Aguirre, the Wrath of God 4K 1972 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

After the conquest and sacking of the Inca state by the Spaniards, a legend arose about the fabulously rich country of Eldorado, which was lost in the countless swamps of the Amazon basin.

Review 4K Movie

Werner Herzog is Homo ignotus in German cinema of the 70s and 80s. He is a fierce romantic of the “southern” Munich wave of German cinema, an existential documentary filmmaker whose films are as “material” and ephemeral as the Peruvian forests he loves. Herzog, who always said that “cinema is not an art for scientists, but for illiterates”, confirmed his own thirst for knowledge of the world and man with each of his films.

The director who came to cinema with a special ethnographic vision of the script of one of his most famous films “Aguirre, the wrath of God” wrote for two and a half days during a trip with his team to a soccer match. He wrote it quickly. After that, he had no choice but to steal 35-millimeter film from the stock of the film school he was attending, and then break off with the entire crew into the remote jungle, teeming with everything that the unaccustomed white man could eat, bite and infect.

Herzog refers the action to the first half of the XV century, in those Renaissance times when Spain with the savagery of a rich empire conquered the living space, destroyed ancient Worlds, drove into slavery the whole New World and killed the History of Mankind in the name of King Charles V and did it with the hands of a handful of thugs led by illiterate Pissaro.

Pissaro wanted to find Eldorado, to find something that could be melted down and then floated down the yellow waters of the Amazon straight to His Majesty's ships. But he did not take into account one important detail - Spanish blood in the Inca sunset was a rare thing and therefore even more desirable for the Indians avenging the death of their king. And so the long road in the jungle for the Spanish conquistadors from the campaign of conquerors turns into a bandit raid of a company of high-ranking Spaniards, led by the crooked Lope De Aguire, who are dumbfounded by mutual hatred.

Herzog revels in Aguire's imperiousness, sublimating in him the pure force of Man's will against heaven, against the order of things. The little feverish Aguire calling himself “the wrath of God” declaring that “if I want the birds to fall dead from the trees, the birds will fall dead from the trees”, becomes for the rest of the squeezed out bunch of hungry underdog conquistadors “the scourge of God”.

Aguire is the great traitor of countries and dead continents that never existed, the illegitimate heir to great barbarian empires and incestuous royal families. He came to conquer his paradise, his new Spain, his Eldorado, his Land of Great Dreams and found only the smell of death in the humid air of the jungle promising gold. He is a conquistador in his once-not-decaying armor; he is Charon sworn in the name of the Styx; he is a madman gazing spellbound into the gray Peruvian sky; he is as if he had just stepped out of a painting by Antonio de Pereda, but had not accepted repentance. His God is freedom, the scorn and anger of the accursed celestial. He is recognizable and appealing because he embodied the power of all the fanatical freaks ever born on this Earth.

Such a hero could capture Herzog's imagination, because he is a contra, a medieval stalker, an invulnerable warrior performing the ritual of conquista of paraíso and not suspecting that the clay water of the Amazon carrying his raft to the misty Eldorado has already imprisoned him between its shores, leaving him alone with his obsession, alone in his immortality in this Peruvian Valhalla.

Eldorado becomes for this cursed king an obsession that has already passed from the real plane of perception into a mystical feeling that lives only in his maddened imagination and fear of the unknown that lurks in the jungle. Herzog endows the little occupant with a special superconsciousness and faith in his destiny before the world, assigning to Aggira the desire to create history like “others put on a play”.

The movie looks like a true-to-life documentary sketch of the great era of the Spanish conquistadors' conquest of South America, and the German director creates a very strange illusion of “watching” everything that is happening, which is even more intensified when the dreary rattling instrumental “Popol Vuh” is played.

And in the end you realize that “Aggire, the Wrath of God” is frankly anti-genre thing, whose generalized planetarity starts to go off the scale by the end of the event, more than paying off not only the obvious drag and monotony of the tape, but even the irritating and eye-cutting red nitrolac, which is spilled sparingly instead of precious Spanish blood.

This is truly a cult movie, as Herzog has found some special mystical, sacred language in which to talk about all the madness, secrets and curses of this world.