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History Is Made in the Dark 3: Aguirre, Myth & the Reality of History

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History Is Made in the Dark 3: Aguirre, Myth & the Reality of History History Is Made in the Dark 3: Aguirre, Myth & the Reality of History Who can forget the opening of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God – eerie music, misty skies, green foliage, vertical rocks and narrow paths, as the camera slowly follows a seemingly endless trek of people, canons, pack animals and containers, laboriously winding its way down a steep and perilous mountainside? Or for that matter, who can forget the ending (spoiler alert), with the mad conquistador’s vast empire shrunk to a few square feet of floating raft, overrun by monkeys, circling and drifting on the vast sheet of water that is the Amazon as it is about to disgorge itself into the sea. No less memorable is what lies in-between, as Herzog improvises – with his crew and his mercurial star, the redoubtable but indispensable Klaus Kinski – on the 1 story of the semi-mythical Don Lope de Aguirre. Aguirre (1510 – 1561) was a Spanish nobleman from the Basque region, and one of the conquistadors of New Castile, the larger part of Spain’s South American colonial empire. Known as El Loco (“the Madman”), Aguirre, in a defiant letter written in 1561 to his sovereign, King Philip II of Spain, declared himself the “Wrath of God, Prince of Freedom, King of Tierra Firme and Chile”. Apart from this phrase, Aguirre is best remembered for taking deadly revenge on a magistrate (who dared to have him publicly flogged), and for his part in an expedition in search of the mythical City of Gold, El Dorado, during which he managed to kill the commander of the expedition, Pedro de Ursúa, as well as his successor, Fernando de Guzmán, in the hope of making himself a feared leader and the real political power in the region. Such are the known outlines of a colourful, seditious and violent life, from which Herzog took the latter episode: Aguirre, and his half-caste daughter Elvira, joining Pedro de Ursúa’s expedition down the Marañón and Amazon rivers, in search of El Dorado. The call for the expedition was in fact a ruse employed by the then viceroy, Andres Hernando Marquis of Cañete, to rid the Spanish Crown of some 300 unpaid and disgruntled veterans by diverting their ambitions from fomenting civil unrest in Lima to their cupidity for gold somewhere in Brazil. In real life, Aguirre turned the expedition into a rebellion against the King and his viceroys, went on to Venezuela until he was finally captured by the King’s army and beheaded, not before having killed his own daughter, supposedly to prevent her being raped or sold by the soldiers. Easily one of the most intriguing, reckless and self-contradictory figures to emerge during the whole of Imperial Spain’s colonial adventure – never short of usurpers, adventurers, sadists and scoundrels – Aguirre must have seemed irresistible to a director attracted to overreachers who think of themselves as underdogs, and who are either their own worst enemies or who pursue hopeless ventures in order to bask in glorious failure. Portraying the expedition as a fiasco – and telescoping two episodes some 30 years apart into a single narrative – Herzog crafted a riveting tale about a man consumed by forces he clearly neither masters nor fully understands, but who is driven by a quest for something singular and absolute, whether in the form of naked evil or sublime beauty. 2 Before Herzog came across the story and made it his own, it had already attracted novelists from several Latin American countries, including Argentina, Venezuela and Peru. They saw in Aguirre an emblematic figure, embodying the heroic, as well as (self-) destructive and tragically flawed character of so many military and political leaders, their bravado in fighting both for independence (from colonial masters) and for authoritarian control (over indigenous populations and natural resources). In works as different as Arturo Uslar Pietri's historical novel El camino de El Dorado (1947, fictionally reconstructing the expedition of 1560/61), Abel Posse's Daimon (1978) and Felix Alvarez Saenz's Cronica de Blasfemos (1986) – and not forgetting V.S. Naipaul’s non-fiction The Loss of El Dorado (1969) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s La Fiesta del Chivo (2000), set in Trinidad and the Dominican Republic respectively – the mythical figure of Aguirre is either a dominating presence or an undulating chimera, at once threatening and beckoning. Herzog does something quite unusual with the traditional mytho-political Aguirre. Historians usually try to evaluate the hidden agendas – and relativise the bias – of Aguirre’s contemporary chroniclers to whom we owe what we know about his exploits, while novelists selectively shape his extraordinary life in order to fit a political allegory that intimates parallels with more recent historical figures and events. But Herzog goes in the opposite direction: selecting from the legendary, apocryphal or simply bizarre anecdotes in the Aguirre story of the Amazon expedition, Herzog blends the mythical with the eccentric and takes them literally. Which is to say, he gives them a local habitation and a name: the dense, suffocating rainforests of the Amazon in the Peruvian highlands and Klaus Kinski. Herzog plunges the viewer into a discordant cosmos of singular sensations, at once overpowering and fragile, erasing the difference between man (the psychological) and nature (the elemental) with his depiction of fetid, feverish growth, matched and mirrored by the hallucinating visionary that is his Aguirre. It gives this piece of history not only the heroic and hypnotic quality that has fascinated chroniclers and storytellers ever since, but through the intensely physical way Herzog has made this films – and we sense the immense effort in every shot – history becomes paradoxically palpable, by being set in an almost preternaturally a-historical landscape. History – colonial history, political history, personal history – in Aguirre becomes a story emerging briefly from this suffocating thicket of sensations 3 before sinking back into myth and phantasmagoria. In Herzog, myth is not just a name for bad or unverifiable history, or for stories that primitive peoples tell themselves about the mysteries of existence. Myth is the ground from which history tries to extricate itself, but as Herzog’s cinema so clearly shows, myth is what it has to return to, if it is to appear both real and true. Thomas Elsaesser Columbia University, New York 4.
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