Aguirre, the Wrath of God

In 1560, an expedition of Spanish conquistadors wends its way through the Peruvian jungle in search of El Dorado, the lost city of gold. What could go wrong? Werner Herzog’s landmark work on hubris, starring Klaus Kinski (at his most megalomaniacal), remains a staggering achievement: As the group splinters in the face of fevers, famine, natives, mutiny and madness, they’re stripped of their colonialist ambitions and self-conception as a civilizing force. In a notorious case of life imitating art, the production was imperiled from the outset by the hellacious conditions in the Amazon Basin, with Kinski and Herzog reportedly locked in a battle of egos to rival those on the screen. The hypnotic score by Krautrock pioneers Popol Vuh amplifies an ambience of mythic devastation.