by Paul Cronin
Aguirre is about a little-known sixteenth-century Spanish adventurer who went in search of El Dorado.
From one point of view, as I look back on it, Aguirre could be viewed as an adventure story that on the surface has all the characteristics of the genre, but on a deeper level contains something new and more complex. It really is a genre unto itself.
The film isn’t about the real Aguirre. As with The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser a couple of years later, I took the most basic facts known about the man and spun my own tale. By chance, at a friend’s house I found a book for adolescents about adventurers – Alexander the Great, Roald Amundsen, Columbus, people like that – with a few lines on Lope de Aguirre, a Spanish conquistador who threw himself into a search for the lost city of El Dorado and called himself “the Wrath of God.” He initiated a revolt, made himself leader of the expedition, declared the king of Spain overthrown, and went down the entire length of the Amazon. After reaching the Atlantic, half starved, he sailed north and attacked the Spanish garrison at Trinidad, completely underestimating the forces there, before finally being captured and put on trial. These few lines in this book fascinated me and I tried to find out more about Aguirre, but little is known about his life; there are only a few remaining documents about the man. History is generally on the side of the winners, and Aguirre is one of its great losers. There are, however, several pieces of literature – novels and memoirs – that discuss him in legendary terms. Years after I made the film I read Aguirre’s letter to King Philip II of Spain, which is actually rather boring.
Aguirre fascinated me because he was the first person who dared defy the Spanish crown and declare the independence of a South American nation, though the film – which is set during the first few weeks of 1561 – never dwells on Machiavellian politicking per se, only the madness of such things. I invented a wildly defiant tone for him, a fury and absolute fanaticism, as he rebels not just against political power, but nature itself. He curses the king, dethrones and strips him of all rights, proclaims himself the new emperor of El Dorado and New Spain, then insists, “When I, Aguirre, want the birds to drop dead from the trees, then the birds will drop dead from the trees. I am the Wrath of God. The earth I walk upon sees me and trembles.” By the end of the film it isn’t just Aguirre who is mad; the whole situation is demented. There is a powerful sense of menace surrounding the characters. We feel them slipping further and further into trouble as the story progresses, and because of this the movement of time in Aguirre is more important than in any of my other films. What interested me was how these Spanish conquistadors set off in search of El Dorado and gradually all drift to their deaths. There is an army of a thousand people at the start, but by the end this is a small and pathetic group of the sick and wounded, a military force that has lost all sense of direction, eventually grinding to an almost complete standstill. At a certain imperceptible moment, a feeling sets in that everyone is futilely revolving in circles, that there can be no happy resolution to this story. This is one reason why Aguirre was shot in sequence, because the chronology of the story is so linked to the film’s rhythm.
It wasn’t my original plan to have a voiceover, but during editing I felt the film needed a more precise tempo. A voiceover also allowed me to introduce specific dates and emphasise the passing of time, underlining just how long these soldiers have been in the jungle. By creating the impression of time dragging on, we get the sense it’s running out for them. The text you hear is an invented diary of the monk on the voyage, though a real monk with the same name – one of the first to have travelled down the Amazon – did actually exist and wrote a diary of a totally different expedition. Historians are always asking me where I found the documents; I tell them it was in this and that book, but unfortunately can’t remember the title. Some of the other characters were invented, or if they did exist weren’t on the expedition as portrayed in the film. Gonzalo Pizarro, for example, the brother of the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, died a few years before the story takes place. I made up characters based on the names I read in the handful of real documents I could find. The script is pure invention. It’s my interpretation of history, like Brecht’s retelling of Galileo and Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Real events acquire unreal qualities.
There is an inner flow to most of my films, one that can’t be followed with just a wristwatch. In Aguirre things steadily move into delirium and become hallucinatory, as if the audience is being taken directly into the interior of things. You certainly experience this by the time of Aguirre’s revolt against Ursúa. Watch the scene of Don Fernando de Guzman’s “coronation” and you’ll see a brief tableau, a highly stylised shot, where all the characters look directly into the camera, like in a nineteenth-century photo. This is similar to the shot of the Irish doctors in Fata Morgana and the image in Nosferatu, with Renfield wearing a straitjacket and two guards standing on either side of him as he leaps crazily up and down. There is also a similar shot in Signs of Life, at the wedding, when the couple and their parents pose for the photographer and stare into the camera. Look again and you’ll notice Peter Brogle gasping for breath. I made him race me as fast as he could for a mile in the suffocating heat; everyone was ready to roll while we ran at top speed back to the set. I quickly tossed Peter a towel for him to dry his face and made him line up with the others, telling him, “Stare at the lens and try to suppress your heavy breathing. Don’t let on that you’re panting.” He stood there, his face contorted.
There is an image in Aguirre that comes immediately after the opening sequence, a minute-long shot of the raging waters of Río Urubamba, below Machu Picchu. The waters are so violent, almost boiling with rage, completely out of proportion to what a human being might be able to withstand. Three seconds of this would have been sufficient, but a minute of it prepares the audience for an approaching fever dream in the jungle. A filmmaker carefully sows, then harvests. After having seen this image, we are better prepared to accept the disproportion to come, the outrageousness of Aguirre, his grandiose failure to conquer an entire continent with thirty starving and ill-equipped soldiers.
