Aguirre, the wrath of God

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Movie
Original title Aguirre, the wrath of God
Aguirre the wrath of god.svg
Country of production Germany , Mexico , Peru
original language English
Publishing year 1972
length 91 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Werner Herzog
script Werner Herzog
production Werner Herzog
music Popol Vuh
camera Thomas Mauch
cut Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
occupation

Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes is an adventure film by German director Werner Herzog from 1972. The German premiere of the film was on December 29, 1972.

action

The film depicts a fictional expedition of Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century who want to find the legendary gold country Eldorado in the jungle of the Amazon . After the adventurous crossing of the Andes, the conquerors, accompanied by Peruvian highland Indians as porters, reach the jungle and the swamps of the lowlands under the guidance of Gonzalo Pizarro .

After the expedition had barely made progress on land, a 40-man group was put together on Pizarro's orders to search for provisions on rafts and to find a route. The advance party is led by Don Pedro de Ursúa, Lope de Aguirre is appointed as his deputy. The group also includes the Franciscan Father Gaspar de Carvajal, who accompanies the expedition as a missionary and chronicler and who keeps a diary (which takes on the role of the narrator in the film ), as well as two women, namely Ursúa's lover Inez de Atienza and Aguirre's daughter Flores.

During the first rest of the group on the river bank, all the rafts are washed away by flooding and it seems clear that the men now have to turn back by land. But the subordinate Aguirre, who wants to seize power and continue the expedition on his own, takes advantage of the men's fear of Indians suspected in the jungle and their desire to be the first to reach the fabulously rich Eldorado and instigates a mutiny . Ursúa is shot and chained, his followers killed or imprisoned. In order to legitimize his position within the group and at the same time irrevocably break the bridges behind him and the crew, Aguirre has the priest write a letter to King Philip of Castile in which all mutineers renounce Spain. Then Don Fernando de Guzmán, a puppet from Aguirre, is proclaimed “Emperor of Eldorado”.

In a show trial chaired by Carvajal, Pedro de Ursúa is sentenced to death for pretext reasons, but is initially pardoned by the emperor, contrary to Aguirre's intention. The men are now building a new, larger raft and the group continues their expedition. As a result, the crew is increasingly decimated by a lack of food and poison arrows shot by Indians from the bank. There are also internal conflicts. Aguirre terrifies his companions with his tyrannical and irritable manner. Inez bravely stands up for the life of her wounded lover, who himself does not speak a word to the mutineers. Entertainment is provided by the sounds of the Peruvian pan flute player , who accompanies you as a slave together with an interpreter and some porters.

Most of the Amazonian people are hostile to the invaders. With shots and the thunder of the cannon they carried, the travelers try to drive away attackers and plunder several abandoned villages along the way in the hope of finding food supplies. Two natives, who approach peacefully on a boat and greet the Europeans as gods, are killed by the Spaniards because they perceive their behavior as blasphemous : One of the Indians had the Bible handed over by the missionary after trying to listen to the book to hear the "Word of God" (which the priest had called it), fall to the ground in shock.

Guzmán is completely absorbed in his ridiculous role as emperor, lets himself be served by the black slave Okello and takes possession of lands as he drives past. While everyone else is starving, he eats almost continuously and his behavior makes himself unpopular. Finally, it is of unknowns with a noose on the abortion strangled. Aguirre uses the murder of the emperor as an excuse to have the captured Ursúa, whom he had wanted to kill from the beginning, be brought into the forest by his henchman Perucho and hanged. In a battle in a cannibal village a short time later, the desperate Inez, who was the only one who clearly recognized the danger from Aguirre from the start, leaves the group and disappears into the jungle.

A success of the expedition is becoming increasingly unlikely, but the point of no return has long been passed. The men drink the river water and develop a fever. A large ship that hangs on a treetop in the jungle seems to promise the nearness of the longed-for coast, but the men consider it a delusion. The speeches of their leader, who is driven by the desire to found a dynasty in Eldorado with his daughter and from there to conquer Peru, Panama, Mexico and the whole of the New World, remain ineffective. Finally, Aguirre's daughter is hit by an arrow from the bank and dies in her father's arms. At the end of the film, Aguirre stands as the last survivor on the raft that glides over the water and explains his plans to conquer a pack of dark squirrel monkeys who have climbed onto the raft from the mangrove forests and cannot be driven away.

background

Werner Herzog deliberately wrote the role of Lope de Aguirre for Klaus Kinski (1926–1991):

