In 1972, German filmmaker Werner Herzog entered the jungle swamps of the Peruvian Amazon along with a tiny crew, a small cast led by European character actor and theatrical eccentric Klaus Kinski, and several hundred native Indian extras from a local socialist collective. Armed with a camera he personally “liberated” from the Munich film school, a scraped-together budget of just under $400,000 (a third of which was set aside to pay Kinski’s fee),and a script written during road trips with the amateur football team he played for, Mr. Herzog and company endured six weeks of deprivations as they struggled to bring his vision to cinematic life.

The result, “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” begins a one-week engagement at Film Forum in a new print tonight, and it is not to be missed.

Mr. Herzog based his script on a littleknown sidebar to the history of the European explorers who first traveled the new world. In 1560, a Spanish expedition set off across the Andes in search of the mythical city of gold, El Dorado. Upon reaching the Amazon, the group’s leaders assigned Don Pedro de Ursua the task of leading a smaller splinter expedition downriver to see if El Dorado might be reached by raft. At some point on the journey, Ursua’s aide, Don Lope de Aguirre, rebelled, murdered his superior, and drafted a letter to king of Spain declaring himself the wrath of God on earth and abolishing the Spanish crown.

“Aguirre the Traitor’s” (or “Aguirre the Madman”as he’s alternately remembered by history) expedition ended in starvation and murder, and is one of the more bizarre anecdotes to emerge from the conquest of South America.

Inspired by the story of, as Mr. Herzog called him,”one of history’s great losers,” the director took the bare bones facts — the raft expedition, the revolt, and the Amazon itself — and built a film of such self-assured hallucinatory clarity and ingenious visual invention that it has no equal, even among Mr. Herzog’s previous and subsequent work. “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” is one of the best films of the 1970s, a movie that mates prickly ironic detachment with deep, dreamlike vision to uncover new pleasures and epiphanies with every viewing.

From the first shot, in which a procession of lamas, livestock, Spanish soldiers, and Indian slaves descend from a fogshrouded peak into the river basin, “Aguirre” casts a peculiar, uneasy, and completely overwhelming spell. And as the film plays out in the ill-fated raft trip to nowhere, that mordant enchantment only deepens. Combining documentarystyle handheld photography with modernist touches like direct camera address and posed human tableaux, Mr. Herzog and the cinematographer Thomas Mauch evoke a landscape that seems to have sprung directly from the unconscious, even though every grim detail bears the often unpleasant stink of reality.

“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” is a triumph of tempo and directorial point of view, maintaining an effortlessly intimate yet ironic distance from the events and characters it spotlights for 94 deliriously poetic minutes. “This animal sleeps its life away. It’s never really awake,” Aguirre says of a baby sloth he gives to his daughter.Thanks in part to the spare, sighing score by Kraut Rock cult band Popol Vuh, even in pitched battle with cannibals or riding through the boiling earth-toned murk of the Amazon rapids, Mr. Herzog’s film is never really awake.

At the center of the film is, of course, Kinski’s performance in the title role.In Kinski’s hands, eyes, lips, and shoulders, Aguirre embodies the limitless human capacity for denial. He scowls, growls, crawls, and lurches through each scene with absolute conviction.As the expedition plunges deeper into chaos and disaster, Aguirre’s madness becomes the sole reality of the film. In a magnificent closing monologue, Kinski’s Aguirre conquers everything and nothing, claiming the film’s voice-over narration for his own and fulfilling his promise to “produce history the way others produce plays.”

But Kinski’s act of creation came at a far greater creative price than the third of the budget he was guaranteed.During the course of the shoot the actor brained a fellow cast member with a sword, sending him to the hospital, blindly fired a rifle into a hut crowded with extras, and prepared to walk off the film entirely until Mr. Herzog made a counteroffer to shoot Kinski and then himself if the actor tried to leave. He was, in Mr. Herzog’s words, “a complete pestilence and a nightmare to work with.” But the results speak for themselves. Would that there were any equal director/pestilence relationships at work in the world today.

October 20–25, 30, & 31 (209 West Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8112).