“Nomadland” - Chloé Zhao (2020)

Nomadland (2020) is an award-winning drama whose approach to the realism of its subject matter is both original and also something that underlies the film’s themes.  This film is a story about “vandwellers” in America – people who live in campervans, RVs, mobile homes, or modified buses and have no fixed abode.  Although the film is a work of dramatic fiction, it is closely based on a nonfiction book that documents the lives of these wandering vandwellers, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017) by Jessica Bruder (in fact Jessica Bruder is credited as a “consulting producer” for the film).  Moreover, almost all of the people who appear in this film are real-life nomadic vandwellers with no prior acting experience.  They are just playing themselves.  

However, Nomadland is not an example of fly-on-the-wall cinema verite.  It is a carefully crafted drama, with masterful cinematography by Joshua James Richards and haunting sound-track music by Ludovico Einaudi.  Neither is it quite appropriate to categorize this film as another example of Italian neo-realism, because there are certain distinguishing aspects of this film that make it rather unique.  

For one thing the film was written, directed, edited and co-produced by Chinese-born American Chloé Zhao, and although Ms. Zhao received a film education at NYU film school, she brings her own original, externally-based eye to the aspects of American life that she writes and films about.  In the context of this film, she seems fascinated by a phenomenon of growing general alienation that is starting to emerge among many ordinary people in America.  And as this film shows, many people have no choice but to accept it.  

So alienation is clearly one important aspect of Nomadland, but there are also other thematic elements present, as well, and these all collectively contribute to reasons for why Zhao’s film has been so remarkably well-received.  On the awards front, Nomadland had almost a clean sweep.  The film won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress (and nominations in three other categories) at the 93rd U.S. Academy Awards.  It won the Golden Lion (best film) at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.  It was chosen as Best Film at the 74th British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs).  And at the 78th Golden Globe Awards, it won an award for Best Motion Picture – Drama and an award for Best Director.  And among top film critics, Nomadland has been widely praised [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].

The meandering story of Nomadland is concerned with a sixtyish woman, Fern (played by award-winning actress Frances McDormand), who has just embarked on a new life as a nomadic vandweller.  She and her husband had worked for years at a gypsum plant in small company-town Empire, Nevada.  But now the gypsum company has shut down, and her husband has just died, leaving the childless Fern alone and with no means of support.  So she purchases a van and converts it into something she can live in while she travels about looking for work.  When asked if she is homeless, she responds with no, she is “houseless”.  

The entire film then focalizes exclusively on Fern as she travels about the western United States in search of odd jobs that she can use for support.  However, Fern is so laid-back and laconic that much of what we learn in the film about vandwellers comes not from Fern, but from the fellow vandwellers that she meets and interacts with.  And as I mentioned, virtually everyone Fern meets is a real-life vandwelling nomad.  Nevertheless, Frances McDormand’s pensive performance as Fern is crucial to the success of the film.  As the film proceeds, we want to know more about what Fern is thinking and feeling.

After Fern heads out on the road from the shutting down town of Empire, she secures a seasonal job at a massive Amazon fulfilment center (warehouse for third-party shipping).  Although the workers don’t appear to be mistreated, the sheer size of the operation makes everyone on the floor like a tiny cog in a gigantic machine.  This is a telling visual metaphor for the impending gig economy and streamlined supply chain that so many ordinary people are now facing.

One of Fern’s coworkers at the warehouse, Linda, convinces her to come to a meet-up for vandwellers in the Arizona desert.  The event is hosted by Bob Wells, a charismatic real-life nomad who seeks to organize cooperative support for his fellow vandwellers.  Although some  vandwellers are middle-class retirees who have embraced this way of life in order to fulfill their love for freedom and the open road, most of these people are like Fern – forced by poverty to live in a van.  At Wells’s meet-ups these people can share tricks and info about how to get by on the road.

Later Fern meets and becomes friends with a congenial elderly woman nomad, Swankie, from whom she learns more about survival under impecunious circumstances on the road.  Swankie also tells her that she, herself, has terminal cancer, but she wants to close out her life on the open road rather than in a hospital.

