The Great Movies: "Aguirre, the Wrath of God"

If you have spent any time at all reading this blog (not even to mention its two obsessive-compulsive sister blogs) you will understand that big arbitrary projects are a big part of the the michael5000 experience. And behold, since I could not possibly have too much on my plate, this week I am beginning another pointless, oversized endeavor.

Dad5000 recently tossed out his copy of Roger Ebert's 2002 The Great Movies, a collection of 100 essays on that critic's favorite films of all time. I brought it home, where it gathered dust until a few weeks ago when, after drinking entirely too much lukewarm white wine, I grabbed it as a late-night leisure read. And you know, Ebert made all of those movies sound reeealy good. "I should watch all of these!" I thought.

So, now you know how I organize my life. I'm going to watch the 100 "Great Movies," and do the predictable write-ups here. Subject to the vagaries of the Multnomah County Public Library, chance, and of course Mrs.5000, I will be watching most of them in more or less alphabetical order. More or less. No reason.

Here we go!

Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Werner Herzog, 1972

One of the great things about the whole moving-pictures-with-sound concept is that it can help you imagine what it would be like to live an entirely different kind of life. Aguirre does this very, very well. It does not try to entertain you with exciting action or an interesting plot. In fact, it doesn't really try to entertain you at all, at least not in the "that's entertainment!" sense of the word. What it does, and pretty damn well, is to create a mood and a sense of empathy for what life (and death) was like in a certain historical context. You read sometimes about people doing things like trying to move cannons through the Amazon jungle in the 1500s. Here's an idea of what that must have actually looked like.

The Plot: Standard Heart of Darkness stuff. An episodic trip down a river through hostile territory, a descent into madness and desperation. In this case, the characters are Spanish conquistadors and the river flows into the Amazon Basin.

The Visuals: Stunning. From the opening scene, where a long line of soldiers, slaves, wives, and animals descend down a sheer cliff into the jungle below, the images are both lovely to look at and keen illustrations of the insanity and futility of what the characters are undertaking. There are a lot of long, steady camera shots; these are going to strike a lot of modern viewers as slow and boring, but make me sad for what we've lost with the more rapid cutting of newer movies. Sometimes its rewarding to just linger on a beautiful image, and sometimes the long impassive gaze on a scene is right for the mood. Both are true in Aguirre.

The Script: Spare. It's a image-driven movie. The characters, completely out of their element, often say things that are funny in a very dark, ironic sort of way. It seems odd at first to hear conquistadors speaking German, but you get used to that pretty quickly.

Prognosis: A great movie, but not for everyone. Recommended for film people, the overeducated in general, and folks interested in Latin American colonial history.