“It was already clear that Kinski would play this role when I wrote the script - in two and a half days while I was out with my football club and everyone around me was drunk and sang obscene songs from Salzburg. I typed the script almost completely with my left hand, with my right I had to fend off a drunk who finally vomited over part of the written pages. Then I sent the book to Kinski in the mail, and two days later at three o'clock in the morning I got this bizarre phone call: At first all I heard was inarticulate screams, and I didn't even know who it was. But it sounded so strange that I didn't hang up. Then I realized that it was Kinski and that he was thrilled, and for all that half an hour I only got to say four words: 'Where do we meet?' "

- Werner Herzog : in an interview with SPIEGEL on May 24, 1999

The external conditions under which the film was made were unfavorable. The budget was set at $ 370,000 significantly underestimated; about a third of that was used for Kinski's fee alone . The number of actors was very small, so that in large scenes almost only extras and extras (Peruvian Indians from the Lauramarca cooperative) can be seen. The camera will Herzog from the Munich Film Museum have stolen - in fact he had probably by Alexander Kluge borrowed. Herzog took the 350 monkeys from the final scene at an airfield under the pretext that he was a veterinarian.

Herzog spared neither his actors nor himself during the filming. The highland Indians provided the group with enough coca leaves to withstand the strains better. In addition to the difficult environmental conditions, Kinski in particular became a problem on the set : he repeatedly endangered production through disagreements with Herzog as well as outbursts of anger and fits of rage. According to reports from film participants, Herzog and Kinski even threatened each other with gun violence on one occasion. In the documentary My Dearest Enemy , Herzog explains that Kinski wanted to leave the shooting and that he (Herzog) threatened to kill him and then himself with his rifle.

The film is shaped by these problems, which lead to many mistakes, weaknesses and lengths. They are also his strength at the same time. Herzog succeeds in narrating a stylized plot full of symbolic allusions to historical events in a quasi-documentary style. There are no special effects and studio recordings, which means that the natural scenes can appear all the more impressive and convincing. Many scenes were created from actual events on site. For example, Herzog spontaneously built a flood that suddenly set in, which destroyed entire rafts of the crew, into the plot of the film. The ship hanging high on a tree at the end of the film was also not featured in the script. Herzog had the dummy made of wood and other solid materials by 15 to 18 men and hoisted it on a scaffolding that had been erected around a tall tree to remove the line between hallucination and reality in the film.

Despite all the stylization and the unreally gloomy mood, the film evokes the atmosphere of a documentary rather than a staging in many phases. Overall, the ending differs greatly from the script version. According to Herzog's memory (the original script is lost), according to the script, the raft should actually reach the Atlantic and be carried back to the Amazon by the tidal waves , with a parrot calling "El Dorado, El Dorado". Francis Ford Coppola later said in an interview that Herzog's film had a major impact on his film Apocalypse Now .

Historical and literary templates

The idea and plot of the film Aguirre, the Wrath of God are vaguely based on the life story of the Basque adventurer Lope de Aguirre and an actual Amazon expedition that set out from Peru in 1560 under the leadership of Pedro de Ursúa to find Eldorado. Historical references to Francisco de Orellana's first trip to the Amazon, which took place 20 years earlier, are partially mixed up with this (this is where the figures Gonzalo Pizarros and Father Carvajals come from, as well as the motif of the advance troop traveling further downstream on their own). However, the film does not attempt to reconstruct historical events, but rather tells a fictional story that is created through the historical setting, the historicity of the names of many of the characters and various historical allusions (for example, the encounter with the two natives in the boat marks the historical Encounter between Francisco Pizarro and the last Inca ruler Atahualpa after) gains particular charm. In the drawing of the protagonist as a diabolically driven "angel of evil", Herzog's film is based on the fictionalized biography of Aguirre in the Venezuelan novel El camino de El Dorado (German: Rauch über El Dorado ), which was published in Spanish in 1947 and in German translation in 1966 Author Arturo Uslar Pietri . From the fact that the historical Aguirre is a dazzling and often legendarily enraptured figure, who is already described in the sources as insane and filled with hardly understandable malice, Herzog develops a surrealist psychogram of the main character.

Just like Coppola's Apocalypse Now , Duke Aguirre is already inspired in parts by Joseph Conrad's story Herz der Finsternis (1899), which depicts the psychedelic river journey of an English sailor to the hiding place of the ivory trader Kurtz, who rules in the African jungle over a seemingly unreal realm of evil .

Contrary to what was indicated in Herzog's film, the historical Lope de Aguirre actually managed to reach the mouth of the Amazon with the survivors of the expedition on ships. He continued the voyage by sea towards Panama with the unrealistic intention of sparking a general revolt against the crown. Feared for his cruel murder, he led a terrible regiment in the islands and towns he had captured until he was overpowered by Spanish troops in Venezuela in October 1561 and then killed by his own supporters.

