The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Werner Herzog · a film in German · 1972 · about 93 minutes · the one cut, with the German soundtrack
Mode
Historical adventure epic played as delirium; chronicle, parable and record of its own making in one
Mythos
The quest for El Dorado turned downstream; the river as the road to the underworld; the overreacher who names himself God’s instrument
Phase
Some six weeks of dated diary entries, from the descent of an Andean pass at the end of 1560 to one raft adrift
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 35mm, about 93 minutes, in German; Thomas Mauch’s handheld camera at water level, music by Popol Vuh, a friar’s diary in voice-over
Register
Terror and grandeur, choral and slow, with the farce of an emperor at his meal set inside them
Scale
One expedition, one river and one will, and behind them the conquest of a continent
Governing Proposition
A Spanish expedition comes down from the Andes in search of El Dorado, and the party sent ahead by raft is taken by the current and by one man’s will until a single raft turns in place with its last living man aboard. The wager of the film is that conquest is a will to possession that dresses itself in documents and sacraments and carries them intact long after its reason has gone, and that an epic made with a handful of actors on a real river can play that conquest as a delirium that the audience is made to share.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins on a mountainside. A column of conquistadors, slaves, llamas and litter-bearers winds down a sheer green slope into cloud, small against the mountain. The shot is held long, and Popol Vuh’s choir-like keyboard rises over it. Armour, a sedan chair and a cannon are carried down a cloud forest by slaves. Before a word is spoken the film has stated its argument in an image: the apparatus of Europe, intact and absurd, descending into a place that does not answer it. Once the column is on the slope it cannot turn back.
A voice begins to read a diary. It is the friar Gaspar de Carvajal’s, and it dates its entries from the end of 1560, recording the expedition stage by stage across some six weeks, in a sober voice that does not change as the image grows stranger. The diary is invented. The history is joined by design: the real Gonzalo Pizarro’s expedition was in 1541, the real Carvajal chronicled Orellana’s voyage of 1541 and 1542, and the real Lope de Aguirre sailed under Pedro de Ursúa in 1560 and 1561. The film takes from each what it needs, a search for El Dorado, a chronicle and a rebel, and makes of them one journey.
Werner Herzog wrote, directed and produced it, in West Germany, and it was first shown in December 1972. Thomas Mauch photographed it on 35mm colour, on location in Peru; Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus cut it; the music is Popol Vuh’s, by Florian Fricke. Klaus Kinski plays Aguirre, with Ruy Guerra as Ursúa, Helena Rojo as Inés, Del Negro as Carvajal, Peter Berling as Don Fernando de Guzmán and Cecilia Rivera as Aguirre’s daughter Flores. It runs about 93 minutes in one cut. A German and an English soundtrack exist; the picture is the same under both, and the desk judges the film as released with the German track.
Movement II
At the foot of the mountains the expedition halts. The way ahead is a river, and a party is sent down it on rafts to reconnoitre: Ursúa in command, with Aguirre, the nobleman Guzmán, the friar, Inés, Aguirre’s daughter and the soldiers and slaves. The column is split, and the first subtraction has been made. From here the film has one direction, and every advance it makes will be a descent.
One raft is caught in an eddy. It turns in place, near and unreachable, and the rest can do nothing. The next morning its men are found dead. The current that will carry the rest of the film shows here, at the start, what it does: it holds a thing in place and lets it die in sight of those who could not reach it. The river has closed the way back.
Mauch’s camera stays mostly on the water, at the height of the rafts, carried into the river with the cast. The bank is always far and always unreadable: a wall of green from which nothing comes but sound and, later, arrows. The audience knows the forest as the expedition knows it, from outside and from below. The hardship of the journey shows on the faces, and the film’s epic scale is won by being there rather than by building anything.
Movement III
The mutiny comes, and the trial that follows is long: Ursúa is deposed and tried, and the expedition renounces the Spanish crown, its notary recording the renunciation with bureaucratic care. A king is deposed by document in a forest where no document has force. The friar sides with the men who hold the guns, and says so plainly.
Aguirre does not take the crown himself. Guzmán, fat and grand, is proclaimed emperor of El Dorado, a sovereign over land that no one in the party has seen, and the ceremony is performed in full. Then the emperor eats. Guzmán sits at his meal on his throne while his subjects starve, and a horse is put over the side. The comedy is broad, and it is the same fact as the terror: the forms of legitimacy carried intact down the river long after there is anything for them to govern.
Through all of it Kinski plays Aguirre as a posture: a lopsided walk on a lame hip, the head tilted, a stillness that threatens more than speech. He rarely raises his voice, and when he does the outburst lands. He wants a continent. He would found a dynasty with his own daughter, the purest dynasty the earth has seen, as he boasts it. He is a rebel against king and God who names himself God’s instrument. The film watches him from outside. What is inside him is given only through gesture and through two speeches.
Movement IV
The drift begins. The rafts move down the brown water, and the diary gives each day a date. Arrows come from the bank, out of nothing, and men fall without a sound. The film lets these stretches run flat, and some of them run longer than they need to: two or three skirmishes on the bank do the same work, and the middle of the journey repeats its effect more than it advances it. Guzmán dies, and the empire has no emperor.
