Sin #29: New Lands

If there is a common theme running deep in the movies by Werner Herzog it’s madness and obsession. He seems to love portraying characters as they venture away on dangerous and inhospitable regions and then rotting away burdened by their own follies.

Take Aguirre, for example. Here’s a Spanish conquistador on a suicidal mission through the Amazon convinced he will find the legendary city of El Dorado and become king of this new land. After Hernan Cortes took Mexico it seems that he might just do the same, ruling with an iron fist. We can almost figure from the start that his journey is doomed, making him a tragic figure.

The journey of filming “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” is almost as exciting as the movie itself. Herzog took his crew and actors to actual locations where disease and starvation were a constant threat. His lead actor Klaus Kinski hated the director so much he wrote heinous and despicable things about him in his autobiography.

The conditions of filming “Aguirre” were so harsh that there was an instance where Kinski announced he was leaving the film; Herzog said he would kill him if he did. This love-hate relationship continued for another three movies and was chronicled in Herzog’s documentary “My Best Fiend”.

It’s the authenticity of the locations that gives the movie a strange and eerie power. When we see the conquistadors fighting to keep the raft floating on water, we sense that we are watching real people struggling to hold on. And in the end, when Aguirre is finally alone we simply gaze as madness consumes him (in a breathtaking shot we see several monkeys getting on the raft and Aguirre trying to shake them off; it’s a powerful metaphor).

A recent movie that reminded me of Aguirre is Terrence Malik’s “The New World” which is a serious adaptation of the Pocahontas’ myth. “The New World” starts as a beautiful meditation on nature and the clash between the European and American traditions as the new settlers try to understand this mysterious new land. While the opening scenes have a spellbinding quality, the movie finally descends to cheap and pointless melodrama as Pocahontas goes to Europe; it’s a shame really that “The New World” becomes so generic, but it’s still worth for its hypnotic and beautiful tone.

These movies give us a feel of what it to discover new lands and realize that some things simply cannot be tamed.