This is pure Heart of Darkness territory. A band of conquistadors searching for El Dorado in darkest Peru find the horror within themselves. Never has Klaus Kinski been more unhinged than as the leader of this crew – the director's fantasised vision of a supposedly sophisticated European who loses his marbles. At the end, with his followers and daughter dead, a demented Aguirre is adrift on a raft overrun by monkeys. Truly, never has a band of monkey extras heard a better howl of monologue than this: "I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together, we shall rule this entire continent!"
The marvellous heedlessness for the dreary dictates of cinematic realism, the sight of a man at the end of his rope and psyche – at this point in his career, Werner Herzog was making the kind of films that, had Richard Wagner been born a century later, he would have been compelled to realise.
Aguirre has perhaps been supplanted in its vision of colonial madness by Coppola's more bombastic Apocalypse Now, which came four years later and borrows heavily from Herzog. But it is less of a film than Aguirre: while the latter uses minimal story and dialogue to express its potent vision, Coppola's film is all talk and display, wearing its high-art credentials (Brando intoning Eliot, Wagner as napalm's aural backdrop) like badges of honour.
Aguirre remains an unremitting and overwhelming vision, not just of the colonial mindset gone insane, but of the madness that – given the opportunity – would bound from every man's breast.