Writing Historical Fiction (7): Amitav Ghosh

I have not read a single book by Amitav Ghosh (yet), but that should not prevent me from posting his opinion on writing historical fiction

Q: What sorts of things do you have to do to write successful historical fiction?
A: I don’t think there is any great difference between historical and other kinds of fiction. There are, in fact, very few novels that are not, in some sense, ‘historical’. Most novels are written in the past tense after all, and are based on the conceit that they are narrating events that have already happened. Melville’s Moby Dick was inspired by events that occurred decades before he started the book; the same is true of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. But today nobody thinks of these books as ‘historical novels’. What this tells us is that history provides novelists, poets and playwrights with different settings and situations: this does not mean that their themes are necessarily different from those that are explored by writers who choose to write about contemporary settings. In the end, novels are all the same in that they are about characters and their predicaments. Nobody would read a historical novel for the history alone. To be successful a historical novel, like any other, must have compelling characters.[Amitav Ghosh Returns to the Opium Trade in “River of Smoke”]

Added to the Reading List (1)

The Historical Novel Society sends out a newsletter once a month with book review roundups from all the major newspapers. The newsletter covers not just fiction, but non-fiction as well. Here are some interesting books. Clicking on the book titles will take you to the review.
Ragnarok by AS Byatt

Why do myths endure? We don’t need them anymore to explain our world. We don’t believe in them. But because they boil human experience down to its essence, speak of our greatest fears and desires, and offer such rich soil for the imagination, they can bear retelling a thousand times.
Canongate’s myth series broaches the question by inviting eminent authors to look at them afresh, and Byatt has chosen the most uncompromising of the lot – the Norse version of Armageddon.
Rather than transplanting, reshaping or reinterpreting her chosen myth, as other authors have done, Byatt boldly retells it in a relatively pure form, though with a deeply personalised slant.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

His debut novel, published in 2008, is a complex tale of intrigue and betrayal that unfolds on the Malaysian island of Penang during the brutal Japanese occupation in World War II.
Rich in detail of the history of Japanese imperialism in colonial Malaya, the story draws the reader into one man’s struggle at a pivotal moment in history.

The Return of Captain John Emmett by Elizabeth Speller

This whopping whodunit, which also manages to create a poignant portrait of soldiers’ lives in the aftermath of World War I, presents a devastated, grayed-down England suffering under the profound loss that overwhelms survivors – both soldiers and those left at home.
The novel revolves around the execution of an officer in France for cowardice and desertion and the rippling effect on the soldiers and families involved. It was inspired, Speller tells us in an author’s note, by the execution of more than 300 British soldiers by firing squad in the Great War. That only three of them were officers raised intriguing questions about class discrepancies.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann

1493” picks up where Mann’s best seller, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” left off. In 1491, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were almost impassable barriers. America might as well have been on another planet from Europe and Asia. But Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean the following year changed everything. Plants, animals, microbes and cultures began washing around the world, taking tomatoes to Massachusetts, corn to the Philippines and slaves, markets and malaria almost everywhere. It was one world, ready or not.

City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire by Roger Crowley

Roger Crowley’s hugely readable, well-written and informative book – take it there with you this summer! – explains how the Venetian Republic grabbed the riches that built it. Grabbed: it’s not the kind of language we associate with the beauty of San Marco or the notion of La Serenissima. But though diplomacy was always a Venetian art, the city was not built on serenity.
It had a large empire which, in its heyday, stretched down the Adriatic, along the Peloponnesian coast, across to Crete, up the Adriatic and into Asia Minor, with its eastern outpost at Tana on the far end of the Sea of Azov beyond the Crimea. An empire is not tranquil: it requires war, conquest, impressment, imposed government and slavery. Venice engaged in all these in the name of trade. The beauty of Venice, just like the beauty of nearly all great European cities, rests on profit and brutality.