These frozen moments don’t necessarily have any significance for the story per se; they connect more deeply, to the film’s inner narrative. Aguirre almost holds its breath as the multiple threads of a story moving in all directions are tied in a knot for one brief moment. Images like this have more to do with music – with pace and rhythm – than with cinema. It’s like knowing how long audiences can be confronted with absolute silence in a concert hall or opera house before they start squirming in their seats. While making The Transformation of the World into Music I spoke to James Levine, who was conducting Parsifal at Bayreuth; he’s the one in the film who always conducts with a neatly folded towel over his left shoulder. During the fermata, after the first few bars of the overture, he would signal for the musicians to stop, then take the towel from his shoulders, mop his brow, put it back on his shoulders and wait. The orchestra would look at each other nervously, thinking there was a problem. Only then would he start up again. James told me he wanted the silence to continue until the audience began to wonder if the conductor had dropped dead in the orchestra pit or run off because his house was on fire.
By the time Aguirre is standing on the raft staring into the face of a monkey, the surreal qualities and fever dreams of the jungle have infiltrated his fantasies. What we see on screen might be a delirious hallucination. Even the way the soldiers die is done in an operatic way. Ursúa’s wife has been wearing a blue dress throughout the film, but when she walks into the jungle – presumably never to be seen again – suddenly she’s wearing a beautiful golden royal gown, in perfect condition, though everything around her is rotting away. Logic plays no part in such things; grandiose stylisations have taken over. When audiences see the brigantine up in the tree they wonder if it really is there or if it’s just a fantasy of the soldiers. The image might appear unreal to us, but for those on the raft – who have long since lost thei
r sense of reality – it doesn’t seem so strange. For that scene I wanted a slightly stylised feeling, so we waited for the heavy atmosphere that emerges during the rainy season, when ominous clouds appear about an hour before it starts to pour with rain. We constructed the boat in five sections, built an enormous scaffold around the tree and hoisted it up. It took twenty-five workmen a full week to reassemble it. The thing had no bottom, so it couldn’t float, but it had a mast and sails, and a canoe dangling from its stern. Who knows, it might still be up there.
You spoke earlier of the “rhythm and sensuousness” of the desert. Can the same be said of jungle landscapes?
Absolutely. Jungles and deserts are at the extreme ends of the landscapes this planet has to offer, and both have enormous visual force. They also both hit back at idiots like me who challenge them by wanting to make films there.
As a Bavarian I have an affinity for the fertility of the jungle, the fever dreams and physical exuberance of the place. For me, jungles have always represented an intensified form of reality, though they aren’t actually particularly difficult challenges. A jungle is just another forest; it’s the myth of travel agencies that they are dangerous places. I really wouldn’t even know what hazards are out there. Like deer, snakes usually flee as fast as they can crawl. It isn’t as if the jaguars are all lined up to eat you, and piranhas won’t bother you unless you do something stupid. I used to catch them with a fishing line and eat them, and right after I pulled one out would jump into the water and take a swim. There’s no danger so long as you stay away from stagnant water. I have a strong memory of the cobalt-blue butterflies, attracted by the sugar-cane brandy we would drink at night. I would be awoken by the screeching monkeys on the other side of the river and find five butterflies had settled on my hand, slowly opening and closing their wings. It was an inexplicably beautiful moment. There is something glorious about people lying all day in their hammocks on the riverbank, endlessly watching the river passing by. Everyone does what they want because no coherent authority exists. It’s complete anarchy out there, a world away from the established order of the city. Outsiders have to adapt or leave, like a girl wearing a bikini in Munich during winter who quickly enough realises what needs to be done.
I never present literal landscapes in my films. What I show instead are landscapes of the mind, locales of the soul. Just as there is no such thing as background music in my films, landscapes aren’t picturesque or scenic backdrops as they are in Hollywood, nor merely representations of physical space. Most directors exploit landscapes only to embellish what is happening in the foreground, which is one reason why I like some of John Ford’s films. He never used Monument Valley as just a backdrop; for Ford it signified the American soul and the very spirit of his characters. Westerns are all about our basic notions of justice, and when I see Monument Valley I somehow start to believe in American justice. For me landscapes are active members of the cast, like the desert in Fata Morgana and the burning oil fields of Kuwait in Lessons of Darkness. During the opening credits of Signs of Life the camera holds for an unusually long time on a single image of a mountain valley in Crete, allowing audiences to climb deep inside the landscape. The jungle of Aguirre is never some lush, beautiful environment there for decoration, as it might be in a television commercial. It’s a representation of our most intense and forceful dreams, our deepest emotions and nightmares. With its madness and confusion, the place becomes a vital part of characters’ inner landscapes, taking on almost human qualities.