A man comes down the river in a canoe, and a Bible is put into his hands. He holds it to his ear, listening for it to speak. It is the only face the film gives to the people being conquered, and in one gesture it shows what the conquest carries and what it cannot hear. Elsewhere the conquered are slaves in chains, a slave who plays a pipe, and arrows from a bank that is never seen.
Inés, by now a widow, leaves the raft. In her court dress she walks upright into the forest and does not look back. No one follows her. The women go, the horses go, the food goes; the men begin to die of hunger and arrows. The diary keeps its sober entries while the image grows stranger, and the distance between what is recorded and what is seen widens with each entry.
Movement V
The survivors see a ship lodged high in a tree, and will not believe they see it. It is the hallucination that tells the audience the delirium is now shared: starvation has made one mind of the raft. Then the diary stops.
Aguirre is left alone on the raft among the dead. Small monkeys overrun it, hundreds of them, over the corpses. He is still the sovereign of a continent in his own mind, and he names himself what the title names him, “der Zorn Gottes”: “the wrath of God”. It is his boast and the film’s verdict on him at once. The camera circles the raft in the brown current, and the raft turns in place as the first one did in the eddy. The journey ends as rotation.
The film was the international breakthrough of its director and, with Fassbinder and Wenders, of the new German cinema abroad, and the first film Herzog made with Kinski. Its river journey to a madman returned at far greater scale in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), and Herzog answered it himself with Fitzcarraldo (1982). It has been read as an anatomy of colonialism, as a parable of a leader carrying a people to ruin, and as an allegory of its own making. What it has made is a form: a costume epic played on a real river, in which the current is the plot and the last image is a man who believes himself sovereign, turning in place.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites less than one expects of a film made so loosely. Each station is a stage of one subtraction: the column is split, the party loses a raft, the leader is deposed, the puppet emperor dies, the women go, the horses go, the men go. Remove the coronation and the film loses its account of legitimacy; remove the man in the canoe and it loses its one face of the people being conquered; remove the ship in the tree and it loses the sign that the delirium is shared. What gives: the drift of the middle third repeats its effect more than it advances it, two or three skirmishes on the bank do the same work, and the trial of Ursúa runs longer than its point needs.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: conquest is a will to possession that clothes itself in documents and sacraments, and the clothing is carried down the river intact long after the reason has gone. A notary records the deposition of a king; an emperor is proclaimed over land no one has seen; a friar sides with whoever holds the gun and says so; a horse goes overboard while food is hoarded at the throne. The image discloses as much as the words: armour, a sedan chair and a cannon carried down a cloud forest are the argument. Held at the bar: much of the power is atmosphere, and the conquered are seen chiefly as arrows from the bank, so the truth is shown from one side.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation is frequent, and of a kind few films reach. The opening: a column of soldiers, slaves, llamas and litter-bearers winding down a sheer green slope into cloud, held long, with Popol Vuh’s choral keyboard rising over it. The raft caught in the eddy, turning, unreachable, its men found dead the next morning. Inés in her court dress walking upright into the forest without looking back. The ship lodged high in a tree, which the men will not believe they see. The last shot, the camera circling a raft overrun by small monkeys while one man stands among the dead. Terror and grandeur are the mode, and the comedy of the emperor at his meal sharpens them. Held below the top by the flat stretches of the drift.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The myth is built, not cited. El Dorado is the oldest shape of the quest, a golden place that recedes as it is approached; here the quest runs downstream, so that every advance is a descent, and the river becomes the road to the underworld it has been since the Styx. Aguirre is the overreacher at his purest: a man who would found a dynasty with his own daughter and rule a continent, a rebel against king and God who names himself God’s instrument. The title bears the load, his boast and the film’s verdict at once. The particular stays particular: rusted helmets, a lame hip, a hoarded portion. Held below the top because the archetype is concentrated in one figure, and the river frame is old.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the historical adventure epic, Hollywood and European, in which conquest is spectacle and the jungle a backdrop, and, nearer, the young German art film of the late 1960s. The turn is real and was paid for: an epic made with a handful of actors, a skeleton crew and a budget a studio would spend on one set, on real rafts on real rapids, the camera carried into the water with the cast, so that the hardship shows on the faces. A costume picture is played as delirium rather than history, and the stake was the film itself. Held a step below the top: the river voyage into madness had literary forebears, Conrad above all, and the turn is in the means more than in the narration, a conventional diary voice-over.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film stops knowing what it knows. Its form is drift: once the first raft is lost the expedition cannot go back, and the film takes the current as its structure, so that time passes as distance downstream and nothing chosen alters the direction. The camera stays mostly at water level, so the bank is always far and unreadable, which is the conquest’s own way of knowing. The diary gives each stage a date and a sober entry while the image grows stranger, until the diary stops. The ending, a circle around a raft turning in place, states the form last: the journey ends as rotation. Held below the top: the drift is sometimes slackness passing as form, and the voice-over is the least worked element.