Briefly Noted: The Conspirator (2010)

Robert E. Lee’s Army surrendered to Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865 and after six days President Lincoln was assassinated. Ten days later, the assassin John Wilkes Booth was killed by Union soldiers in Virginia. But on the day Lincoln was shot, he went into a coma and the War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton wanted answers. Very soon one of Booth’s colleague, a John Surratt was identified. John had left town, so his mother Mary Surratt was taken into custody. Robert Redford’s gripping period movie follows the trial of Mary Surratt
Mary was the owner of a boarding house in which the conspirators stayed and that was a fact she never denied. To defend her before a military tribunal a reluctant lawyer — a 27 year old civil war hero by the name of Fredrick Aiken is appointed. Mr. Aiken believes that his client is guilty and he reluctantly defends her because he was forced to by his mentor who believes that the constitution is applicable during war time as well.
But as the trial proceeds he changes; from being certain that Mary was guilty, he becomes unsure of her role. Despite the fact that the military tribunal worked against him, never giving him the freedom to work the case, he manages to convince everyone that Mary was not guilty. But Mary becomes the first woman to be executed by United States because Edwin M. Stanton believes that, “They assassinated the President and someone must be held accountable.”
After the preachy and boring Lions for Lambs, this is an excellent movie which goes into deeper questions about nation, laws, war and the people who have to make tough decisions in the midst of all these.

Briefly Noted: The Eagle (2011)

Following Centurion (2010), here is another movie on the Ninth Legion which disappeared in Britain around 117 CE. In this movie, years have passed since the incident and Marcus Flavius Aquila arrives to take over a garrison in Britain. He has a secret: his father was the in charge of Rome’s Eagle standard in the legion which disappeared and if you have seen the pilot episode of HBO’s Rome, you know that the Eagle is a big thing.
Thus the son wants to restore the family honor by finding the truth behind the disappearance of the legion and their standard and that indeed is a noble cause. Unfortunately the movie took the artsy route — I finished couple of chapters of An Evil Eye in between scenes. As the hero wanders aimlessly outside Hadrian’s Wall, so does the script. It is a messy historical which failed to capture my attention after the first battle. Soon it becomes a buddy picture, but you are not rooting for either one.
Now that the Ninth Legion theme has been beaten to death, I hope they make movie of Rome or Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra.

Briefly Noted: Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

He competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and had his picture taken with Hitler. In the war that followed, he was shot down over the Pacific and he spent 47 days on a raft drifting aimlessly, surviving Japanese planes and sharks. For the next two years he was tortured by a sadist Japanese prison guard. Any normal person would have died, but Louis Zamperini survived all that to tell his tale. Unfortunately he became an evangelical, but somehow that saved him, his marriage and sanity.
The author does not simply follow Zamperini’s life, but also keeps track of the torturer Mutsuhiro Watanabe who survived the war and the hunt for war criminals. He was alive till 2005 and there was a possibility of both of them meeting again in Japan. But that never happened as Watanabe backed out.
This book is an example of what a great non-fiction writer can do; the research just blends into the story telling. Within the structure of a biography, Laura Hillenbrand introduces suspense and lots of history. This is one of the most powerful books I have read recently.

Review: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)

In Southern France, the Ardèche River flows through a spectacular landscape. Surrounding the river are white limestone cliffs, covered with vegetation, rising up over hundreds of feet. Over the river runs the Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, a natural arc like the one at Arches National Park. The cliffs on either side of the river are perfect places for hiking and that is what Jean-Marie Chauvet and his two friends, Éliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire were doing in December, 1994 when they chanced on a narrow entrance within the cliffs.
When you enter through this obscure shaft which was hidden for twenty millenia, you reach a dark cave with high ceiling where there is not much to see. If you have seen any Ramsay Brothers or Ram Gopal Varma movie, this is the point where you scream and run as fast as possible. Fortunately Chauvet and his friends explored the caves and as they went through the network of chambers they saw not just animal bones or stalactites, but undulating cave walls painted with spectacular animal images. And they were 30,000 years old.
Some of us may enter Mt. Athos, but we will never enter the Chauvet Cave. The cave is closed to public. But then if the French culture minister is a big fan of your movies you may get the once in a life time opportunity to film inside the cave. This is how the Bavarian film maker Werner Herzog (Aguirre) got permission to make this 3D documentary. But even then there were too many restrictions. The crew had to minimal (3 people). They had to use only hand held cold lights and always stay on the narrow walkway. They would be allowed inside only for a few hours every day. Despite such restrictions, the result is a spectacular film.
Since the cave was naturally sealed by a landslide for more than 20,000 years, it is like walking into a time capsule. The walls are filled with drawings of horses, bisons, lions, bears and mammoths. In one depiction, there are a bunch of animals running and to give the impression of running, the artist chose to depict the animal with multiple legs, similar to how you do in modern cartoons. You can call them the precursor to animation. Drawn during the period when Neanderthal man roamed alongside humans and Europe was covered with glaciers, the images are lifelike. They seem to be telling various stories: of fighting and mating and of hunting and movement.

