Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog) (Patreon)

79/100

Second viewing, last seen 1994. Confirms what I concluded after revisiting Fitzcarraldo: Even Herzog's narrative films essentially function as documentaries, and are great insofar as they reflect the most arduous aspects of their production. Aguirre isn't particularly compelling as a character study, and the power struggle it depicts mostly involves Ursúa slowly dying over the course of nearly an hour; dramatically or psychologically speaking, there's little to grab hold of. Yet the film remains riveting whenever it's in motion, because the sight of all those cumbersomely costumed actors trudging through the jungle and drifting down the river boasts such an elemental grandeur. (Glad to see that Coppola openly acknowledged its influence on Apocalypse Now. Don't think that occurred to me 26 years ago; this time I could think of little else during every riverboat scene.) Although "grandeur" perhaps isn't le mot juste regarding e.g. the practical difficulties of transporting a horse on a small raft, which is the kind of thing one sees only in a Herzog joint. In any case, while there's no single immense undertaking here à la pulling a steamship over a small mountain, I feel a similar sense of awe at the sheer determined folly on display. Not the most conventional reason to be enthralled by a movie, I suppose, but wow is wow. Also, it's more darkly funny than I'd remembered, especially toward the end: natives reported as excitedly yelling "meat is floating by"; a man completing his count to ten as his freshly decapitated head rolls to a halt; the almost Python-ish dying words "Long arrows are getting fashionable." (Made me think of Eric Idle's casual "Message for you, sir," a joke that it predates by three years.)

Through it all, of course, there's Kinski, whose performance doesn't entirely match my decades-old memory. Paul F. Tompkins, who has like 20 seconds of screen time in There Will Be Blood, does a hilarious routine about meeting Daniel Day-Lewis on set: "All he is doing is sitting in a chair and I am terrified of him!" That's Klaus Kinski as Lope de Aguirre. There's a little of the foaming at the mouth that had stuck with me over the years, but mostly he just looks cruel and potentially dangerous, with the 16th-century helmet and long hair putting his lupine features in starker relief. At one point, some dude's playing the panpipes, with Aguirre beside him, and while Kinski does literally nothing during the scene—just stands there, sometimes looking at the musician, sometimes looking away, exactly as if he were killing time waiting for his next call and being surreptitiously filmed, which for all I know was actually the case—the feeling of impending violence is overpowering. (I imagined a much more horrific version of Bluto and the guitar in Animal House.) I don't know if one can genuinely say that Kinski was a superb actor, but he didn't need to be—he was a phenomenal screen presence, and that's all that this film in particular requires. I do wish, as ever, that the dialogue weren't all poorly ADR'd, simply because that's always an unwelcome distraction (worse than usual in this case because almost everyone's speaking English, dubbed in German—hard to sync those languages, duration-wise). But words mean relatively little here, and it doesn't much matter whether Kinski or someone else is muttering megalomaniacal nonsense in the finale as a barrelful of tiny monkeys scampers all over the raft—an ending more readily explicable, but no less magnificent, than Stroszek's dancing chicken. In both cases, the overall effect has been carefully designed, but the behavior of the animal(s) exists independent of the camera; animals and babies automatically create a quasi-documentary, merely by appearing. Herzog's particular genius was extending that idea to human adults.