After the extended encounter with Swankie, Fern is shown working in the Black Hills, South Dakota, where she runs into Dave (David Strathairn, the only other actor in the film with significant professional acting experience), a mild-mannered elderly nomad she had seen earlier in Arizona.  They go on to meet on several further occasions, and Dave politely indicates to Fern that he is interested in having her stay with him in a long-term relationship.  But ultimately Fern resists the temptation and decides to stick to her life of independence on the open road.

There is also an occasion when Fern’s van has a serious breakdown, and she has to go ask her married sister in California for a loan in order to pay for the repairs.  When Fern goes to her sister’s upper-middle class home, we can see the contrast in the two sisters’ lifestyles; and we hope the encounter will shed some light on the taciturn Fern’s background.  But it becomes clear that the sister has always been as much in the dark about Fern’s thoughts and feelings as we viewers are now.  Anyway, the sister does loan the money to Fern, and the van gets fixed.

Fern has further encounters with Bob Wells and other van-dwelling nomads, before eventually returning for one last nostalgic visit to Empire, Nevada, which is by this time almost a ghost town.  Then at the end of the film, she heads back out on the road.

So overall, Nomadland is a bleak, moody film that effectively conveys inescapable feelings of loneliness and a sense of loss.  But there are three connected thematic elements in the film that linger in my mind and warrant further comment:

• Is the Gig-Economy the Future of Labour?
• What Role Does Narrative Play in Nomadland?
• To What Degree is a Self Defined by Narrative?
  

These are not items really explicitly addressed in Nomadland, but they were tangentially evoked when I watched the film.

1.  Is the Gig-Economy the Future of Labour?

Watching Nomadland made me wonder whether the traditional nature of U.S. socioeconomic society is collapsing (and since the U.S. is at the forefront of social evolution, this applies eventually to everywhere else, too).  With management increasingly centralized and specific jobs increasingly objectified and compartmentalized, the labour environment is more and more moving towards a gig-economy.  For digital workers, this can mean more and more digital nomads – people who can perform their jobs from remote locations and can therefore live anywhere.  But for hands-on gig workers, such as those depicted in Nomadland, it means that anyone looking for work must travel to the site of the job location and secure the gig-job.  In other words, they have to be nomads.

The positive side to all this is that there are likely to be available jobs for itinerants.  But of course the downside is that the jobs are reduced to lowest-common-denominator specifications and are often low-skilled and low-paid.

Chloé Zhao doesn’t take up this general social issue and its ramifications at all in Nomadland.  But what she does show is the lifestyles of the nomads and their various ways of dealing with the inherent loneliness in “nomadland”.

2.  What Role Does Narrative Play in Nomadland?

Almost all films (as well as dramas, stories, and novels) have a narrative that provides a structure for the events depicted.  The metastructure of these narratives is often characterized metaphorically as a journey.  There are one or more protagonists on such a “journey” who are struggling to reach a desired “destination”, and there are usually other agents along the way who assist or stand in the way of progress.  Much has been written about the narrative-as-journey metaphor [8,9,10,11,12], notably the more formalized characterization of it known as the “hero’s journey” [13] that was popularized by Joseph Campbell [14].

In the present context concerning Nomadland, we don’t have to delve into the various narrative characterizations, because in this case, I don’t see that the film even has a narrative.  Although one might at first think Fern is on some sort of journey, neither the destination nor the overall scheme of that journey is ever specified.  We never know what the wandering Fern wants or is thinking.  All we get is a random sequence of scenes depicting haphazard encounters that have no clear outcome – at least no outcome with respect to a given quest.  We never really learn much about what goes on inside Fern’s head or indeed who she is.  But then maybe that is the point.  Fern’s lack of a narrative is what this film is about.

3.  To What Degree is a Self Defined by Narrative?
It is often claimed that we basically model all the people we meet in terms of the narratives we construct about them, and this is how we come to know and understand them [9,10,11].  We even think of ourselves in terms of the narratives constructed by ourselves and others about ourselves.  So is it really true; is that all there is to the self – the narrative that has been constructed to characterize it?  Are you and I just the stories we have constructed about ourselves?  There is dispute on that score.