The sequencing takes us in through that cliff-face door, away from sunlit faces and landscapes and down the torchlit shaft leading to the cave’s long chambers. These stretch back some eight hundred feet. The cave’s miracles of geology—the extravagance of its glittering stalagmites and calcite curtains—surpass those of the Pont d’Arc outside. But the chambers also have undulating walls, and it was on these that the ancient artists chiefly worked. We are given a foretaste of their images: we exit; we return to this item, to that; we leave again. “It is a relief to go outside,” Herzog explains: inside the caves we get to feeling “as if we were disturbing,” as if our distant ancestors’ eyes were still upon us. But finally we surrender to the flow of their art, immersed at length in the interplay of torchlight, rippling cave flanks, scorings, charcoalings and red ochre.[Cave of Forgotten Dreams]

But there are no human depictions.

One thing, though: There’s a partial depiction of a female, the lower part of a female body, somewhat embraced by a bison. It’s very strange that this motif reappears 30,000 years later in some etchings of Picasso—the Minotaur and the female.But why no human beings? You see depictions of human beings 20,000 years later, 18,000 years later, at the beginning of Neolithic times. By the end of Paleolithic—during the Magdalenian epoch of Paleolithic culture—that’s where you start seeing human depictions.[Werner Herzog Finds at Least Three Dimensions in the “Cave of Forgotten Dreams]

The documentary also reveals the amount of care taken by the French to protect the caves. This has not been developed into a tourist site because the visitors’ breath could bring mold on the paintings like what happened in Lascaux. Even the scientists stay on the narrow metal path so as not to plant their foot prints next to the 20,000 year print of an extinct cave bear. For tourists, they are planning a replica site nearby.

The other impressive thing is the research that has been done in these caves. Every inch has been laser scanned and specialists have looked at every artifact. Near the opening there is a wall with hundreds of hand prints and they belonged to a man who had crooked fingers. Deep in the caves, researchers found another painting which was done by a man who too had crooked fingers. The Chavuet painters used torches and some of them rubbed those flames against the cave walls leaving 28,000 year old charcoal fragments. A surreal moment is when Herzog tells us about two sets of foot prints: one belongs to a bear and the other to a child. Did the bear eat the child, or were they friends or were the foot prints made thousands of years apart? Again, we don’t know.
What makes this a non-boring documentary is Herzog’s commentary. His imagination is quite wild. Standing in the silence, looking at the art, he says one can hear one’s own heartbeat and the sound track switches appropriately. The cave paintings remind him of Fred Astaire’s dancing with the shadows and we get a visual from Swing Time. Then he gets the most wonderful characters to explain the past: a circus employee turned archaeologist, a scientist who walks in reindeer skin, a perfume maker who sniffs for smells in caves. These are very unique Herzog touches.
This is probably the only documentary I have seen in a theater and it was worth it.
Furthur Reading:

What does the world’s oldest art say about us? The New Yorker article that inspired Herzog.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), NYTimes Review
Werner Herzog Finds at Least Three Dimensions in the “Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Herzog on Fresh Air

