Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Werner Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes) opened in 1972. It was his third feature, made for approximately $370,000 over five weeks of shooting in the Peruvian rainforest with no permits. It made Herzog the most uncompromising director of the New German Cinema (alongside Fassbinder, Wenders and Schlöndorff), and his partnership with Klaus Kinski one of the most volatile in the history of the medium. The Sight & Sound poll has kept Aguirre permanently in its upper tiers.

1561, the Andean approach to the Amazon basin. A small Spanish expedition, sent by Gonzalo Pizarro to find the rumoured kingdom of El Dorado, splinters into a smaller raft party under the second-in-command, Don Lope de Aguirre (Kinski). As hunger, fever and talk of mutiny set in on the river, Aguirre grows steadily more unhinged, and the film's title tells you what he takes himself to be.

Thomas Mauch's photography gives the film one of the strangest openings in cinema: the Spanish convoy descending the Andean cordillera through fog in a single take that moves like Steadicam decades before Steadicam was invented. Popol Vuh's electronic score does much of the work of the atmosphere. The stories from the Herzog-Kinski shoot (knives drawn on set, Kinski threatening to leave camp at gunpoint) are documented in Herzog's My Best Fiend, and the performance they produced is one of the great deranged star turns of the medium.