Seeing Aguirre last night was interesting, though I think I will save my comments until after I've thought about it a little more and given some chance for Herzog & Ebert to speak. The thing I noticed most about the screening was the way the audience seemed to think they were so superior to the characters in the film and through this very mechanism are repeating the errors of the characters in the film. Aguirre is about would-be Spanish conquerers searching for El Dorado on the Amazon and slowly going insane. It may not sound like it has a lot in common with our lives, but a sense of moral superiority pervades the group and ultimately leads them to their doom. I found this attitude on the part of the audience incredibly grating and spent most the film imaging it was actually science fiction occurring on another planet to help me acclimate myself to the material.
Terrence Malick's New World really captured the alienness of the New World, which for the early explorers might as well have been the moon. Aguirre begs some of the same questions as Malick's film---whether first contact could have happened any other way, particularly considering that our shock troops are usually warriors, criminals, and the religiously insane---I suspect if you were to corner the two directors, Malick might have said yes, while Herzog would probably say no. The idea that we are all on a giant raft drifting through the universe filled with unseen threats seems pretty much par for the course in Herzog's films, in fact his more recent
Wild Blue Yonder expresses this explicitly. From my post on that film:
He says something like, "After 500 generations... how could you have avoided inbreeding, rebellions, murders, would you not just become grossly maldeformed freaks with no idea where you came from or why you began the journey to begin with?" Lost, inbred, mad, any travelling civilization would have lost all memory of the original mission. It seemed like an apt metaphor for the human condition. There's a reason we call our planet "Spaceship Earth."
It would be irresponsible to watch this film without mentioning Herzog's other Amazonian film with Klaus Kinski at the helm,
Fitzcarraldo. Fitzcarraldo is another face of colonialism, but is slightly more optimistic and a much more ambitious film. Aguirre is a little naive, and in part worth watching to see Herzog's development as a filmmaker. Also Klaus Kinski: what a face, what control, what movement! There is a sense in watching Kinski that he is in the tradition of the silent film. The dialogue in this film is much less important than the images, though I will offer up the following moments to give you a sense of the film.
One of the shocking things about the film, from the earliest shots of the expedition hiking single file down steep rock faces in the fog, is the presence of women. One is a wife of one of the nobles. The other is Aguirre's daughter who travels primarily in a palanquin. There ruffs and lace are ludicrous in the environment. Fairly early in the film a serious of accidents befalls the expedition eliminating 'dead wood' that might impede the expedition or oppose Aguirre's push (though he is not yet in charge) to El Dorado. The nobleman's wife pleads with the priest for his intervention in removing Aguirre from power. He responds something along the lines of, "The church has always supported the strong to better serve our Lord."
Another moment that really stuck me was towards the end of the film. Everyone has the fever and they are being picked one-by-one by arrows and blow-darts by native who never emerge from the woods. One of the characters sees a ship with a sail in the treetops. The person he is with (the priest?) explains that, no, he is certainly hallucinating from fever. The camera turns so we can see this boat. Indeed, it is there. Then an arrow hits the 'hallucinating' character and he says, "That is no arrow. We just imagine the arrows because we fear them," before expiring. This is a powerful argument for the materialist world. All the faith in the world: in Jesus, in El Dorado, in their racial superiority, in their special destiny, cannot change the fact that they are all a bunch of starving lunatics on a raft to nowhere, or the fact that it was indeed an arrow that hit him and ends his life.
But the other thing that surprised me about this film is that it didn't get as grim (visually) as it could have. While most people would not call Herzog or his tactics, 'restrained' (his method is to take 500 people into the jungle and to film them going insane while provoking it) I've always admired Herzog's restraint. He reveals horror without making us watch it. There are cannibals, but no one eats each other: hell they don't even slaughter the horse. The women go unmolested and the most memorable dead is a long-leathered mummy. Instead, we remember the image of women being led by the hand down a mountain path. A cannon falling off the path and exploding. That boat in the tree. The raft, barely keeping afloat with what seems like a whole village on top of it. And the monkeys. One of Herzog's themes is the teemingness of life in places where the only certainty seems death. I am thinking of the rich and unexpected lifeforms in the Antarctic oceans. Of the crabs crawling over each other in Invincible and now these monkeys swarming over canons and swimming in the river (I'd never known monkeys could swim!), adapted to their environment in a way these metal men (so much armor!) never will be. Believe it or not this is the theme I find most hopeful in Herzog's films. We may not be here to see it, but life will go on. There is something rich and incredibly beautiful---not to mention perverse---about its abundance on this planet: unintuitive and unexpected and present in a way that we rarely acknowledge.
One of the reasons I love Herzog's films is because they have a liminal quality. The experience I get from them borders on the sublime, whether its responding to the ecstatic imagery---particularly of the natural world---or the sense one has, while watching them, of entering a dream-like state. Herzog has often called film 'the art of illiterates' and film critic Jim Emerson expanded upon this on KGNU this morning, which nicely dovetailed with my thoughts re: visual literacy and the pendulum swing back in this direction. (I will post a link once it's available.) Aguirre is a very apt example of extremely complicated ideas being communicated in almost an entirely visual way.
I will post more as I think about it. I suspect this will be revised several times in the coming week.