In Pragati: Book Review – Churchill's Secret War by Madhusree Mukherjee

Three days after Germany invaded France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, Winston Churchill inspired Britain with the words, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” These words—Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat—is the title of a book by John Lukacs which analyses Churchill’s motivational speeches during World War II as American and Russian forces battled the Axis in Europe and the Pacific. The titles of other books—The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, Churchill: A Study in Greatness—reveal the exalted position Britain’s war-time prime pinister occupies in world history, specifically Western history.
While reading Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat it was unclear what was more funny—Mr Lukacs’ repetition of the title words every few pages or his admiration of Churchill’s speeches extolling the virtues of freedom ignoring the enslaved people of the colonies. For such historians Churchill proved his mettle by leading the country through the war and coming out victorious. Like how many American historians do not see the irony in Thomas Jefferson asserting all men are equal while owning slaves, members of Churchill fan club do not see anything wrong in pronouncing him as the upholder of freedom and democracy despite his unapologetic imperialist stance and inhuman behavior towards the colonies.
In Madhusree Mukherjee’s book, Churchill is neither a lion nor a man of great moral rectitude. He was a man who could have prevented three million Indians from starving to death, but did not. Clouded by racist views of Indians, he even stopped other countries from helping the starving population, antagonised the US president with his stand on India and argued that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to British India. Despite all these, when the first words of Paul Johnson’s biography states that Churchill was most valuable man to the whole of humanity in the 20th century, one has to wonder about the lack of perspective behind that testimonial.
The famine
Between 1941 and 1942, three events occurred which turned out to be disastrous for the people of Bengal. First, fearing the Japanese invasion of India, the War Cabinet ordered a scorched earth policy in areas which would have to be surrendered. Rice was removed or destroyed. Money was advanced to businessmen to buy and hoard. Along with this, boats, much needed by farmers, fishermen and potters for their livelihood were destroyed.
Continue reading →

Movie Review: The Sea Hawk (1940)

Poster via Wikipedia There is a funny scene at the beginning of The Sea Hawk which explains the state of Europe in the 16th century. The English privateer Geoffrey Thorpe (Errol Flynn) — leader of a group of privateers known as Sea Hawks — captures the Spanish ship and takes the Ambassador and his niece on board. As Thorpe makes some moves against the beautiful Dona Maria, she refutes his advances and forcefully tells him that she does not talk to pirates. Thorpe smiles and asks Dona Maria how the Spaniards managed to get the Indians to part with their treasures. The speechless lady stomps away and at this very moment Thorpe, the writers and the viewers know that she has fallen for him.
The movie is set in a period which is almost a century after Vasco da Gama set foot in India and a decade before the first fleet of East India Company visited Jehangir. Spain was the super power following the conquest and looting of paradise by Columbus and his followers. England’s standing in the world at that time, according to one historian, “was pretty rubbish.” Queen Elizabeth could not raise capital for any venture and made money by robbing Spanish fleets, who in the European Amway style made money by robbing people of the New World. The Queen had deputed a number of privateers (euphemism for pirate), licenced by the state for this task.
This was the time of Francis Drake and William Shakespeare. This was also a time of religious wars. When Elizabeth took over, she was initially lenient towards the Catholics, but when the Catholics saved the souls of few prominent people, she took notice and outlawed the practice of the religion. Besides this she also supported the Dutch Protestants and this did not go well with King Philip II of Spain, who once was the King of England due to his marriage to “Bloody” Mary. Philip wanted to send an armada to invade England, remove Elizabeth from the throne and return England to the Catholic fold.
While he was preparing the armada, Philip did not want Elizabeth to have any suspicion. It was for this reason that he sent the Ambassador and his niece to London. When she hears that the Ambassador was captured by her privateer, the ancestor of Prince William admonishes Thorpe in the court, but after that takes him to her private chamber and accepts gifts from the loot. She also approves his plan for going to the Americas and looting the Spaniards, right at the source.
This turned out to be a bad idea. Conspirators in the court join forces with the Spanish Ambassador and send a team to ambush Thorpe. He is taken to Spain where he faces another great European invention — the Inquisition Court where he is sentenced to a life in the galleys. From there he escapes, returns back to London and reveals the Spanish conspiracy.
This is a fun movie to watch with an array of one dimensional characters in expensive costumes, very impressive sets, with plenty of sword fighting and the 1970s Rajendra Kumar-Asha Parekh style look-don’t-touch style romance. The hero is smart, good looking, adventurous or as they say – swashbuckling. The heroine too is bold, beautiful and has of an independent mind. With a few songs, it would have made for a perfect Indian movie. In fact, parts of this movie were used in the first 70mm Malayalam movie — Padayottam (1982).
Though it was made in 1940s, the action scenes are quite spectacular, especially the initial scene where Thorpe’s ship chases and captures the Spanish ship, the ambush in Panama, and the final fight between Thorpe and the spy in the English court. The movie was released during WWII and there was some symbolism to the Queen’s speech in the movie. As one reviewer notes:

