironically required his crew to colonise the area of the Huallaga and Nanay rivers and Macchu Picchu in the Andes. The adventure anticipated his filming of Fitzcarraldo (1982) in the Amazon Basin, which resulted in numerous injuries and several (supposedly incidental) fatalities among the indigenous people involved.

Herzog’s films, including such documentaries as Fata Morgana (1971), Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) and Grizzly Man (2005), search for what he calls “ecstatic truth”, which, refracted through the prism of his subjectivity, “is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylisation”; relying on facts enables a film to reach “only the most banal level of understanding”. If the term “ecstatic truth” lends mystique to a not uncommon idea – Dennis Potter also said that “drama is more truthful than reality” – the concept explains why Herzog fused or altered facts when constructing Aguirre as a myth with Friedrichian and Wagnerian flavours, partially to redeem German Romanticism from its sullying by the Nazis. 

Herzog drew Aguirre’s story from the 1541 expedition by Gonzalo Pizarro, brother of Francisco, the conqueror of the Incas, and the 1560 to 1561 expedition of Pedro de Ursúa. The impetus for both was to locate El Dorado, the legendary ‘lost city of gold’, a symbol of European greed but something of a MacGuffin in Aguirre.

Pizarro sought both the golden city and the mythical plantations of ‘the Land of Cinnamon’, east of Quito in modern-day Ecuador. The expedition barely survived the crossing of the Andes. Running out of provisions and harried by Indians, Pizarro sent his second in command, Francesco de Orellana, to lead a foraging party and find the mouth of the Napo river. Unable to return to Pizarro because of the river’s current, Orellana continued his cruise and discovered the Amazon in 1542, which his brig navigated all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. 

The chaplain on board was Father Gaspar de Carvajal, whose diary of the journey recommended him to Herzog as Aguirre’s narrator, though the friar was not present on Ursúa’s expedition. Ursúa was, however, joined by Lope de Aguirre who, apparently enraged because Ursúa would not let him bring his mistress, conspired with Fernando de Guzmán to assassinate him after fomenting a rebellion. Having taken Ursúa’s place, Guzmán was in turn murdered by Aguirre, who succeeded him as “Prince of Peru, Tierra Firme [northern South America, Mexico and Central America] and Chile”. 

Trapped by Royalist soldiers after he rebelled against Spain, Aguirre was captured, shot and beheaded in Venezuela. At the end of Herzog’s film, Aguirre, alive on the raft, stands at the centre of a visual vortex achieved by the camera mounted on a motorboat that whirls dizzyingly around him: the circle of death. As for Gonzalo Pizarro, he was beheaded for rebelling against Peru’s first viceroy in 1548, but shortly after the start of Herzog’s film in 1560, he is seen confiding in Aguirre, a seemingly rational lieutenant, before entrusting the foraging party to Ursúa. Herzog’s liberal conflating of Pizarro and Ursúa’s expeditions, his shuffling of the participants, and his Romantic stylisation of Aguirre mythifies the mid-16th century Spanish colonial experience and extends it to a meditation on the Nazi Lebensraum policy. 

Aguirre, the Wrath of God attains transcendence with its dreamlike opening, which sets the tone for what might be considered one long hallucination. The musical score kicks in a beat before the first image. Composed by Florian Fricke, performed by his band Popol Vuh, and featuring a mellotron-like ‘choir organ’, it evokes – once the Andes appear – celestial choristers hymning nature’s numinous power, though the high-pitched notes that reverberate in the oft-repeated main theme are ominous. 

Clouds hang over the foreboding Andes, its peaks stretching for miles beyond the foregrounded mountain. A descending zoom shot brings close a grey, black and green mountainside on which, hundreds of feet above the Amazon, insect-like figures cautiously pick their way in single file down the narrow winding path that leads to and from the summit of Huayna Picchu. 

The POV suddenly plunges, then slows as it zig-zags over the jagged terrain before a cut introduces a dramatic adjacency that mimics a split screen. On the left side of the frame is the mountain, down which the vanguard of conquistadors and Incas make their way; the right side is all cloud. Stressing the puniness of humans faced with the Olympian detachment of the natural world – an effect John Ford strove for when filming in Monument Valley – the disorienting metaphysical image suggests that the world has been turned on its side. If unintended by Herzog, it is a handy metaphor: the establishment, via colonisation, of four Spanish viceroyalties in South and Central America and the Portuguese colonisation of Brazil killed millions of indigenous people and disrupted their land management, laying the blueprint for the ongoing despoliation of the Amazon rainforest.

A medium-length shot reveals armoured conquistadors who carry halberds and muskets as they trudge on the path in the foreground. The wool-helmeted Incas drive pigs and llamas and carry fowl in baskets. The column’s leaders start to ascend the mountain again as the path climbs. Harbingers of disaster, a chicken basket and a cannon barrel plummet, the latter exploding on impact. Given the illusory goal, the perilous trek made by the explorers and their entourage is a prodigious exercise in futility. It anticipates the near-Sisyphean task of hauling a 300-ton steamship over a mountain between two rivers in Fitzcarraldo, as attempted by Kinski’s aspiring rubber baron and his – and Herzog’s – armies of indigenous labourers.

