Seven years before Apocalypse Now, young Bavarian director Werner Herzog embarked on his own journey into the heart of darkness.
Aguirre’s a hypnotic account of a doomed 16th-Century Conquistador expedition through the Peruvian jungle in search of the mythical El Dorado.
Klaus Kinski plays the titular megalomaniac, terrorising his fellow Spanish adventurers and battling both an unseen human enemy and nature at its most immense and pitiless.
Traditional labels of fiction and documentary seem redundant in describing this newly restored film, whose superbly photographed landscapes reflect Aguirre’s increasingly hallucinatory state of mind.
A classic that screams to be seen on the big screen.
