Yesterday we finished watching “Aguirre, The Wrath of God”. Tonight I read about it on Wikipedia and elsewhere. It seems other people have a lot higher opinion of it than I do. It has its good points, but I’m going to ignore those and talk about something else.
The puppet emperor in one scene is shown gorging himself on delicacies while the rest of the crew are reduced to rationing out the last few grains of corn to eat. (It’s not in the scene in the above YouTube clip, though, even though it’s the same character. I wasn’t able to find a clip of the one I’m talking about.) BTW, All the actors look pretty well fed, the starving ones as well as the upper crust.
Up to this point the movie hadn’t done a good job of portraying the social differences between the classes in any way that would seem to engender resentments, then all of a sudden it shows this scene of stark contrast. It’s a very crude way of putting it, and it’s not a theme that was developed very carefully in the movie.
It reminds me of one of the things that has been surprising to me about Soviet era Russian films. They portray the social differences of the pre-Revolution era in a much more subtle, human fashion than I ever would have expected. I’m talking about post WWII films, not those of the Stalin era. I’ve seen a few of the Stalin-era ones on RTR Planeta, and they are about as crude as you might expect in demonizing the aristocrats. But some of the post-Stalin ones do a nice job. The message is subtle.
I’m thinking about movies such as Siberiade or Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, or even Oblamov. Yes, there is class conflict and there is a social distance, but the movies don’t overplay it. The human relationships seem real, plausible, and very ordinary.