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Return yields, and fifty years of it are evidence. The film has been read as an anatomy of colonialism; as a parable of German history, a leader carrying a people to ruin on his will; as an allegory of a filmmaker driving his crew into the jungle; and as a study of a man before a nature that does not see him. The second viewing finds the comedy the first misses: the emperor’s pomp, the notary’s bureaucratic care. The depth is formal as well as semantic, in the relation of diary to image. Held at the figure because the readings, though several, converge on one figure and one movement, and the surface is simpler than its fame suggests: the well is deep but narrow.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Released in 1972, so force and reach are scored together, against a cinema of the 1970s crowded at the top. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of what an epic could be made with: grandeur won by exposure to an actual place and actual danger rather than by construction, and a historical film played as hallucination. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the international breakthrough of its director and, with Fassbinder and Wenders, of the new German cinema abroad; it began the partnership of Herzog and Kinski; the river journey to a madman returns at far greater scale in Apocalypse Now (1979), and Herzog’s own Fitzcarraldo (1982) answers it. Held at the bar: the reach ran through a few large successors more than through a change in common practice.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-four years. The form is whole: one cut survives as released, the two soundtracks are variants that take nothing from the picture, and any restoration is repair. Presence has been continuous, in repertory and teaching, on every home format, in the study of its director, and in the circulation of its opening and closing shots far beyond the art house; it is steady rather than the widest a film can have, broad within the cinema and narrower outside it. The surface is not fixed to 1972: set in 1560, the film has almost no period effects to date it. The fabric, grainy and unevenly exposed 35mm colour and a post-synchronised soundtrack, is the smallest charge.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, and it bears weight in the principal elements. Thomas Mauch’s handheld camera on the raft and in the water gives the film its body; the opening descent and the final circle are composed with complete assurance. Popol Vuh’s music, sparing and placed as an event, carries the sublime the image opens. Kinski’s Aguirre is a performance of posture: the lopsided walk, the tilted head, a stillness that threatens more than speech, the outbursts kept for few moments. The costs fall where they matter: much of the supporting cast is stiff, the post-synchronised sound is often flat and loose against the lips, the skirmishes are thinly staged, and the cutting of the middle third is approximate.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the vast, misty descent of the prologue, solemn and choral, and the farce of Guzmán eating alone at his throne while his subjects starve. One law governs both: the will of Europe, in its grandeur and its absurdity, moving through a place indifferent to it and dissolving by stages. The comedy and the terror are one fact seen at two distances. The law holds from the first shot to the last: no rescue, no turning back, nothing outside the current. The ship in the tree and the monkeys are not breaks in realism but the realism of a starving mind, prepared by every stage before them. Held below the top: the register is narrower than its range of tone suggests, and the law is simple.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 93 minutes holds, and many orders are present. The state, in a king deposed by notarised document and an emperor proclaimed; the church, in a friar who serves the strong; the family, in Aguirre’s daughter and his wish to found a dynasty with her, and in Inés’s widowhood; conquest and slavery, in the litter-bearers and the chained Indians of the opening; nature, in a forest, a river and rain that decide everything; the sacred, in the Bible, the cross and a blasphemy. What holds it lowest is the view from outside: consciousness, Aguirre’s included, is rendered through gesture and two speeches; the conquered are a man in a canoe, a slave with a pipe and arrows from the bank; labour is portage. All of it is held through one expedition and one will.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 8.8, then The Archetypal Deep, The Imperishable and The Inner Law at 8.7. Elevation at the opening, at the eddy, at Inés’s walk, at the ship in the tree and at the last circle; the quest for El Dorado built as a descent; a form whole in its one cut after fifty-four years; and one law, the will of Europe dissolving by stages, from the choral descent to the emperor at his meal.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: the state, the church, the family, conquest, nature and the sacred are present, but held through one expedition and one will, with consciousness rendered from outside and the conquered seen as a canoe, a pipe and arrows. Below the rest, The Bottomless Well at 8.3, where the readings are several but converge on one figure and one movement.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Inner Law at 8.7, The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition meet it exactly at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.5 from a sum of 102.1, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes as released, first shown in December 1972, about 93 minutes in its one cut, with the German soundtrack, from the descent into cloud to the last circling shot: written, directed and produced by Werner Herzog, photographed by Thomas Mauch, edited by Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, with music by Popol Vuh (Florian Fricke). An English soundtrack also exists; the versions differ in sound and not in picture, and nothing on any axis turns on the choice. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the film as released in German; English renderings are a reader’s aid and nothing is charged to them. Dialogue is quoted only in the two words of the title, which are certain; speech is otherwise described. Accounts of how the film was made are not the object; only what they produce on the screen is judged. Details that could not be verified, among them the date of release in cinemas, the co-producer, the language spoken on set, the date given by the opening title, a cannon fired at the lost raft, the name of the king renounced, a soldier and his arrow, the instrument the slave plays, any danger to those who made it, where abroad the film was first taken up, the account its successors have given of their debt, and the order and timing of the episodes of the middle third, are not given.