Werner Herzog's Aguirre tells the story of an ill-fated Spanish expedition to find El Dorado, the legendary lost city of gold. The expedition party, chosen by the conquistador Pizarro, consists of ambitious rival noblemen, soldiers, slaves, a priest, and some vital instruments of war. Setting off up the unexplored Amazon on a small fleet of rafts, the expedition quickly runs into disaster. As it becomes taken over by the megalomaniacal Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski), it descends further and further into madness.
A lot of the discussion about Aguirre concentrates on elements outside the movie itself -- as, indeed, does a lot of its praise. Legends have arisen about its arduous filming process, which Herzog himself has not been reluctant to spread. Critics write in awe of the difficult jungle conditions, and the brawls, Kinski tantrums, gunshots, death threats, lies and larceny that happened on the shoot. One senses among many reviewers a kind of locker-room admiration for all this stuff. For them, Aguirre is an object of macho fascination, a man's man's movie.
Not that these background elements are entirely external to the finished work of art. There's something to be said for depicting an insane quest into the Amazon by literally making an insane quest into the Amazon: it lends a solid background of realism to what is in fact quite an unreal and heavily stylised movie. It gives the film a unique and unmistakable texture. There's also something to be said for casting a real-life unhinged madman as a semi-fictional unhinged madman: Kinski is quite astonishing in the role.
So many images in Aguirre are unforgettable: the opening shot of Pizarro's army winding its way down the jungle slopes, armour glinting in the mist, backed by Florian Fricke's awesome electronic score; the closing shot of Kinski on the raft, raging against the world, surrounded by dozens of tiny monkeys; the horse left on the shore as the raft passes by; Ursua's mistress walking calmly to her fate; and many more. Any random few minutes of Aguirre have a power and presence almost unmatched in cinema. There are occasional moments of bad taste ("long arrows are back in fashion") but they become lost in memory; the movie seems vast, much longer than its 90 minute running time, and I mean that in the best possible way.
Aguirre, made during the Vietnam war, powerfully depicts the violence and ignorance of the invading force, their disregard for native lives and native culture, their lust for money and power, and the hypocrisy of the church that supported them. I'd like to wrap up and leave my appreciation there, but unfortunately Aguirre has higher goals. As with the later Apocalypse Now, it reaches for a deeper, more literary, more "universal" theme: the insane journey upriver is a metaphor for the "heart of darkness" in all of us.
Herzog was a leading member of the German "new wave" of filmmakers which arose in the mid-60s and 70s. Many German artists of his generation, in one way or another, felt themselves burdened with the question of how their forefathers turned towards Nazism, and of how such a horrible thing could have been tolerated by humanity in general. Some phrased this in terms of a conflict between civilisation and human nature. Wim Wenders, a contemporary of Herzog's, frequently depicts pure, innocent individuals being destroyed by the institutions humans have built up around them. Civilisation, for Wenders, seems to be a corrupting force on human nature; we would presumably be better off if we ditched it all and went back to a primeval existence. Herzog (who is incidentally a much better filmmaker) takes the opposite view: nature itself is corrupt, horrible, violent. "Birds do not sing," he memorably said on the set of Fitzcarraldo, "they screech in pain." For Herzog, civilisation is a thin veneer over humanity's essential barbarism, a weak force, easily stripped away. Give it a gentle push, and it begins to break apart. Aguirre's Spaniards, brutish to begin with, reveal their even more brutish nature when the bonds of civilisation are cast aside.
I can't endorse either view. To contrast civilisation with "human nature" is to assume that the two are separate, and opposed; but it's hard to argue that civilisation is against nature when it has arisen independently, and repeatedly, in human cultures all over the world. Instead, I'd argue that civilisation is human nature; given a sufficient technological state, we have a natural tendency to settle down and organise things, to make laws; to gather together and build things for the benefit not of individuals, but of groups of people, and of future generations. Civilisation has survived many threats and distortions: since the first civilisations appeared six thousand years ago, there has not been a time when it hasn't existed somewhere on the Earth.
And as much as civilisation is human nature, human nature is civilisation. Armchair theorists might take the "inner savage" as an obvious truth, but scientifically, one can only begin to describe human nature by observing the way humans behave. And to a large extent, maybe even entirely, the behaviour of humans is defined by the circumstances in which they live -- social, intellectual, economic, and technological. In other words, human behaviour is defined by human civilisation.
I'm suspicious of those who preach about the heart of darkness: it's an ideology that can only be used to justify greater social control, to justify a dumbed-down pandering media and a consumer society that distracts us with doggy treats. But in truth, no great evil ever came to power by appealing to the "dark side" of human nature. Nazism, for example, appealed to principles which were there in a particular society, in a particular economic situation; principles which were regarded by many as good common sense at the time. So with the "white man's burden" justification of pre-WWI colonialism; so with the "convert the savages" justification of the expeditions of the conquistadors. It is the responsibility of civilised humans to improve their conditions so that such principles do not come to the fore, to snuff them out when they arise. And this can only be done by treating human beings as rational, thinking and feeling people, and not as brutes.