Some philosophers, usually objectivists, maintain that, yes, that is all there is to the self – the narrative story (or stories) that provides a comprehensible, temporally-oriented scheme of who you are.  They argue further that any idea that there is some inner being constituting the true self is a self-deceptive hallucination.  The only existing selves, they insist, are the fabricated narratives that have long been constructed (since caveman days) to facilitate human interactions extended over time.

But there are other thinkers, both esteemed Western philosophers [15] and respected Eastern sages [16,17], who hold that there are really two essential aspects of the self:

• an outer, worldly, narrative-based self 
• an inner self that is founded on core-consciousness
  

According to this second, more nuanced scheme, it is the inner, core-consciousness-based self that is the true being that identifies who you are.  And this is the self-perspective that I find more natural, and I would guess that Chloé Zhao thinks this way, too.  It usually follows under this scheme that when a person’s inner core-consciousness gets the feeling that its constructed narrative-based self is somehow unfulfilling and leaves it disconnected from meaningful interactions in the world, it then feels alienated.  This sense of alienation can be difficult to articulate, but it lies as a root element of existentialist thinking, and it has been eloquently expressed by such writers as Albert Camus [18] and Jean-Paul Sartre [19], as well as in a number of memorable films [20].  And it is Fern’s alienation that is the artistic key to Nomadland.

As I mentioned, the film Nomadland doesn’t really seem to have its own narrative, and that comes down to the fact that the film’s main character, Fern, doesn’t appear to have a narrative-based self at all.  It’s not just an unsatisfactory narrative-based self, as it often is with some people; here in Fern’s case, it is a virtual narrative void.  She doesn’t appear to have had much meaningful interaction with her family when she was growing up.  And now that her husband has died and she has lost her longtime job and home, there is nothing left of her adult life on which to base her narrative self.  Her life is empty.  And that is what makes the film problematic.  Can a film succeed without being driven by a narrative journey?  In the case of Nomadland, I would say it more or less does succeed.   

Even though I am aligned with the philosophical position that the narrative self is not the most intrinsic aspect of the self, having only a severely diminished narrative-based self, like Fern, would be an existential problem.  And it is Fern’s existential problem that is on display in Nomadland.  We viewers want to know more about what Fern is thinking and feeling in response to her barren circumstances, but her contemplative reticence gives us little to chew on and leaves us wanting more.  Frances McDormand’s subtle, laid-back performance as Fern is crucial here.  We follow her gaze and guess about her feelings all the way, but our fascination persists.  And that is what lies at the heart of Nomadland.

★★★½

Notes:

1. A.O. Scott, “‘Nomadland’ Review: The Unsettled Americans”, The New York Times, (18 February 2021, 26 April 2021).   
   
2. Brian Tallerico, “Nomadland”, RogerEbert.com, (19 February 2021).   
   
3. Beatrice Loayza, “Nomadland finds beauty on the rugged, ruthless open road”, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (28 April 2021).   
   
4. MaryAnn Johanson, “Nomadland movie review: ain’t that America”, flick filosopher, (6 May 2021).   
   
5. Murtaza Ali Khan, "’Nomadland’ Review: An inspiring tale of survival that presents the modern-day American West in a new light”, A Potpourri of Vestiges,, (4 April 2021).   
   
6. Marjorie Baumgarten, “Nomadland”, The Austin Chronicle, (19 February 2021).   
   
7. Chris Barsanti, “Review: ‘Nomadland’ Is a Sorrowful Lament for Lives on America’s Fringes", Slant Magazine, (12 September 2020).   
   
8. Roger Schank and Gary Saul Morrison, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence (Rethinking Theory),  (1990), Northwestern.
9. Jerome Bruner, "The Narrative Construction of Reality", Critical Inquiry, 18:1, 1-21, (1991).
10. Jerome Bruner, “The Narrative Construction of Reality”, Narrative Intelligence (2003), Michael Mateas and Phoebe Sengers (eds.), John Benjamin Publishing Co.
11. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vols. I- III, (1983-1985), University of Chicago Press. 
12. Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, 2nd Edition, Michael Wiese Productions (1998).
13. “Hero’s Journey”, Wikipedia, (17 September 2021).     
    
14. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1st edition, Bollingen Foundation (1949), 2nd edition, Princeton University Press (1990), 3rd edition, New World Library (2008).
15. Dan Zahavi, "Self and Narrative: the Limits of Narrative Understanding", Narrative  and  Understanding  Persons, D. D. Hutto  (ed),  Royal  Institute  of  Philosophy Supplement 60, Cambridge University Press, pp. 179-201, (9 August 2007).  
    
16. Paramahansa Yogananda, God Talks With Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita, Self-Realization Fellowship, (1 September 2001).  
17. Ching Hai, I Have Come to Take You Home: A Collection of Quotes and Spiritual Teachings from the Supreme Master Ching Hai, Sophie Lapaire and Pamela Millar (eds.), SMCHIA Publishing Co., (1 January 1995).   
18. Albert Camus, The Stranger (L'Étranger), Gallimard, (1942).  
19. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (La Nausée), Éditions Gallimard, (1938).
20. The Film Sufi, “Existentialism in Film 1", The Film Sufi, (15 July 2008).   
    

Chloé Zhao

 Films of Chloé Zhao:

• Nomadland - Chloé Zhao (2020)
  

“Fantastic Fungi” - Louie Schwartzberg (2019)

Fantastic Fungi (2019) is an entertaining documentary film that explores various aspects of  ubiquitous but often overlooked participants in our biosphere – fungi, and in particular, their usually above-ground fruiting components, mushrooms.  This film brings to the viewer’s attention the fact that fungi are absolutely crucial to the sustenance of life on earth. The film was directed and photographed by Louie Schwartzberg, whose demonstrated expertise in time-lapse cinematography and CGI (computer-generated imagery) is a spectacular feature of the film.  In fact the time-lapse imagery is so frequently occurring and dazzling that it may perhaps sometimes distract the viewer from some of the film’s other virtues.  

Fantastic Fungi was written by Mark Monroe (among whose earlier writing credits is the fascinating documentary The Cove (2009) [1]), and it was edited by Kevin Klauber and Annie Wilkes.  There are numerous voiceover narrations from the various talking heads in this documentary, but one special narrative element is provided by previously Oscar-winning actress Brie Larson, who serves here as the unseen metaphorical voice of the fungi kingdom.  I am not sure how well this particular narrative innovation works in this case, but it does provide an unusual twist to the presentation.  Another aspect of the production that deserves comment is the music by Adam Peters.  Unfortunately, I found much of the music to be littered with rumblings and  mostly distracting from the viewing experience.  In any case, the film has been largely well-received by a range of critics [2,3,4,5,6,7].

Although Fantastic Fungi rambles back and forth between various topics about fungi, we can say that the film covers roughly four general areas of interest:

• The science of fungi
• Fungi in ancient mythology
• The impact of hallucinogenic drugs that have been derived from Fungi
• Practical and medicinal uses of fungi
  

Throughout much of this journey, we are shepherded by Paul Stamets, a lifetime amateur mycology (the science of fungi) enthusiast.  Despite having limited formal training in mycology, Stamets’s passion for the subject and hands-on explorations have enabled him to make a number of discoveries and contributions to the area.  And as the film demonstrates, he is a rather glib communicator on the topic.  

1.  The Science of Fungi
In this topic area the viewer is given some interesting scientific information about fungi.  The expert narrators concerning this material are, for the most part, Michael Pollan and Eugenia Bone, who are food journalists, and Professor Suzanne Simard, who conducts research on fungi at the University of British Columbia.

Fungi are a primitive form of life that predates plants and animals.  Indeed the oldest fossil remains of life are those of fungi dating back 2.4 billion years ago.  And of course fungi are still prospering today, and there are now several million fungi species, more than six times the estimated number of plant species.  

A fascinating and most important structural component of fungi are the thin filamentary hyphae that exist mostly below ground and serve as the roots of the fungi.  They spread out into incredibly complex network structures that are known collectively as mycelia, and they can form even more complex mycorrhizal networks with plants that a mycelium network may connect to.  The expert commentators in the film liken the complexity of these network mycelium structures to that of the human brain, and it seems that these mycelium networks can facilitate the exchange of nutrients and information between the nodes (plants and/or fungi) that are interconnected in these networks.  For more information concerning how these mycorrhizal networks facilitate the essential vitality and harmony of nature, I recommend you see Suzanne Simard’s TED talk, "How trees talk to each other" [8].

