For Werner Herzog, cinema is an active art, participatory one in which the creation of a work requires the practitioner to actually live (or have already lived) it, as if truth comes most compellingly from an artist’s firsthand experience with their subject matter. Herzog’s fiction films are intrinsically linked to his documentaries in that, in both cases, the German auteur is often not simply the storyteller but, also, a willing and essential participant, his presence fundamentally, messily tangled up in the final product.

So it goes with Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Herzog’s 1972 tale about an expedition of Spanish conquistadors through Peru’s jungles and down the treacherous Huallaga river. A saga of adventurers—led by Don Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinski)—driven headlong into annihilation by their hubris and desire for immortality, it’s the first of Herzog’s many features in which his (anti-)heroes...