In 1991, the French husband-and-wife volcanologist-filmmaker team Maurice and Katia Krafft were killed by the flow of ash from the eruption of Mount Unzen in Nagasaki. Inexplicably, Werner Herzog didn’t get around to making a film about them for more than 30 years. These would seem to be ideal subjects for the documentary half of his career, a large portion of which he’s spent on portraits of eccentric, romantic, often foolhardy, and more than occasionally ill-fated individuals who pit themselves, or in any case find themselves pitted, against the raw elements of nature. Their couplehood makes the Kraffts a slight exception in that lineup, but it also makes them even less resistible to a more conventional documentarian — not that a documentarian could get much less conventional than Herzog.
Hence, perhaps, the appearance of two entirely separate documentaries on the Kraffts in the same year, 2022: Herzog’s The Fire Within, and Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love. The Like Stories of Old video above performs a direct comparison of the two films, both of which make heavy use of the volcano footage shot by the Kraffts themselves.
Herzog assembles it into wordless, operatically scored, and sometimes quite long sequences, intensifying their quality of the sublime, which we feel in that aesthetic zone where awe of beauty and fear of existential annihilation overlap completely. These do nothing to advance a narrative, but everything to put forth what Herzog has often referred to in interviews as a sense of “ecstatic truth,” a distillation of reality that cannot be captured by any conventional documentary means.
The video’s host Tom van der Linden describes Fire of Love as “much more fast-paced. Images come and go so quickly that they don’t really have a chance to reveal that strange, secret beauty, to take the spotlight with their own mysterious stardom. Instead, they feel subservient to whatever predetermined emotion the narrative wants you to experience,” as if the director is giving you orders: “Be in awe. Feel the romance. And now the comedy.” That hardly suggests incompetence on the part of Dosa and her collaborators, or any deficiency in her highly acclaimed film. But it does give us a sense of what becomes wearying about the techniques of mainstream cinema in general, fictional, or nonfictional. The truth is that Werner Herzog may be uniquely well placed to appreciate not just the fearsomely enrapturing object of the Kraffts’ obsession, but also the driving passion, and flashes of ridiculousness, in the Kraffts themselves — who were, after all, fellow soldiers of cinema.
Related Content:
An Introduction to the Painting of Caspar David Friedrich, Romanticism & the Sublime
Underwater Volcanic Eruption Witnessed for the First Time
Werner Herzog Discovers the Ecstasy of Skateboarding: “That’s Kind of My People”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