2.  Fungi in Ancient Mythology
It seems that fungi have been known and cherished since very ancient times – even to ancient hominids that flourished before the appearance of Homo sapiens.  This was presumably due to the powerful mind-altering properties of some mushrooms.  The film has some commentary about this and refers to and shows some ancient temples in this regard.  

Reference is also made to the Stoned Ape Theory that was proposed by Terence McKenna in 1992, which advanced the idea that the movement from the early human species Homo erectus to the current species Homo sapiens was connected with the hypothesized increased consumption of psilocybin mushrooms (“magic mushrooms”) about 100,000 years ago.  This allegedly gave consumers of those mushroom improved acuity and cooperation capabilities that ultimately provided them with evolutionary advantages.  Thus, so this story goes, the consumption of magic mushrooms led to the emergence of Homo sapiens.

3.  Hallucinogenic Drugs

At the beginning of the 1970s, 15-year-old Paul Stamets became inspired by reading some writing by an advocate of alternative medicine, Dr. Andrew Weil, about altered states of consciousness.  This was when Timothy Leary, LSD, and other hallucinogenic drugs derived from mushrooms were in their heyday.  Consequently Stamets was eager to try out some psychedelic mushrooms.  So he consumed a whole bag of magic mushrooms, and the resulting experience that he had changed his life.  For one thing, it instantly cured his til-then lifelong stuttering problem.  In addition, it launched his unquenchable fascination with the mind-bending possibilities of fungi.  However, about this time there was a decades-long U.S. governmental suppression of psychedelic drug research (1970s - 2000), which hindered work in this field  by Stamets and others.  So Stamets started his own mushroom business and moved to Canada.  In some respects this film is intended to renew a wider scientific interest in this area, such as existed in the 1960s and 70s.

4.   Medicinal Uses of Fungi
A fascinating element of Fantastic Fungi is its discussion of some of the promising medicinal uses of fungi.  However, because of time constraints, only a smattering of this material can be offered.  A key item with respect to this topic is the fact that the human brain has neuroplasticity.  That is, the neuronal structure of the human brain can change and grow throughout the course of a person’s life.  But to facilitate this activity, the brain needs assistance to generate new neurological pathways.  And this is where mushroom-derived chemicals such as psilocybin can play an important role in the brain’s chemistry.  This is an ongoing topic of current research.

Overall, there is an important message we can take from Fantastic Fungi.  We learn that fungi are fundamental instruments for the regeneration of life, and that as Paul Stamets tells us, “the entire ecosystem is infused with fungi.”  Our reductive scientific models of the natural world have too often focussed on the individual entity or agent, and they have thereby overlooked the intertwined, multi-generational nature of life, in connection with which fungi play a fundamental role.  Indeed what is emphasized here in this film and the essential point we come away with, in fact, is how fungi underlie and facilitate a most crucial aspect of the world, something that Buddhist and other spiritual masters have long taught – the interconnectedness of all living beings.

★★★

Notes:

1. The Film Sufi, “‘The Cove’ - Louie Psihoyos (2009)”, The Film Sufi, (26 July 2009).   
   
2. Rex Reed, “Charming Documentary ‘Fantastic Fungi’ Explores the Miracle of Mushrooms”, Observer, (15 October 2019).   
   
3. Matt Fagerholm, “Fantastic Fungi”, RogerEbert.com, (11 October 2019).  
   
4. Jeannette Catsoulis,”‘Fantastic Fungi’ Review: The Magic of Mushrooms”, The New York Times, (10 October 2019).   
   
5. Josh Kupecki, “Fantastic Fungi”, Austin Chronicle, (6 December 2019).   
   
6. John Defore, “‘Fantastic Fungi’: Film Review”, The Hollywood Reporter, (8 October 2019).  
   
7. Robert Abele “Review: Mushrooms are the new superheroes in documentary ‘Fantastic Fungi’”, Los Angeles Times, (24 October 2019).      
   
