Aguirre, Herzog and The Secret Mainstream

By the beginning of the 1970s, Werner Herzog, then in his late twenties, had already made an impressive number of films. These had received praise from influential critics but were, to put it mildly, of limited mass appeal; his most recent features had been Even Dwarves Started Small, a bizarre tale of rebellion with a cast of little people, and Fata Morgana, a psychedelic desert travelogue untainted by any apparent structure, which found an enthusiastic following among stoned hippies, but was less successful with non-chemically enhanced viewers. It was at this moment that Herzog set his sights on finding a wider, international audience; his next film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, would be a “test of my marginality.”

Inspired by an entry in a children’s book of adventurers, he conceived of “an all-out adventure film” telling the story of Aguirre, a little-known Conquistador who had disappeared into the jungles of Latin America. Herzog raised a tiny budget and set off to Peru with a crew of eight for what would become a notoriously arduous six week shoot. Success for the completed film was by no means immediate; the German theatrical release of Aguirre, the Wrath of God in 1972 was effectively killed by a simultaneous screening on television. But it became a repertory favourite in Europe, playing in one Parisian cinema continuously for two and a half years, and grew in reputation until it gained an American release in 1977, and with it, widespread acclaim. The years since have enhanced its critical standing and it also has proved influential, informing the work of directors like Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now) and Terrence Malick (The New World).

The BFI’s newly restored print of Aguirre, to be screened at the Filmhouse from 7-13 June, gives us a rare chance to enjoy this great film on the big screen, and to examine its place in Herzog’s ever-growing oeuvre (a live counter on his website stands at 57 completed films so far).

From the awe-inspiring opening sequence tracking the train of the Conquistadors and their porters snaking along the vertiginous, mist shrouded paths of the Peruvian Andes, there is little doubt that this is one of the great adventure films. Scenes of the motley expedition slogging through the jungle and rafting turbulent rivers, armour streaked with rust and clothes rotting on their bodies, are given a startling verisimilitude by Herzog’s immersive style of filmmaking, in which the cast and crew endured almost the same privations as their characters. But revisiting Aguirre also reminds us just how far this “all out adventure film” is from being a conventional one.

Indeed, the least successful parts of the film are often those when Herzog tries his hand at a routine action scene. A sequence in which a panicked horse kicks a barrel of gunpowder into a fire on the Conquistadors’ raft is clumsily shot and edited, while a moment in which a Spaniard, after being shot by an unseen Indian, stops to declaim: “The long arrows are getting fashionable,” before falling stiffly into the river, is jarringly bad. More realistic deaths have been enacted in the playground.

While it is true that these kinds of sequences require time and resources which Herzog, working with a skeleton crew and a single camera, did not have, there is always a sense the director’s interest is simply elsewhere. When Aguirre’s party comes under attack in an abandoned village and the air is thick with arrows, the camera passes with little interest over the bodies of a couple of skewered Spaniards, only to fix on their comrades moaning with pleasure as they lick spilled salt from the ground.

Aguirre does have strong narrative sequences, filmed in a muscular, documentary style, but these alternate with moments of extreme stillness, the camera seduced by the roiling waters of the river for hypnotically long takes, or dwelling on carefully composed tableaux in which the actors gaze back at the lens. One of the most familiar images of the film is of Klaus Kinski, his face a baleful mask, staring out past the camera while a Peruvian porter plays the pan pipes jauntily next to him. Herzog holds the shot for what feels like forever, so that it overflows with mysterious significance.

Herzog has said that “my kind of cinema is killed stone dead without the outside world to react to,” and there is an openness to his working method which means that his surroundings and the people he meets along the way infiltrate and become entwined with his own preoccupations. He gives cameo appearances to animals, from the mice that infested the film crew’s raft, to pigs, baby sloths and monkeys. Members of the local Indian tribes dressed in great sheafs of grasses slip in and out of the forest, forming some of the uncanniest images of the film. An Indian couple who come onto the Conquistadors’ raft stare at the camera, as if posing for a National Geographic portrait.

And Herzog cares little for the niceties of the period drama. The script is cobbled together from a patchwork of sources, both historically accurate and anachronistic; his Conquistadors’ fondness for trials, declarations and coronations in jungle clearings nicely captures the bureaucratic inertia of Imperial Spain, but scenes of burning villages seem to allude more to the then-ongoing Vietnam war than the times of Cortez. Herzog inserts a character called Okello, after the Zanzibari rebel leader of the 1960s, John Okello, about whom he had previously intended to make a documentary, and also claimed to have based some of Aguirre’s madder speeches on radio broadcasts made by Okello - a man of stunning, demented cruelty. And in the film's final scene Herzog confounds the authentically slow and enervating pace that he has built up until this moment; the last shot is filmed from a camera mounted on a speedboat whose wake can be clearly seen as it races around the waterlogged raft on which Aguirre stands, utterly alone but for a troupe of tiny monkeys. It is a sequence of haunting strangeness.

In this way, Herzog in Aguirre takes the period film, a form in which the filmmakers’ usual concern is to squeeze the maximum quantity of crinoline into - and keep errant satellite dishes out of - each shot, and turns it into a visionary epic. Transporting his historical characters, with their breastplates, sedan chairs, and cannons, into a jungle which seems to hover somewhere between the present and the deep past, he creates a sense of forbidding isolation within an alien world that is more akin to science fiction or Tarkovsky’s Stalker than Downton Abbey. This is the kind of place where the sight of a boat lodged high in the branches of a tree, its sails hanging limply in the heat, is at once an impossible hallucination and just another occurrence in a world ruled by an unfathomable nature. (Recalling this boat, which it took 25 workmen to lift into its eyrie, Herzog has said: “Who knows, it might actually still be up there.”)

At the end of an interview with the writer Tom Bissell in 2006, Herzog mentioned, almost in passing, that he saw himself as being part of “the secret mainstream.” He did not elaborate further on what he meant by this rather enigmatic formulation, but watching Aguirre, which fuses the obscure obsessions of his early films with the conventions of a genre movie, perhaps suggests that it represents a way of working which allows Herzog to refuse to conform either to the demands of commercial cinema or the genteel parlour games of the arthouse. It is this opportunistic determination to realise his singular vision that unites Herzog’s vast, often maddeningly disparate body of work, from the epic melodrama of Fitzcarraldo, through baggy documentaries like The White Diamond and Grizzly Man, to his cameo as the Gulag-hardened crime boss in this year's Jack Reacher.

Most of all, Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a classic example of Herzog's compulsion to plunge fearlessly into the world to find images and stories that burn themselves into the viewer's memory, and of his willingness to tackle the big, cosmic questions without embarrassment or irony. And, of course, it is a great all-out adventure film.