Word: monke
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...Fields Forever, a drug song, is backed by masses of huge, drowsy faces, ballooning up over the stage as they smoke pot, looking as passive as numbed denizens of an opium parlor. Revolution, in which the Beatles dissociate themselves from violence, shows hooded Klansmen burning a cross, and a monk in self-immolation to protest the Viet Nam War, serenely praying as delicate traceries of flame sweep over him. The words of a famous Lennon love song about the need to make up after a spat: "Try to see it my way, only time will tell if I am right...
...rest of the film, Herzog does not make much more effort than this to help the audience understand the plot. From time to time a voice reads from the fictional diary of a monk who accompanied the fortune-hunters, but for the most part we are forced to rely on sparse dialogue and a relentlessly searching camera for our information...
...months the rebels drift down the river, increasingly hungry and discouraged, but unable to turn back. They have broken their ties to civilization--even the monk who could sanctify their journey is propelled by selfishness, and like the others knows they cannot return...
...subjects, and Aguirre is no different. Herzog's view of the Spaniards' abuse of the Indians they found in Latin America is offered through juxtaposition of images--four chained Indians struggle under the burden of a gaily-decorated sedan chair while its occupant looks on impassively; the monk impassively kills two Indians who fail to understand his efforts to proseletize. But the filmmaker's views are rarely more articulated than this, as if he accepts the conquistadors' brutality because that is the way it was. A great deal is left to the observer, so much so that the film often...
...dynamic for the film, but he fails to project the reasons for his ruthless brutality. (The problem may be that the actors speak in German, and subtitles hardly aid in character development, but is more likely that Kinski's was the kind of acting Herzog asked for.) If the monk had been an impartial observer--although this is historically unlikely, since the church served as one of the main instruments of colonization in Latin America--he might have helped the audience understand the conquistadors better. As it is, however, there is almost no internal tension in Aguirre: for the most...