One of the best and key paintings in the work of the wonderful West German director Werner Herzog, he shot at the age of thirty, brought world fame to Herzog himself and actor Klaus Kinski, who played the title role. For the basis of the story told on the screen was taken the tragic fate of the truly existing Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre, who in 1560 landed as part of an expedition to Peru to find the rich country of Eldorado, a kind of "golden paradise" on Earth. But the fierce struggle between the conquistadors for the power, as well as the unsuccessful search for this very Eldorado led the expedition to complete collapse.
The filmmaker is almost obsessed with the idea of visualizing the human passion for the irrational, the unknown, the mysterious. He creates a philosophical parable about the obsession and blind dream, about the thirst for power that destroys the nature of man, turning it into a puppet of mercenary and evil instincts. A single player throws a desperate challenge, entering into an unequal match not only with no less greedy rivals and unfortunate circumstances, but, it seems, with the very destiny, the Divine Providence, the will of the Creator. He proudly sees himself in the role of a prophet and even a messiah who knows the way to the well-being of all mankind, but he himself is a victim of irrepressible ambitions, an insane attempt to outplay the destined fate. Anyone who has become filled with anger toward a person who has forsaken God, can only provoke the "wrath of God" or "heavenly punishment", and not in religious and metaphysical terms - just evil, engendered by evil. The conqueror of the Amazonian jungle, Lope de Aguirre, was never able to conquer the Indians, who did not want the invasion of alien civilization into their borders.
The unique skill of Werner Herzog and one of his permanent operators, Thomas Mauch, is depicted in capturing the peculiar "landscapes in trance", an almost surreal world of the virgin nature of South America - a paradise that becomes a real hell for foreign seekers of Eldorado. The director, who adheres to the principle "I believe only in what I see", performs in almost every one of his tapes a real feat, managing to shoot them absolutely in the same conditions unbearable for a civilized person, in which were his heroes (it is interesting that the budget of this historical The film was generally insignificant - $ 370,000). And Kinsky, who worked with Herzog for the first time (then they worked together four more times), finally got complete freedom to express his violent temperament, self-igniting passion for a certain Absolute, to which the soul, bound in perishable, full of vices and unkind thoughts are the body. The final picture, thanks to the relentless direction of Werner Herzog, squeezing the deepest, already subconscious reactions of the hunted beast from the actor, is perceived as a visible image of the Last Judgment, on which all sinful humanity writhes in agony before the Lord.
1989