Werner Herzog has been one of my most prized discoveries during my film journey. Today most probably know him as the bad guy with the thick accent who hires the Mandalorian to capture baby Yoda, but he is so much more. Since the late 1960s, Herzog has alternated seamlessly between scripted films and documentaries and may be the most interesting and consistently unique filmmaker of his era. He never went to film school and instead stole a camera from a German university. He then made a few low-budget movies before traveling to South America with a skeleten crew, a handful of actors, and a few pages of script. This movie simply feels so real. Herzog pulls this off because it sort of was real. He did trudge through the jungle with carriages and full Spanish metal armor. He did put both actors and crew on handmade rafts careening down the Amazon. And he did hire natives to play natives. This realism coupled with the absolutely unhinged performance by Klaus Kinski as the title conquistador make Aguirre one of the best films of the 70s and welcomes the arrival of one of my favorite directors.
No comments:
Post a Comment