Aguirre proclaims de Guzmán emperor of the new country and declares Philip II dethroned. Knowing this would slow down the expedition, Aguirre hints to Perucho (Daniel Ades) to "keep the rust off the cannon". One of the key elements in Herzog's work is the use of landscape and the natural surroundings. [6][clarification needed]. Immediately prior to his arrest, Aguirre murdered his daughter Flores, who had remained by his side during the entire journey. Watching the film for the first time with audio commentary by Herzog and he revealed many things I never heard before. Under the command of Gonzalo Pizarro (Alejandro Repullés), the men, clad in half armor, pull cannons down narrow mountainous paths and through dense, muddy jungle. De Guzmán dines on the low food supplies while the men starve, and has the expedition's only remaining horse pushed off the raft because it annoys him. During the 1800s, paroled Brazilian bandit Cobra Verde is sent to West Africa with a few troops to man an old Portuguese fort and to convince the local African ruler to resume the slave trade with Brazil. "[42], Several critics have noted that Aguirre appears to have had a direct influence on several other films. A young man named Kaspar Hauser suddenly appears in Nuremberg in 1828, barely able to talk or walk, and bearing a strange note. If they do not return to the main party within one week with news of what lies beyond, they will be considered lost. There's no romanticism in Herzog's view of nature. His teammates got drunk after winning a game and one of them vomited on several pages of Herzog's manuscript, which he immediately threw out the window. [38], Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, a film based on Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella Heart of Darkness, was influenced also by Aguirre, as it contains seemingly deliberate visual "quotations" of Herzog's film. In 1973 it won the Deutscher Filmpreis (German Film Award) for "Outstanding Individual Achievement: Cinematography". "It took me at least a couple of minutes before I realized that it was Kinski who was the source of this inarticulate screaming. Media in category "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" This category contains only the following file. [33], Aguirre has won several prestigious film awards. SYNOPSIS: “Based on the journals of Brother Gaspar de Carvajal, Aguirre, The Wrath Of God is director Werner Herzog's hallucinatory tale of Spanish colonialists searching for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold, in 16th-century Peru. Through the character de Aguirre, Herzog demonstrates that history never truly changes; the drive for wealth and power is always a drug, regardless of the time period. I had some sort of natural right to this tool. The foreman of a small village glassworks dies without revealing the secret to the famous "Ruby Glass". In an early scene in which Pizarro instructs Ursúa to lead the scouting team down the river, in the script Pizarro mentions that in the course of the expedition Ursúa could possibly discover what happened to Francisco de Orellana's expedition, which had vanished without a trace years before (see "Historical Accuracy" section). In Berlin, an alcoholic man, recently released from prison, joins his elderly friend and a prostitute in a determined dream to leave Germany and seek a better life in Wisconsin. At once a 16th century Peruvian adventure story about the legend of El Dorado and a somewhat indirect parable about modern imperialism, Aguirre, Wrath of God can be regarded as one of the key influences on Francis Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now. This is a splendid and haunting work. Herzog's Aguirre is not of "short stature" but although he is not very tall, his deformity causes him to stand out. [15] Years later, Herzog recalled: It was a very simple 35mm camera, one I used on many other films, so I do not consider it a theft. Ursúa is then taken ashore and hanged in the jungle. Repaired or not, the plane left off anyway and crashed in the Amazonian jungle with the only survivor a young German woman, Juliane Koepcke. Illustration: Ronald Grant Archive T his is pure Heart of Darkness territory. The chronicle of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, La Relación ("The Account"), mentions the appearance of a boat in a treetop after a fierce tropical storm in Hispaniola: Monday morning we went down to the port and did not find the ships.