Using an introductory title, Herzog sets up Aguirre as Pizarro’s search for El Dorado in “the impenetrable bogs of the Amazon tributaries”. The megalomaniac Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) seizes command of the 30-strong advance party that Pizarro sends under the command of Ursúa (played by the writer-director Ruy Guerra), who is more interested in his devoted mistress Inez (Helena Rojo) than the mission. Absurdly announcing the dethronement of the Spanish king Phillip II and choosing the gluttonous nobleman Guzman (Peter Berling) as puppet emperor of the non-existent El Dorado, Aguirre has Ursúa hanged by his trilling henchman Perucho (Daniel Ades) in the jungle and Guzman strangled behind their raft’s outhouse. 

As the journey proceeds, Aguirre’s band – intent on conquest for conquest’s sake – rampages through abandoned riverside villages; at the second, they send capering ahead of them the gentle enslaved Okello (Edward Roland), believing his Black skin will terrify the Indians. As part of Herzog’s mythmaking, he was paradoxically named after John Okello, the instigator of the Arab genocide during the 1964 Zanzibar revolution. Herzog bequeathed “his [John Okello’s] craze, his hysteria, his atrocious fantasies” to Aguirre.

The village attacks avail the conquistadors and crewmen little beyond scavenged pigs. As the terrain flattens out and the raft heads on to the Mantaro River, fever and arrows fired by unseen Indian bowmen decimate Aguirre’s band. The few survivors are starving, feverish and delirious. It is Okello who sees – as do viewers – a European sailing boat, a canoe dangling from its prow, surreally perched atop a high tree. 

Paying homage to it, Francis Ford Coppola transformed this vessel into a burning American helicopter, similarly aloft, in Apocalypse Now (1979). The considerable influence of Aguirre on Coppola’s Vietnam War film – evidenced in the voyage up the Nung river of Captain Willard and the Navy PBR crew, the American slaughters of North Vietnamese civilians, and the hallucinatory aura – closed a circle: John Milius and Coppola adapted Apocalypse Now from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of Herzog’s key inspirations for Aguirre.

The monk Gaspar de Carvajal (played by Del Negro) – killer of a Yagua Indian couple and the venal representative of the Catholic Church who cynically admits that it “was always on the side of the strong” – tells Okello that the boat is a mirage, but Aguirre also sees it. Delusion follows delusion. After his daughter Flores (Cecilia Rivera) has been slain by an arrow, Aguirre is left the raft’s soul occupant, but for his new crew of cavorting monkeys, and his inner monologue supplants the dead Carvajal’s narration: “When we reach the sea, we will build a bigger ship, sail and take Trinidad from the Spanish crown,” Aguirre fantasises. “From there we’ll sail on and take Mexico from Cortés. What great treachery this will be! Then all of New Spain will be in our hands and we’ll stage history like others stage plays.”

Improvised on location by Herzog, who directed from a prose scenario that he’d written in two and half days during a football trip, the speech is the film’s most important. Aguirre does not covet riches, despising those who do, but the “power and fame” he expects to win for toppling the Spanish Empire. It’s left unexplained why he fixates on this vendetta, but the real Aguirre, who claimed to be gentry, was – according to unreliable sources motivated to vilify him – humiliated by a public flogging ordered by Francisco de Esquivel, a judge with Peru’s Spanish judiciary, who had tried him for cruel treatment of the indigenous people. That Aguirre subsequently murdered Esquivel after pursuing him for three years testifies to his mania for vengeance.

Insane though Herzog’s Aguirre is, he understands how history becomes history through theatricalised ceremonies and proclamations, however flimsy the pretexts for manipulating them to allocate power. “What is a throne but a plank covered with a piece of velvet?” he tells Guzman when he foists temporary power on him. Eric Ames points out in his 2016 BFI monograph on Aguirre that Herzog’s arrangement of the raft’s crew into tableaux transforms it into the stage on which Aguirre directs Guzman’s farcical coronation. Allegorically, the raft embodies a nation succumbing to fascist rule and the resulting paranoia.

At the centre of Aguirre is Kinski’s malign demiurge. Like a madder Richard III, he is characterised by his Nordic features, blond hair, blue eyes, eagle’s stare and crab-like gait. He countermands the idea that he is a fond father to his daughter, which initially humanises him, by voicing to himself his plan to breed a master race by impregnating her. (The real Aguirre allegedly murdered his daughter to prevent her being defiled.) Though Herzog denied the film was an allegory for Nazism, Aguirre fits the mould of the Nietzschean Übermensch as wilfully distorted by Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg – a leading proponent of the Holocaust – and other Nazi theorists to justify their advocacy of a biologically superior Aryan master race such as that Aguirre proposes. 

Important analogues of Aguirre include Zama (2017), Lucrecia Martel’s adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto novel about the existential plight and self-destructive actions of a minor Spanish magistrate trapped in 1690s Paraguay, and The Settlers (2023), Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s stylised Chilean ‘western’ about the long-erased genocide of Tierra del Fuego’s Selk’nam people, as orchestrated by the Spanish sheep baron José Menéndez. 

These, too, are trenchant films about the depredations and hubris of the Spanish colonial project, but the multivalent imaginary of Aguirre, the Wrath of God is unrivalled.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God is out now on BFI 4K UHD and BFI Blu-ray.