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.

Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977)

Clemens Scheitz and Bruno S. in Stroszek

Bruno Stroszek: Bruno S.
Eva: Eva Mattes
Scheitz: Clemens Scheitz
Pimp: Wilhelm von Homburg
Pimp: Burkhard Driest
Mechanic: Clayton Szalpinski
Indian: Ely Rodriguez
Warden: Alfred Edel
Scott: Scott McKain
Auctioneer: Ralph Wade
Doctor: Vaclav Volta

Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus
Music: Chet Atkins, Sonny Terry

Stroszek is Franz Kafka meets Mark Twain. Or maybe it's Alice in Wonderland if Alice had been a middle-aged ex-con with a history of institutionalization for mental illness. Or it's The Wizard of Oz with Stroszek/Dorothy accompanied by a prostitute and an elderly man instead of a scarecrow and a tin man. Or Stroszek is Don Quixote, or any other wandering naïf of myth and literature. Those analogues give the adventures of Bruno Stroszek the resonance they need to rise above the gritty absurdity of what happens in Werner Herzog's film. In any case, it's a film that's more than what some would reduce it to: a satire on the American dream. To be sure, Stroszek and Eva and Scheitz set out for Wisconsin certain that America will offer something better than the bleakness of lower-class Berlin. Scheitz has a nephew there who owns a garage and can offer a job to Stroszek while Eva can leave her abusive pimps -- who also torment Stroszek and Scheitz -- and get a job as a waitress. And for a while all is well, except for the language barrier and Stroszek's companions' belief that they can get a mobile home and a color TV on credit without making payments. As a consequence, Scheitz goes to jail and Eva, resuming her old life, this time as a truck-stop hooker, goes to Vancouver. Stroszek ends up literally going in circles, the tow truck he has stolen madly chasing its tail in a parking lot until it explodes while Stroszek rides a ski lift around and around, up and down the hillside, and a dancing chicken in a "roadside attraction" continues its mindless scratching. Herzog's real forte is documentary, and his precise and even witty choice of locations, plus his ability to employ real people instead of actors -- and to make them remain real instead of just amateurs reading lines -- gives Stroszek its grounding, even as the film's narrative goes wildly loopy. It's a film of richly strange and strangely rich details. 

Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982)

Klaus Kinski in Fitzcarraldo

Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald: Klaus Kinski
Molly: Claudia Cardinale
Don Aqulino: José Lewgoy
Cholo: Miguel Ángel Fuentes
Captain: Paul Hittscher
Huerequeque: Huerequeque Enrique Bohorquez
Station Master: Grande Otelo
Opera Manager: Peter Berling
Chief of Campa Indians: David Pérez Espinosa
Man at Opera House: Milton Nascimento
Enrico Caruso: Costante Moret
Sarah Bernhardt: Jean-Claude Dreyfus

Director: Werner Herzog
Screenplay: Werner Herzog
Cinematography: Thomas Mauch
Production design: Ulrich Bergfelder, Henning von Gierke
Film editing: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus

Why does Werner Herzog's infamously extravagant Fitzcarraldo begin with Fitzgerald/Fitzcarraldo and his brothel-owner mistress Molly attending a performance of Verdi's Ernani that stars not only Enrico Caruso but also, in the role of Elvira, Sarah Bernhardt (played by a man in drag), who mimes while a soprano sings from the pit? Probably to add several more layers of myth to the story, since there is some doubt that Caruso ever sang at the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus and he almost certainly never appeared in a production of Ernani with a lip-synching Bernhardt. If Fitzcarraldo is about anything, it's about obsessions, the more extravagant and, yes, operatic the better. Which is why Herzog's own obsession with actually hauling a steamship over a hill through the jungle, instead of using special effects, models, and montage, is so ironic. If we can believe that Klaus Kinski is an Irishman, we can believe almost anything. Why resort to reality?  Fitzcarraldo is also about the power of illusions, of misguided and conflicting belief systems. Fitzgerald believes, against all evidence to the contrary, in himself. The Indians who labor for him do so because they believe he is some kind of god. So it's entirely appropriate that the central metaphor for a film about extravagantly obsessive belief in illusions should be opera, that most extravagant and illusion-filled of artistic media. (If, that is, you exclude movies.) Is Fitzcarraldo a great film? As fascinating as Kinski's eye-popping is to watch, he never transcends his persona as an actor to create a credible character. And I don't understand what Fitzgerald hopes to achieve by hauling the ship across the isthmus to the rubber plantation. Wouldn't he have to haul it back over again, this time with cargo, to benefit? But such considerations tend to fall by the wayside when viewers encounter the audacity of what's on the screen, and even more so when they learn the behind-the-scenes story of the making of the film. Fitzcarraldo falls into that category of cinematic overreaching occupied by movies like Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). If it isn't a great movie, it's certainly a unique one. And maybe we should be thankful for that.