A quote attributed to Lope de Aguirre served as a template for the film title. When Aguirre proclaimed himself ruler over Peru, Tierra Firme ( Isthmus of Panama ) and Chile in March 1561 (i.e. only after the expedition shown in the film ), according to the chronicle of Toribio de Ortiguera (1585/1586) he is said to have said: “ I am the Wrath of God, the Prince of Freedom, Lord of Tierra Firme and the Provinces of Chile ”.

Reviews

  • Lexicon of the International Film : “A multi-layered adventure film about a monstrous figure of a leader, about imperialism, megalomania and madness, in an exemplary staging that strives for an authentic narrative. The material goes back to a historical chronicle and was filmed in original locations. "
  • Heyne Filmlexikon: “A great moment in the collaboration between Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. A powerful visual epic about imperialism and megalomania. "
  • The film was awarded the “Predicate valuable” by the Wiesbaden Film Evaluation Center . In the FBW report from 1972 it says u. a .: “... especially the opening sequences of the descent over the Andes, the shots of the roaring jungle stream and the first scenes from the raft trip are extremely impressive. The acting, on the other hand, is consistently colorless and stilted; Above all, the actresses in the female roles, whose function is not recognizable in the film, are nothing more than clothes dolls. Even under the prerequisite that the director has chosen a type for the main actor Klaus Kinski who is pre-marked as a monomaniac film stereotype, the appearance of this actor remains puppet-like. "
  • The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote at the premiere: “Herzog promised himself everything when he enlisted the German actor Klaus Kinski, who was cataloged as Wüterich, for the role of the possessed. The mask and Medusa look of this mime may well fit the role - the play of the helmeted fury does not express the spiritual content that could make the film significant, God's wrath. The paroxysm that a man possessed, in the metaphysical sense evil, through his rage leads the expedition, which is hungry for gold and ideologically pretends religious conversion, to the judgment of God, is almost given away. There's too much theatrical thunder in Kinski's rage. No god is angry there. "
  • The Süddeutsche Zeitung called Herzog's film "a colorful, powerful movement painting."

Others

Almost misfortune of the shooting team

On December 23, 1971, a shooting team was supposed to start shooting in the Peruvian jungle from Lima to Pucallpa , but all flights were canceled due to the weather. After there was only one flight on this route on the following day with LANSA flight 508 , it was completely overrun and Herzog was unable to get seats for himself and his team despite great efforts. As a result of this unfortunate coincidence, the film team escaped a catastrophe: The machine got caught in a storm and broke in the air. The only survivor was Juliane Koepcke , who was then seventeen . After personal conversations with her, Herzog made the documentary Julian's fall in the jungle decades later , which deals with this accident and Koepcke's rescue and was shown for the first time on German television in the spring of 2000.

Almost loss of the film material

In 2018, Herzog commented on the history of its origins:

“By the way […] - with the film Aguirre , the entire exposed negative disappeared on the way to Mexico. The Kopierwerk has sworn stone and leg that it never came. And we suspected it was still lying around the airport somewhere in Lima, and [my brother] *) discovered it. It was out in the open, just thrown in the sun, for weeks. Wasn't broken yet. "

- Werner Herzog : in the WELT AM SONNTAG conversation on April 8, 2018 
*) This is Herzog's half-brother and manager Lucki Stipetic.

Awards

Thomas Mauch received the German Film Award for his cinematography and the award of the US National Society of Film Critics , while the film received the French Étoile de Cristal for best foreign film (Prix International) in 1975 . The French film critics awarded the film the Prix ​​Léon Moussinac award for best foreign film in 1976. In the same year it was nominated for the César in the same category.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God was voted one of Time's Best 100 Films from 1923 to 2005 .