8. Suzanne Simard, “How trees talk to each other”, TED, (31 August 2016).   
   

Louie Schwartzberg

Films of  Louie Schwartzberg:

• Fantastic Fungi - Louie Schwartzberg (2019)
  

“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” - Werner Herzog (1972)

Werner Herzog, one of the most versatile and creative film directors, has had a remarkably successful career spanning across a number of genres over more than fifty years.  However, I would say one of his greatest works came relatively early on in his career, with his third fiction feature film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, 1972).  This is a historical drama set in 16th century Peru and concerns the activities of some Spanish conquistadors in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado [1].  But the film’s subject matter stretches far beyond its overt topic of Spanish conquistadors in South America and extends off into vistas relating to Herzog’s characteristically gloomy view of human existence as a whole.  

You might think that such a film focussed on a pessimistic view of humanity would not attain widespread popularity, but Herzog’s unique cinematic vision led to the fashioning of one of the all-time great films.  Upon its release, ,Aguirre, the Wrath of God quickly acquired cult status, and it is said to have directly influenced subsequent important works, such as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and Terrence Malick's The New World (2005).  And over the years, the critical appreciation of the film has only grown [2,3,4,5,6,7].

Actually, the making of Aguirre, the Wrath of God has acquired a somewhat legendary status in its own right [5,6,7].  Herzog took a small film crew to shoot on location in Peru.  But the harsh, life-threatening shooting conditions in the Amazon rainforest and Herzog’s customary extemporaneous shooting style (he often made things up as he went along, which meant that the film had to be shot in narrative sequence) made things almost impossible for the frazzled crew.  In addition, there was the further matter of working with hot-headed lead actor Klaus Kinski, who was characteristically stubborn and maniacally volatile.  Nevertheless, Herzog somehow got a brilliant performance out of Kinski, and in fact this film was the first of five Herzog-Kinski collaborations.  (How Herzog managed to work with the temperamental Kinski over the years is covered in some detail in Herzog’s later documentary film My Best Fiend (1999)).  

Despite these trying and dangerous production conditions, however, the resulting film that Herzog and his team produced was masterful all across the board.  The acting from a diverse collection of actors was excellent, and the cinematography was superb.  Indeed the cinematography fashioned by Herzog and cinematographer Thomas Mauch plays a key thematic role in the film.  Equipped only with a 35mm camera Herzog had stolen from the Munich Film School, they managed to convey the dense imagery of the Amazon rainforest as a symbol of the oppressive and entangling nature of man’s unfeeling natural environment.  Thus Nature, itself, was rendered to be a cruel player/antagonist in this story.  Moreover, because of Herzog’s extemporaneous filming style, skilled post-production work in the editing room on the part of Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus was undoubtedly crucial to the film’s smooth narrative flow.

The story of Aguirre, the Wrath of God is based on a real historical figure, Spanish conquistador Lope de Aguirre (1510-1561), who was active in Spanish colonialist activities in South America during the 16th century.  However, Herzog massaged various facts and events from that era to come up with his own, more streamlined storyline that has many fictional elements.  In particular in Herzog’s version, several separate historical sequences of events have been combined into a single expedition.  So in this (Herzog’s) story, Aguirre is part of an expedition undertaken by Hernando Pizarro, (one of the famous conquistador Pizarro brothers), who,  after the conquest of the Inca empire, led an expedition of several hundred Spanish soldiers over the Andes mountains in order to go down the Amazon river in search of the fabled city of El Dorado.  But, as I mentioned, Herzog’s refashioned story is not so much one concerned with historical accuracy as it is one constructed instead to evoke Herzog’s grim vision.  In fact the expedition depicted here in Aguirre, the Wrath of God can be considered to be Herzog’s vivid nightmare of a willful descent into Hell.

The narrative of Aguirre, the Wrath of God can be viewed as made up of three unequally lengthed sections.  

1.  Descent into the Maelstrom

In 1560 Gonzalo Pizarro (played by Alejandro Repullés) leads several hundred armored Spanish conquistadors and a similar number of Indigenous slaves down a steep mountain path in the Andes towards the Amazon River.  They have heard that somewhere along that river is their hoped-for destination, the legendary city of El Dorado.  The heavily forested path is so steep and narrow that it seems almost impossible for them to make the journey, themselves, not to  mention transport their cannons and provisions, too.  How Herzog and Thomas Mauch managed to film this harrowing sequence must have been a story in itself.  As the single-file descent, which includes equipment accidents and injuries, proceeds, it almost looks as if Mother Nature is enshrouding her new captives in green leafy burial garments.  

