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Klaus Kinski in his breakthrough role as Don Lope de Aguirre in AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD, with Cecilia Rivera.


rebellion and stands in fierce defiance of a tree that he imagines to be rudely pointing at him. LAND OF SILENCE AND DARKNESS shares


a disc with FATA MORGANA in the Shout! Factory set, preserving its chronologic truth, while BFI po- sition it in support of THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER, which seems more thematically sensi- tive. Surprisingly, considering Herzog’s fondness for it, there is no commentary provided. Lensed in 16mm, the 1.33:1 presentation is brightly colored with strong blacks—as is often the case with these transfers, overly so in the case of the Shout! Fac- tory release with the BFI transfer exhuming more detail from within areas of shadow.


AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD Aguirre der Zorn Gottes


1972, 94m 26s (S!F), 90m 39s (BFI)


Herzog’s first collaboration with actor Klaus Kinski is the story of a 16th century Spanish expe- dition into the Amazon jungle, led by conquistador Don Pedro de Ursua (Ruy Guerra) and his wife Inez


(Helena Rojo), in search of the rumored city of gold, El Dorado. Kinski plays the misshapen Don Lope de Aguirre, another of the conquistadors sent ahead from the encampment of Francisco Pizarro and charged to spend a week of scouting the territory for food, dangers, and signs of the fabled city. Al- legedly based on the surviving diary pages of a monk who accompanied the adventurers to bring the word of God to the Amazon savages, the film is a sustained examination of the tensions dividing insistent reality and stubborn delusion, as well as those separating humor from bleakest despair. The film looks at once like a group of costumed actors stranded in a hostile documentary landscape, and also much like what one imagines the historical characters might have looked like in their situation; at the same time, the success of this historical rec- reation is thwarted at the very time it is given unique character by the use of Popol Vuh’s (Florian Fricke’s) murmuring, incantatory electronic score and hand- held cameras with flecks of water on the lens. Making matters still more complicated, Herzog freely admits in his audio commentary that the film’s


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