While
Herzog is brilliant to his approach to characters, he is also proud of the fact
that he is a great director of landscape. Landscape in a Herzog film is an
important element, and often a strong attribute of his mastery of cinema,
because it represents the opponent to humanity’s struggle - Nature. Herzog’s
portrayal of nature is indifferent, antipathic and unsentimental. It is the
chessboard where his characters move and interact, with each other or address
the call of challenge from nature itself.
Much
of the dramatic conflict in Herzog’s work stems from the individual versus the
surroundings that often overwhelm these characters in question. These
characters, no matter how bigger than life they are (as in the case of Aguirre,
Fitzcarraldo, or basically any Herzogian characters portrayed by Klaus Kinski),
are consumed by ambition, desire, dream, and obsession that drive their
actions. Herzog may be implying that madness and obsession, two themes very
frequently featured in many of his films, can just be two sides of the same
coin. Often, the world in a Herzog film is limited in the sense it will not be
able to fulfil the grand vision an individual may wish to perceive - most
notably in Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. The antithesis of Aguirre, brilliantly
portrayed by Klaus Kinski, is Stroszek, just as masterly portrayed by Bruno S.
The two iconic characters are sort of like Yin and Yang of Herzog’s cinema.
They represent a pair of personalities when one looks at the world they find
themselves in.
Aguirre:
The Wrath of God is Herzog’S most famous film. It is a tale of a doomed voyage.
The style and theme of the film has influenced Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse
Now, Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Alejandro G. Inarritu’s The
Revenant. The story detailed the struggle between Aguirre, an egomaniac who was
at odds with both institutions and nature. Like Colonel Kurtz, Aguirre could
not consider as an evil genius. As Herzog has also stated, there is no point to
analyze whether Aguirre should be considered a hero or a villain, because he
was both. What makes Aguirre fascinating is that how far he could go on both
ends. He was a tremendously daring person, and yet it was totally reasonable to
consider him as an egomaniac, even if such a psychiatric assessment might not
exist in Aguirre’s era.
A
similarity between Aguirre, Apocalypse Now, The Thin Red Line and The Revenant
is that they all contain scenes of exploration through the river, as the
difficulty of the mission escalates. Metaphorically, as the journey continues,
the characters are descending into the darkness of humanity and madness one
seldom wants to confront. While the characters claimed to be civilized and
expressed their desire to help and civilize the local people, they were
motivated by self-interest and irrational obsessions rather than any
enlightened views. So in both Herzog’s and Coppola’s films, the colonizers were
driven by greed and an intense thirst of power and control. Even institutional
measures like organized religion was not free of scrutiny, as the priest in Aguirre
went as far as stating the awful truth, ‘you know my child, the Church has
always been on the side of the strong’.
When it came to the pursuit of wealth and resources, this religious
personal was not much different from Aguirre himself.
(1/2)
by Ed Law
Film Analysis