When they reach the river, Pizarro, assessing that their slow progress has left them very low on provisions, decides to have a group of forty men take four constructed rafts and go on an advanced scouting mission down the river.  If they don’t return within a week, they will be presumed lost, and the rest of the party will travel back up over the mountains to their main fortress.  For this scouting mission, Pizarro selects Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra) as the commander and Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski) as second-in-command.   Also assigned are Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling) as a royalty representative and Brother Gaspar de Carvajal (Del Negro) to bring religion to the natives.  And accompanying them, surprisingly, will be Ursúa's fiancé, Doña Inés (Helena Rojo) and Aguirre's 15-year-old  daughter, Flores (Cecilia Rivera).

2.  The Ursúa-led Mission

The scouting mission sets off, but one of the four rafts gets stuck in an eddy and is unable to get free.  The others of the group stop and make camp, but they are unable to help their comrades trapped in the whirling eddy.  Then overnight the men on this trapped raft are mysteriously shot and killed. Ursúa wants the dead bodies to be brought back to camp for proper burial, but Aguirre, not wanting to be delayed, conspires to have the raft and bodies destroyed by cannon fire.  Up to now Aguirre’s presence has been relatively minor, but from hereon we see his malevolence coming to the fore.

During the night, the river rises and sweeps away the remaining rafts.  Ursúa has now had enough and orders the end of the scouting mission and that they should all return to Pizarro's group.  But the greedy Aguirre doesn’t accept this and leads a mutiny against Ursúa.  Aguirre gains support among the men for his mutiny by pointing out that Cortes conquered Mexico and achieved wealth and power by staging a mutiny.  When Ursúa tries to thwart the mutiny, he is shot, but not fatally, and Aguirre takes over as the leader.  Inés proceeds to care for the seriously wounded Ursúa.  When she appeals to Brother Carvajal to intercede against Aguirre’s rebellious takeover, he cynically informs her that the Church has always backed the strong.

3.   Aguirre Takes Over

Aguirre has the soldiers elect the indolent Fernando de Guzmán (because the man is a royal ornament) as the new leader of the expedition, and then goes even further and has Guzmán identified as the new imperial emperor.  But of course the swaggering Aguirre is the real man in charge.  In fact the very way that Aguirre swaggers and struts, as performed by Kinski, seems to be an  instrument of control in itself.

Aguirre orders a new, larger raft to be built, and his deranged descent into Hell continues.  With precious food supplies running out as they drift downstream, greed, jealousy, and eventually madness begin to take over.  When their raft is approached peacefully by an inquiring Indigenous couple in a canoe, Brother Carvajal has the visitors killed for allegedly insulting God.  The sight of the portly Guzmán gorging himself on their scant food supplies leads to some of the men to secretly kill their new “emperor”.  To the real man in control, Aguirre, this hardly matters.  He simply declares himself to be the new emperor, and he orders Ursúa, whose life up to this point  had been preserved by Guzmán, taken ashore and hanged.  

But the isolation of he group continues, and their attempts to engage with the Indigenous people gets nowhere.  Apart from that one friendly but ill-fated approach by the native couple in a canoe, these people are basically invisible to the invading conquistadors.  But their presence is felt by occasional salvos of lethal arrows that are frequently directed at them from behind bushes and trees.  Gradually, Aguirre’s people are getting picked off one-by-one by an invisible mortal force.

And as crazed desperation sets in, the starving men begin to wonder what is a hallucination and what is real.  Are these silent deadly arrows appearing suddenly from out of nowhere real, or are they imaginary?  At one point they all stare in amazement at a large wooden ship perched in the highest branches of a tall tree.  (To many viewers, this weird image will seem to be an eery foreshadowing of the later Herzog-Kinski movie Fitzcarraldo (1982)).

Eventually everyone besides Aguirre on the slowly drifting raft is dead, even Aguirre’s teenage daughter, Flores, towards whom he had incestuous urges and whom he wanted to make his queen.  The movie ends with the crazed figure Aguirre continuing to rant and rave his mad dreams of power, with the only ones available to hear being a band of monkeys who have boarded the raft.

