REVIEW: DVD Release: Aguirre, Wrath Of God

Film: Aguirre, Wrath Of God
Release date: 28th February 2000
Certificate: PG
Running time: 90 mins
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Klaus Kinski, Ruy Guerra, Helena Rojo, Del Negro, Peter Berling
Genre: Adventure/Biography/Drama/History
Studio: Stonevision
Format: DVD
Country: West Germany

Aguirre, Wrath Of God was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 Best Films Ever, describing it as “an examination of madness from the inside.” Aguirre’s influence spread to Hollywood, a clear inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Terence Malick’s The New World.

1560, Peru. An exhausted group of one thousand Spaniards and captured native Incas, led by the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repulles), search for evidence of El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold.

After much struggle through the Amazonian rainforest, Pizarro orders a group of forty men to travel onwards downriver on rafts to search ahead. The small expedition is led by Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra), with Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) as second-in-command.

The group set off downriver on four rafts. One becomes caught in eddy currents, and, after being forced to return to rescue the soldiers the next day, the remaining explorers discover that the entire raft of soldiers have been murdered.

Aguirre takes the opportunity to lead a rebellion, which results in the leader, Ursúa, being shot and imprisoned. Aguirre manipulates the situation to elect Don Fernando de Guzman (Peter Berling) leader of the expedition, although Guzman is hopelessly inadequate. Aguirre, as the real leader behind Guzman, systematically kills any members of the expedition not pliable to his demands.

The expedition continues on a single, larger raft, although danger increases, as they encounter groups of Incas. Guzman is killed and Aguirre proclaims himself leader of the expedition, continuing to lead his gradually starving band of explorers downriver, towards increasing danger and madness…


Filmed entirely on location in the Amazon rainforest over the course of five weeks, Aguirre had a troubled shoot. While the director, Werner Herzog, felt that Aguirre should be portrayed as a quiet, menacing figure, Klaus Kinski insisted that the character should be a ranting madman. Kinski’s tantrums have become the stuff of legend; although the story of Herzog forcing his lead to act at gunpoint has been refuted by the director, Kinski did shoot off the top of one extra’s finger after a squabble. As in Fitzcarraldo, his later film portraying a madman’s struggle, Herzog blurred the line between film shoot and fiction. After a real-life flood destroyed the rafts built for the film, Herzog incorporated the rebuilding of the rafts into the film itself.

The film was initially produced with an English soundtrack (the common language of the multinational cast, and the language that Herzog felt would benefit the film commercially), but the commonly screened version features a higher-quality soundtrack rerecorded in German. Kinski demanded a huge amount of money for the rerecording session, so Herzog hired another actor to dub his German lines, resulting in oddly unsynchronised dialogue, which only adds to the unsettling atmosphere.

The film has a nightmarish documentary quality; droplets of water mark the camera lens, and scenes appear hurriedly framed (Herzog didn’t storyboard any scenes, preferring to react instinctively to the environment and performances). It’s often difficult to accept the bruised, terrified-looking participants as characters in a work of fiction or the rusting armour as props. In the initial scenes, showing the group struggling through the Amazonian undergrowth, the extras playing Peruvian guides seem perplexed and afraid of their armour-clad companions and their foolish expedition.

Kinski’s performance involves a rat-like posture that he would later employ to great effect in Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu. Added to this is a simian, scuttling walk - a man not entirely stable, even before his eventual descent into madness. Even at the start of the film, Aguirre is a pessimistic and toxic presence among the explorers, but, as the plot unfolds, he becomes more and more unpredictable, lurching between quiet meditation and frenzied outbursts.

The soundtrack is fixated around two themes: the panpipe refrain played by one of the captured Incas on the raft, and Popol Vuh’s strange Moog and choir arrangements, described by Roger Ebert as A “haunting, ecclesiastical, human and yet something else.” Both elements are calm but, used sparingly and accompanied by Herzog’s images, become deeply unsettling.

Much of Aguirre is what you might call ‘pure cinema’. Scenes showing the soldiers struggling to cope with their environment (one studying a captured Inca, one examining a butterfly landed on his finger, one staring forlornly downstream) are of equal or greater importance as scenes involving dialogue. Herzog, filming events in chronological order, documents a real journey and captures dazzling and unexpected moments along the way. However, Kinski’s final speech, in which he gazes down the camera lens as he expounds his vision of the new world, is one of modern cinema’s most arresting monologues.

Werner Herzog would continue to work profitably with Klaus Kinski, particularly in the thematically similar Fitzcarraldo.


If part of the joy of cinema is its ability to act as a window into another time and place, Aguirre succeeds magnificently, somehow authentic and honest, despite its fraught production. TM