Around the time of the movie’s release in July 1940, Great Britain found itself standing alone against the growing threat of Nazi Germany. Sixteenth century Spain. Nazi Germany in 1939-1940. I get the feeling that Miller and especially Koch knew what they were doing when writing the movie’s script. Especially since Spain (under Franco’s Fascist rule) happened to be one of Germany’s allies in 1940. The strongest indication of ”THE SEA HAWK” being an allegory of World War II’s early years came in the form of the Queen’s speech in the final scene that hinted for all free men to defend liberty, and that the world did not belong to any one man. She might as well have been speaking to the British subjects of 1940, instead of 1588.

As always, the irony escapes these British script writers.

Writing Historical Fiction (6): Jason Goodwin

Recently on goodreads.com, I got an opportunity to ask few questions to Jason Goodwin — the author of The Snake Stone,The Janissary Tree and The Bellini Card, featuring Investigator Yashim — on writing historical fiction.

Research for historical fiction can be never ending. So do you write the plot first and then add in the minor details later? Does research and writing go in parallel?

…the research can be, could be, endless, so there comes a point when you have read a hundred books, hoovered the floor of the car again, washed up and fixed the leaky tap, looked at some notes, and you just have to get going. Clinging to the fragile hope that this, your story, is true in spirit, if occasionally outrageous in the details. But not, ever, anachronistic.
A dozen minor details can be cleared up as you go, via the internet – a name, the position of a building, was he alive at this date? etc. Alan Paton, who wrote Cry, the Beloved Country, says he researches each chapter before he writes it, chapter by chapter. My chapters are tiny, usually, so that’s not the way I do it.

How much liberty do you take with history to make the plot interesting? Did you have to make such a choice in any of the Yashim books?

When I started writing The Janissary Tree I vowed to let mystery come before history, but of course it doesn’t come that pat. The Valide, the sultan’s mother, is drawn from Leslie Blanche’s The Wilder Shores of Love, which lays out in detail the old rumour that Mahmut II mother was a French girl from Martinique who sailed to France to finish her education. En route she was taken by Algerian corsairs, and wound up in the sultan’s harem where, by dint of her intelligence, charm and determination, she secured the top spot in the female hierarchy of the Ottoman Empire. Astonishingly, a childhood friend from the remote Carribean island became Napoleon’s Empress Josephine. Some island!
Is Aimee’s story true, or merely a suggestive and irresistible flicker of a muslin dress across the darker pages of history? Who cares? The Valide, much older and wiser, is one of my favourite characters, and I won’t be doing without her even though, in truth, Mahmut’s mother was certainly dead by 1836, when the novel unfolds.
Fast and loose? Maybe. But when I wrote the janissary tree I needed a third fire-tower in Istanbul, so with a certain unease I invented one and put it in a specific part of the city. Not long afterwards I happened to be leafing through the pages of an exquisite volume of engravings of Istanbul, made by a French ambassador in the late 18th century – and there was my fire tower. I’d invented it, slap-bang where it had actually stood. (I think I’ve mentioned the Library Angel on another post).

Adding too much historical detail can make the book look like a history book. Adding less will not transport the reader to the 18th century. How do you come up with the right mix of spices? Do you have any guidelines?

Too much, too little – who can tell? I go with the feel of it, and sometimes a reader objects that I’ve overdone the history lesson (never, I think, the other way round). I’m sorry they feel that, but I’m not deeply moved. When I began writing, when I was younger and greener, I cut my teeth on travel narratives, travel books, and the craft of it taught me a lot about using one’s eyes and ears and sense of smell in evoking an unfamiliar scene. The historical novel is travel of another sort, into the past. If a reader doesn’t want the stunning detail which evokes a period, or fixes a place – well. There are other books they can try! So, like a chef, follow your nose and do what you want.

