Cobra Verde (Werner Herzog, 1987)

Klaus Kinski in Cobra Verde

Francisco Manoel da Silva: Klaus Kinski
Taparica: King Ampaw
Don Octavio Coutinho: José Lewgoy
Captain Fraternidade: Salvatore Basile
Bernabé: Peter Berling
Euclides: Guillermo Coronel
Bossa Ahadee: Nana Agyefi Kwame II

Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Based on a novel by Bruce Chatwin
Cinematography: Viktor Ruzicka
Music: Popol Vuh

With Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Cobra Verde constitutes the third element in a trilogy about the insanity of colonialism written and directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski. It's the weakest of the three films, though it's the only one based on a previously published work, Bruce Chatwin's 1980 novel The Viceroy of Ouidah. Its weakness may even stem from having a source: With an existing narrative to work from, Herzog may have been constrained to follow its outline, instead of giving free rein to his usual improvisatory imagination. The film really begins about a third of the way in, after Herzog has loosely established his protagonist's background as a failed rancher, Francisco Manoel da Silva, who has turned outlaw, the "Cobra Verde" of the title. Eventually his charismatic lawlessness leads him to a job as overseer on a Brazilian plantation where, after having impregnated the owner's three daughters, he gets sent on an errand to buy slaves in West Africa -- a task that his employers figure is a win-win situation: either they get rid of a troublesome person or they profit from his success as a slaver. The problem with the first third of the film is that it is told in rather enigmatic sequences, one including a conversation with a philosophical dwarf who owns a bar -- a scene long on talk and short on significance. But the African scenes are often powerful and colorful; Herzog doesn't yield to the impulse to preach about the slave trade, but we see its evil infect everyone, not only da Silva but also the Africans who have been corrupted by participating in it. Some of the big scenes don't quite fit: da Silva spends a long time training an army of women to depose the local chieftain, but his efforts end anticlimactically when the ruler, seated in a courtyard decorated with the skulls of his enemies, folds without a fight. In the end, da Silva is defeated by the decision of the Portuguese to end the slave trade, leaving him penniless and without purpose in a hostile land. In the powerful last scene, da Silva desperately tries to haul a boat, single-handedly, into the crashing surf, only to wind up rolling in the waves. The only witness to his futile efforts is a cruelly deformed man, whose lower body has been so weakened by what we can assume must have been polio, that he walks on all fours, mostly using his hands. It's a horrifying image that tacitly makes its thematic point about the consequences of imperialism.

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)

Don Lope de Aguirre: Klaus Kinski
Inez: Helena Rojo
Brother Gaspar de Carvajal: Del Negro
Don Pedro de Ursua: Ruy Guerra
Don Fernando de Guzman: Peter Berling
Flores: Cecilia Rivera
Perucho: Daniel Ades
Okello: Edward Roland

Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Music: Popol Vuh

In the breathtaking opening scene of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, a long line of conquistadors and their Indian slaves descend the trail carved into the almost vertical face of a mountain. It's a scene that we'll never see the likes of again because no one today would have the audacity to film it the way Werner Herzog did: with real people really descending a real trail down a real mountain. It would be done today with computers supplying either the mountainside or the people or both, and something would be lost in the process. Which is not to say that I think that Herzog's defiant insistence on working his cast and crew to the point of exhaustion and madness is a virtue. We can watch a film filled with similar perils, such as Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear (1953), and know that the dangers are artfully simulated and that cast and crew are not in real danger, but still be thrilled by the simulation. But there is something about the raw, passionate obsessiveness of Herzog's work that remains essential. A film like Clouzot's, for example, is tightly scripted with well-drawn characters. Herzog's feels improvised, and the characters are simply figures in a hostile landscape. The central figure, Aguirre, is played by an actor who was, by all accounts, only a bit this side of the kind of madness that infects the character. Aguirre, the Wrath of God almost feels like a documentary, a genre in which Herzog was a master. That it's also a historical fable about colonialism, about the thinness of civilization's veneer, about the horrors wrought by religious fanaticism, and perhaps an allegory of recent German history only adds to one's uneasy sense that art sometimes emerges from cruelty and obsession.