2018.5.24 Yu Xian Er
with "Achill, the Wrath of God"
"Aguirre, God's Wrath" was Herzog's 1972 work, and our "Overland Boat" was made by him in 1982. I think both Herzog and Wenders are directors with distinct personal styles, and just by looking at the film, you know it's his.
"Aguirre, God's Wrath" was filmed in the Amazon rainforest, and "Overland Boat" was also filmed in the South American rainforest. Many of his other works have also entered into primitive, isolated and pure natural harsh environments such as rain forests, isolated islands, deserts, and indigenous areas. So why did Herzog make such a choice?
First , such an act is both a unilateral invasion and a mutual shock. This kind of shock occurs between "civilized man" and nature, between "civilized man" and "barbarian", between modern civilization and primitive civilization.
In the face of these primitive people and environments, our "civilized people" in suits and leather shoes and modern machines with iron walls are particularly weak and ridiculous.
Secondly , in this isolated, pure and natural environment, people lose all cover and help, and are as naked as they are stripped. Let us be able to take care of ourselves more realistically.
At the same time, it is also such a harsh environment that will inspire our truest force.
Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald was always out of tune with his surroundings—
The opera I watched by hand rowing a boat was so embarrassing that I didn't buy a ticket yet.
Always wear a white suit, no matter how messy the environment is.
When the major capitalists are frantically exploiting resources and making a fortune, he wants to build an opera house in the rainforest.
Fitzgerald was a dreamer, but also a doer.
He did not stop his "opera house" in imagination, but actually bought a boat, recruited a boat of people, and sailed into the depths of the dangerous and unpredictable rainforest.
If we had to discuss it, pulling a giant ship over a hill might not be much easier than navigating a dangerous rapid. But it doesn't matter. The important thing is that Fitzgerald believes that it works and must be done.
So there is an epic scene - on land, in boat.
A dreamer, a fanatic, a lunatic, an alien, a marginal person, with his inexplicable firm belief, as well as the common strength of industrial civilization and primitive civilization, has successfully achieved the scene of boating on land.
If there is where I can see the only tiny power and the only tiny hope of mankind, it is in this madman .
Opera and Rainforest
The scene of the rainforest is an important part of the film - Herzog is considered, after John Ford, another director who uses the scenery to the extreme. I think this is more apparent and extreme in Aguirre, Wrath of God.
In this film, primitive scenery and modern opera meet.
When the gramophone echoes the opera in the rainforest, the art of our proud human creation meets and collides with the pristine natural rainforest.
But I think here, the director is not trying to express the charm and greatness of the art representing the highest civilization of mankind, on the contrary, I feel a kind of tragic meaning from it.
——In the face of primitive nature, the art we are proud of seems to be only a eulogy before the collapse and demise of mankind.
others
There is also some mockery and deconstruction of religion (there can be no church without an opera house; priests are powerless in the rainforest; priests are killed by savages)
A description of the tragedy of another fanatic
And Kinski, the actor who plays the lead in both films. (He's too good to play these lunatics)
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