These closing images of self-destructive greed and madness are so powerful that they linger in the minds of many viewers long after seeing the film.  In fact it is the visual images, rather than dialogues, that are the cinematic keys to Herzog’s greatness.  As mentioned, Herzog tends to make up the spoken words on the fly during the shooting of his films.  The focus of his narrative imagination is the stream of visuals that he has in his mind.  Even principal actor Klaus Kinski, in the role of Aguirre, doesn’t have that many lines to speak in the film.  The key to Kinski’s performance is his physical posturing throughout the film.  Kinski is constantly shown leaning at an angle, but not usually holding onto anything for support.  This leaning posture is suggestive of someone engaged in momentary pondering just prior to some firm, impending negative action.  Thus Aguirre’s visual imagery suggests a man always on the verge of something emphatically contrary.  And that threatening imagery is what we remember about him.

So what is Herzog’s message in Aguirre, the Wrath of God?  I would say it is based on two relatively somber themes that have long underlain his work:

• 
  His concern that so much of European (i.e. Western) civilization has been based on greed and selfish utilitarianism.  This egoistic focus has fuelled exploitative Western imperialism and colonialism across the globe and continues to this day.  It was this that drove Aguirre’s desire to go to any lengths to find and plunder the legendary city of El Dorado.
   
  
• His glum recognition that the natural world, i.e. “Nature”, is devoid of the human values of beauty and harmony that we sometimes attribute to it.
  

In support of my assertions here, I offer the following quotations from some of my reviews of other Herzog films.

• From Lessons of Darkness (1992) [8]:
   
  “The demonic forces that lurk inside the hearts of men seem to be beyond civilized understanding or rational control.  These issues of cruelty and madness are as elemental as fire, itself . . .“
   
  
• From Heart of Glass (1976) [9]:
     
  “Man’s efforts to understand the universe and build a humane civilization are doomed to failure in the face of his own depravity and the incomprehensibly vastness of great Nature. The universe is infinite and brutal, unmindful and unaffected by our puny efforts to find truth and beauty. Our so-called civilisation has tried to tame nature, but it is based on reductionist mechanism and increasingly drives us further away from any chance of harmony within it. “
   
  
• And from Herzog, himself, (from my review of Into the Inferno (2016) [10]):
  
  “I don’t see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It’s just – Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain.” [11]
     
  and
   
  “There is a harmony [in nature] . . . it is a harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” [12]
  

So I would say that Herzog’s two rather pessimistic notions have been present throughout his work.  And in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, both of these sentiments are on full display and symbolically facing each other – Aguirre, the self-centered and exploitative European, is fighting a losing battle with an even more unfeeling and exploitative force: Nature, itself.  Indeed these two notions have probably been no more vividly and aesthetically expressed than here in Aguirre, the Wrath of God.

★★★★

Notes:

1. “El Dorado”, Wikipedia, (27 August 2021).  
   
2. Peter Bradshaw, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, The Guardian, (17 August 2001).   
   
3. Peter Bradshaw, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God - review”, The Guardian, (6 June 2013).    
   
4. Fernando F. Croce, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog / West Germany, 1972): (Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes)”, Cinepassion.org, (n.d.).   
   
5. Jeffrey M. Anderson, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Herzog's Mad Journey”, Combustible Celluloid, (1999?).   
   
6. Bruce Bennett, “An Infamous Mutiny, A Descent Into Madness”, The New York Sun, (20 October 2006).   
   
7. Roger Ebert, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, RogerEbert.com, (4 April 1999)..   
   
8. The Film Sufi, “‘Lessons of Darkness’ - Werner Herzog (1992)”, The Film Sufi, (30 May 2010).   
   
9. The Film Sufi, “‘Heart of Glass’ - Werner Herzog (1976)”, The Film Sufi, (6 September 2008).   
   
10. The Film Sufi, “‘Into the Inferno’ - Werner Herzog (2016)”, The Film Sufi, (11 November 2019).   
    
11. Werner Herzog, “24 Wonderfully Bonkers Werner Herzog Quotes”, (Compiled by Nico Lang), Thought Catalog, (24 April 2013).   
12. from Les Blank’s film, Burden of Dreams (1982), which is about the shooting of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).