Tonight we started watching Aguirre – The Wrath of God.
I’m not quite sure why we got this one from Netflix. It definitely was in my queue, but I had thought I had a Russian film at the top. Maybe it has something to do with a big mailing mixup Netflix was trying to tell us about, but that doesn’t quite make sense, either.
Oh, well, it’s something I had wanted to watch anyway. But then I was surprised to find that it’s a German film, not a Spanish one. That’s OK, too. I do have a very few German films in my queue.
But I got to thinking again about when I started with Netflix two years ago, it was because an Argentine woman told me that if I was serious about learning languages, that I should watch movies — over and over. At the time Russian and Spanish were at the top of the list of languages I was trying to learn. But the problem is, there are hardly any Spanish movies that I care to watch, while there are a lot of Russian ones. If there were more good Spanish movies, maybe I’d be putting more of my time into learning Spanish than Russian. It’s certainly a language I could make use of where I live. But Russian is at the top now, largely because of the good movies.
The clip above shows an opening scene from Aguirre. It shows more than that, too, but I didn’t want to look ahead on this one just yet. So far I’d have to say the photography and setting area good.
While watching it I got to wondering if the movie is an outgrowth of the German fascination with Native American things. Ten years or so ago we were visiting an exellent historic park in Canada — Ste. Marie among the Hurons. Among other things, I learned that the place gets more visitors from Germany than from the United States. Does their interest extend to Indians from South America, too?