Briefly Noted: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

Aguirre, The Wrath of God (via Wikipedia) Recently four Americans were kidnapped and killed by Somalian pirates off the cost of Oman. Two of them — Jean and Scott Adam– spent the past decade, sailing the oceans offering Bibles and doing missionary work. In 2004, Kim Sun-il, a Korean missionary was beheaded in Iraq. In 2007, 23 Korean missionaries were held hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan and two killed. In the 16th century too, missionaries made such suicidal trips to hostile places motivated by religious fanaticism and imperialism. Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God tells the tale of one such mission in the Peruvian rain forest in 1560 CE.
The movie starts with a convoy of Spaniards and their slaves snaking their way across the high Andean passes with women on palanquins, a priest, animals, heavy canons, and the Bible. Under the leadership of conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, they are off to find the mythical El Dorado as well as save some souls. As they go through humid jungles, muddy terrain and reach the Amazon, Pizarro decides that they cannot proceed further. He sends a scouting party on four rafts through the rapids. One raft gets separated and the next day all people on it are found dead, killed by mysterious attackers.
From this point the lunacy starts. The leader Don Pedro de Ursúa decides that they should go back to Pizzaro while the second in command Don Lope de Aguirre disagrees. Aguirre argues that if they move forward, they will discover El Dorado and become rich like Hernán Cortés. The mutiny becomes violent: Ursúa is shot and wounded and a nobleman is chosen as the emperor. Aguirre reads a proclamation that Don Fernando de Guzman is the emperor of the New World and not Philip II of Spain.
Following this they set off on the raft and rest of the movie happens on this raft. While the crew starves, Emperor Guzman feasts. The movie moves at the leisurely pace of the Amazon and is disrupted a few times when they see native villages and find that some of their missing compatriots had been used as food. They move in constant fear of being attacked but do foolish things like letting their horses go. Some enervated Spaniards want to escape from Aguirre and return to Pizzaro. But the crazy leader, who took over after Guzman was killed, would not tolerate any talk of retreat. One day they see two natives on a boat and the first question the priest has for them is if they have heard of Jesus Christ. Even in the hostile atmosphere where their survival is at stake, their bigger concern is in Christian burial and after life.
The cruise along the river continues and finally, everyone is killed by the natives who fire arrows from the river banks. Undeterred, Aguirre goes forward claiming he is the Wrath of God and will gain untold riches one day.
This movie is considered a classic and is on Time Magazine’s Top 100 movies, but it was quite boring. There are many loose ends in the movie. For example, why is Aguirre such a crazy guy? Did they know he was crazy and still let him be in command? Unlike Ridley Scott’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise there is no back-story to explain his behavior. Another point: Why did “Emperor” Guzman forgive Ursúa after the mock trial which sentenced him to death? Even Aguirre who hoisted Guzman as the emperor looks surprised at this verdict, but does nothing. When Aguirre takes over as the leader one of his first acts is to hang Ursúa. Much later in a disconnected scene Ursúa’s wife walks off into the forest and disappears.
The movie at 100 minutes is not long, but since it is done in an artsy/symbolic way, even the dramatic moments do not seem dramatic. There is a scene when the members of the team are collecting wood and iron. Since Ursúa had not given the order, he is sure that Aguirre is behind it. In a confrontational scene they both stare at each other reminding you of all those award winning Malayalam movies of the 80s. There is another scene when one of the slaves tells his story — about how he was a prince and was converted by the Spaniards — in an unemotional monotonic narrative as if he is reading from a piece of paper during the script reading session. In approximately 90% of the scenes, there is no emotion in the face of any of the characters.
But the movie makes up for all this by providing by some stunning visuals and it is no surprise that it has influenced film makers like Santosh Sivan. Right from the initial scene of the over the Andes to the raft journey along the Amazon, you experience the grandeur of the landscape. In his review Roger Ebert wrote that the movie was supposed to provide a feeling and not deliver artificial action. Since the movie is like a documentary, it does not provide much feelings. The only thing that stays with you is Aguirre’s madness.