Graham Fuller

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

Werner Herzog’s Aguirre is a fevered descent into madness and myth, where colonial ambition meets cosmic futility. Blending hallucinatory Romanticism with Brechtian realism, his jungle epic becomes a haunting allegory of imperialist ruin – one that still reverberates in today’s world of expansionist violence and ecological collapse.