I just watched Aguirre, the Wrath of God, then I wrote this

I recently watched Werner Herzog’s Aguirre the Wrath of God, a movie I remember renting on VHS when I was in high school, and never finishing. At that time, it didn’t amaze me like it did this time—because of several things I can see now that discouraged me from giving it my full attention then. It would’ve helped me to understand Werner Herzog’s philosophy of making art. He’s one who believes that the contemporary moment is as heroic as any in the past — like when Emerson questions at the beginning of his essay Nature, “The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” An original relation, a direct, unmediated engagement with the universe…

When I was growing up I felt a horrible malaise, that everything had already happened and now life was all about looking back at it. For some reason I associated this thought with John F. Kennedy’s assassination. I guess that seemed like the world’s last dramatic event to me. That’s one of those moments when people would talk about what they were doing when it happened, when the world stopped for a moment… (today is September 11, and I suppose that day, 23 years ago, my feeling that nothing happened anymore crumbled with the towers, as I watched a TV on a cart in my 11th grade history class).

I remember hearing Patti Smith expressing the same idea, something like: We today are as capable of miracles as the past. We’re just as able to make great poetry, music, etc… But I can’t find where she said that. Can anybody help me remember where I heard that? Any other people expressing similar ideas? I know there must be a ton.

Werner Herzog has most likely expressed that same idea. At least, it feels evident in Aguirre. If I’d understood that kind of philosophy was behind this movie, when I watched it at the age of 16 or whatever, I would have been riveted. I would have been ravished by that idea at the time. It’s clear how dangerous it was to make this movie : you see fifteen or so people and sometimes horses riding very flimsy rafts on a wild river that looks very dangerous. I don’t think teenager Clark realized how much risk they were taking to make this film. How could writing words & music ever be that risky?

Another aspect that probably bugged me is the fact that the story seems to unfold like kids playing pretend: “Oh no… a flood!” “Whoa! They’re shooting arrows!” This fits in with the boldness of the whole undertaking but also seems to square with a kind of epic storytelling. There’s a childlike quality to it. And how could it be risky to write? Well, outside of taking a pen and pad while walking a tight rope suspended between the twin towers, you could take a typewriter on a bus with a binge-drinking semi-professional soccer team, which is how this film was apparently written (so I read on Wikipedia). Apparently one of the players vomited on some pages of the script — Herzog threw them out the window and kept writing, forgetting what was on them. I’m not saying that’s the best way to write by any means, in an intense burst, but it is a good way to “channel” something other than the typical words that are repeatedly articulated in your thoughts. That layer of thinking tricks me into thinking it represents something more than just the thinnest surface of what’s really going on “inside.”

Yet another thing that would have bugged me is the German language. This adds to the audacity of the film’s indifference to realism: the characters are all Spanish (16th century colonists violently seeking wealth in South America) but they all speak German. If the film were in English, the strangeness of that arrangement wouldn’t be nearly as palpable — because we’re used to seeing English used to portray historical periods in cinema where the language would have been completely different. Most surprisingly, however, I read that the film was actually acted in English and later overdubbed in German — and this was done due to budgetary constraints. The whole film is overdubbed, and Klaus Kinski, who plays the lead role of Aguirre, was overdubbed by a different actor entirely.

It’s striking me now that Mel Gibson’s movies The Passion of the Christ (which I never actually watched) and Apocalypto (which I did, when it came out in the theater…I barely remember the movie, but I do remember feeling very disappointed in it.) make an interesting comparison, since they have a similar gritty, bold & risk-taking feel, but they use languages that at least approached what would have been spoken in, respectively, ancient Palestine (Aramaic?) and the Amazon. That gives them a different sort of philosophy — a kind of faith in cinematic realism, where Herzog is more in line with Bertolt Brecht in his embrace of the artificial. Mel Gibson’s films try to put you in the historical moment, to simulate it — whereas Aguirre is putting you in a dream-vision with roots in a historical moment. Mel Gibson’s movies are bound to fail completely at simulating a historical moment, given that any movie you make is going to be terribly artificial — so just on that basis alone I think Herzog is onto something more interesting in Art Making.

I’ve heard him speaking about his theory of what truth is — something accessible only by a kind of ecstasy… “ecstatic truth” is truth reached outside of facts. I think I understand this, in terms of one of my favorite books, I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, which elaborates a Vedic philosophy that essentially negates all experience as false, meaning truth is only knowable through being. (That’s too brief a description and I’d completely understand your being turned off by it, but I just recommend reading the book).

I may be getting it wrong, but I also feel that getting it wrong is not necessarily getting it wrong, as what matters is the spirit, a kind of heroic effort. I feel like Aguirre is a film where you can feel being, which is an unsolvable mystery, only able to be felt, and that’s the kind of feeling I hope to access through what I do. Now I haven’t mentioned Aguirre’s character, but of course he is a cruel madman. But there’s part of him that resembles an artist: the insane part, determined to do what’s irrational and impractical and bound to come up short (I have to go back to Beckett – you know you’re going to lose before you start, and you try like hell anyway).