When I write a script, I often describe landscapes I have never seen. Although I had never been to Peru before I started making Aguirre, I imagined the atmosphere with a strange precision, and when I arrived in the jungle for the first time everything was exactly as I had pictured it. It was as if the landscapes had no choice; they had to fit my imagination and submit themselves to my idea of what they should look like. Although sometimes I struggle to find actual environments that match those in my head, I’m good at reshaping physical landscapes and making them operative for a film. They always somehow adapt themselves to the situations required of them. Often I try to introduce a certain atmosphere into a landscape, using sound and vision to give it a definite character. The fact is that I can direct landscapes, just as I do actors and animals.
Where does this ability come from?
Perhaps my grandfather, Rudolph. As I said, he was a self-taught archaeologist, an unusually bold and distinguished man with a real instinct for terrain. He could look at a landscape and determine where a temple now deep under the ground had been constructed two thousand years before. On Crete, the remains of Knossos had been known about for centuries because columns were sticking out of the ground for everyone to see. On the island of Kos, by contrast, there was no visible trace of any ancient ruins. Archaeologists there had already spent years searching for the Asklepieion, which was some sort of centre of healing and resort dedicated to Asklepios, the god of medicine. My grandfather read about it in a text by Herondas when he was a classics teacher, immediately quit his job, proposed to and married my grandmother – who was nineteen years old – and went in search of the Asklepieion. Like Heinrich Schliemann, who excavated Troy, my grandfather set out with only a spade and started digging. Other archaeologists had carried out excavations in different spots on Kos without finding anything, but for reasons known only to himself my grandfather chose to dig in the middle of a field that was covered in trees and vineyards, and promptly discovered a Roman bath.
What preparation did you do for filming in the jungle?
The calibre of some films is decided by pre-production, and pre-production on Aguirre was meticulous. Before I took the crew into the jungle I bought the most primitive and cheapest of cameras – some tiny Super 8 plastic thing with a wide-angle lens which I couldn’t even focus – and went to Peru, where I scouted locations. It was the first time I had ever been in the jungle. I did reconnaissance on a small steamboat, then had a nimble balsa raft constructed. For several weeks an oarsman and I drifted down the Urubamba, Nanay and Huallaga tributaries, sleeping on hammocks and rarely leaving the raft. From the first to the last tributary was a distance of nearly fifteen hundred miles. I was trying to develop a feeling for the river’s currents, searching for those that looked spectacular but weren’t too dangerous. Several stretches were clearly too hazardous for a film crew. At one point the raft struck some rocks and was split in two. The half we were on became caught in a whirlpool; what saved us was getting stuck in a strong current and being swept several miles away. It would have been a disaster to have made the film without having gone down there beforehand to test things out. It was crucial to be in physical contact with the rapids before I started filming, not unlike a few years before, when I took the actors and crew around the fortress before we shot Signs of Life. I had to create some tactile connection to the place, and wanted everyone to be familiar with the environment before we started filming. “We aren’t going to pull out the equipment for at least two days,” I said, and asked them to walk around, touching the walls and feeling the smooth surfaces, which is how I had experienced the fortress myself when I first encountered it as a teenager.
Peru was governed by a military dictatorship at the time we made Aguirre, but a left-wing one that had nationalised various industries and instituted a vast land-reform programme. President Juan Velasco Alvarado was of Native Indian descent and controlled a regime very different to those of people like Stroessner in Paraguay and Pinochet in Chile. We weren’t offered much assistance by the Peruvian government, though the army supplied us with an amphibian aircraft and established a radio station, which meant we could be in contact with the nearest big city, providing the electricity didn’t fail. Shooting permits were needed, otherwise showing up at conspicuous places like Machu Picchu would have been problematic. The government representatives we worked with appreciated that the strongest force in Aguirre is the Native Indians with their ancient heritage, fighting the imperialist invaders. Th
ey are the ones who ultimately survive, not the plundering Spanish conquistadors.
Once production started, we built an encampment for 450 people on Río Urubamba, including the 270 Indians from the mountains who acted as extras. It was so big I decided it needed a name, so I called it Pelicula o Muerte [Film or Death], which is a joke version of the Cubans’ cry of “Patria o muerte” at the Bay of Pigs. For a time I slept in a nearby hut owned by a hunchback dwarf, her nine children and more than a hundred guinea pigs, which crawled all over me. We eventually moved to Río Huallaga, but with a much smaller group of extras because throughout the story so many characters drop away like flies. Filming took about six weeks, including a whole week lost when we took the cast and crew from one tributary to another, a distance of more than a thousand miles. Once we arrived at Río Nanay we lived on rafts that had been especially built. There were less than ten in total, and on each was a small hut with a thatched roof and hammocks inside. We weren’t able to set foot on dry land because in the flat lowlands the jungle was flooded for miles around, so at night we tied the rafts to over-hanging branches. They floated in a convoy about a mile behind the one we were shooting on, which meant we could film the river without having any other rafts in shot. Once filming was done for the day, we would tie up and wait for this floating village to arrive, including the raft that was used exclusively as a kitchen.