synchronization

literature

  • Gregory A. Waller: Aguirre, the Wrath of God. History, Theater, and the Camera. In: South Atlantic Review, 46 (1981), No. 2, pp. 55-69.
  • Lutz P. Koepnick: Colonial Forestry. Sylvan Politics in Werner Herzog's Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. In: New German Critique 60 (1993), pp. 133-159.
  • John E. Davidson: As Others Put Plays upon the Stage. Aguirre, Neo-colonialism, and the New German Cinema. In: New German Critique 60 (1993), pp 101-130.
  • Angela Errigo: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). In: Steven Jay Schneider (Ed.): 1001 films. Edition Olms, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-283-00497-8 , p. 552.
  • Robert Fischer, Joe Hembus: The New German Film. 1960-1980. Goldmann, Munich 1981, ISBN 3-442-10211-1 , pp. 80-83.
  • Carmen Becerra Suárez: La figura mítica de Lope de Aguirre en las versiones de W. Herzog y C. Saura. In: Hispanística XX (1997), No. 15, pp. 331-340.
  • Thomas H. Holloway: Whose Conquest Is This, Anyway? Aguirre, the Wrath of God. In: Donald F. Stevens (Ed.): Based on a True Story. Latin American History at the Movies. Scholarly Resources, Wilmington, DE 1997, pp. 29-46.
  • Katja Kirste: Aguirre, the wrath of God. In: Bodo Traber, Hans J. Wulff (Hrsg.): Filmgenres. Adventure. (= RUB . No. 18404). Reclam, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-15-018404-5 , pp. 351-354 [with references].
  • Holly Rogers: Fitzcarraldo's Search for Aguirre. Music and Text in the Amazonian Films of Werner Herzog. In: Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129 (2004), No. 1, pp. 77-99.
  • Hernán Neira: El individuo inquietante en la película "Aguirre, la cólera de Dios", de Werner Herzog. In: Revista de filosofía 63 (2007), pp. 73-86 ( HTML version ).
  • Carlos G. Queimadelos: Aguirre, la Cólera de Dios: Werner Herzog y el Nihilismo. (PDF; 2.4 MB) In: Enlaces. Revista del CES Felipe II 12 (2010).
  • María del Carmen Rodríguez Rodríguez: La búsqueda del Dorado: Aguirre, la cólera de Dios. In: María Dolores Pérez Murillo (ed.): La memoria filmada. Historia socio-política de América Latina a través de su cine. La visión desde el norte. Iepala, Madrid 2009, ISBN 978-84-89743-50-2 , pp. 15-35.
  • Stephen Brockman: A Critical History of German Film. Camden House, Rochester, NY et al. 2010, ISBN 978-1-57113-468-4 , Chapter 22: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Film and the Sublime. Pp. 329-342.
  • María Dolores Pérez Murillo: Dos visiones de Lope de Aguirre a través del cine europeo. Werner Herzog y Carlos Saura. In: Trocadero. Revista de historia moderna y contemporanea 23 (2011), pp. 261-276.
  • Will Lehman: A March Into Nothingness. The Changing Course of Herzog's Indian Images. In: Brad Prager (Ed.): A Companion to Werner Herzog. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester et al. 2012, ISBN 978-1-4051-9440-2 , pp. 371-392.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Filmstarts.de , accessed on December 27, 2014.
  2. Der Spiegel 21/1999 , p. 198.
  3. a b Chris Wahl: The epitome of an author filmmaker. Goethe-Institut , Internet editorial office, January 2013.
  4. ^ A b Nicolas Renaud, André Habib: The Trail of Werner Herzog: An Interview. In: Offscreen , Volume 8, Issue 1 (January 2004) (English).
  5. Gerald Peary: Interview: Francis Ford Coppola. 2004, accessed on September 20, 2012 . –– In a conversation held with the author on the fringes of the Cannes Film Festival 2001 , Coppola said : “ Aguirre, with its incredible imagery, was a very strong influence. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it. "(" Aguirre with his incredible pictures was a very strong influence. Not to mention him would be unforgivable. ")
  6. Klaus-Dieter Ertler: Small history of the Latin American novel: currents - authors - works. Tübingen 2002 ( ISBN 3-8233-4991-0 ), p. 172.
  7. ^ Arturo Uslar Pietri : Smoke over El Dorado. Roman from Spanish America. Translated from the Spanish by Maria Bamberg. Erdmann Verlag , Bad Herrenalb 1966.
  8. See Gerhard Wild: Rigoletto in the rain forest. Monad, myth and mannerism in the work of Werner Herzog. In: Michael Lommel, Isabel Maurer Queipo, Volker Roloff (eds.): Surrealism and Film: From Fellini to Lynch. Bielefeld 2008, pp. 89–118 (here: p. 98).
  9. Toribio de Ortiguera: Jornada del Río Marañón , in: Elena Mampel González, Neus Escandell Tur (ed.): Lope de Aguirre. Crónicas: 1559-1561. Barcelona 1981, p. 108f.
  10. Aguirre, the wrath of God. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 12, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  11. Aguirre, Zorn Gottes: A new film by Werner Herzog ( Memento from December 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  12. Aguirre, the wrath of God. Filmstarts.de , accessed on September 20, 2012 .
  13. Koepcke, Juliane: When I fell from heaven: How the jungle gave me back my life. Piper, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-492-27493-7 , p. 83.
  14. I don't dream at all , in: Welt am Sonntag , April 8, 2018, p. 56.
  15. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972). In: German synchronous card index, build date: September 1, 2019.