I suppose two documentaries on the same subject coming out within a year of each other isn't that unusual. Anyone remember those two Whitney Houston docs from a couple years ago? Or Netflix and Hulu competing for best dibs on the Fyre Festival debacle? Well, by some sort of serendipity, here are two documentaries commemorating the life, exploration, and research of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft.
Both born in the Alsatian region of France, Katia and Maurice first met each other at the University of Strasbourg in the late-'60s. The former a geochemist and physicist, the latter a geologist, they fell in love all but instantly, bonded by their mutual, lonely fascination with volcanoes. At a period of pivotal discovery in the field of modern geology - when confirmation of the theory of plate tectonics was yielding revelatory understanding of the violent, often cataclysmic forces perpetually shaping our planet - the duo became controversial but pioneering celebrities of the international 'edutainment' set. Over the next two decades, they dared to get closer to the hot, fiery heart of active volcanoes than any of their predecessors, using both still photography and motion pictures to meticulously document their adventures.
As with the explorer-heroes of generations before them, the quality of hard research engaged in by the pair gradually receded into the background of a death-defying, thrill-seeking enterprise, the photo books, short films, and lecture tours sufficing to fund yet more dalliances with fate. As Maurice himself would put it in "The Volcano Watchers," a 1987 documentary produced for the PBS series Nature, "When you hear about an eruption, you say 'Okay, I will make gas analysis, take temperature,' and this and that... And then, sometimes - often - you forget to make the observations... You can forget to work on it. This happens often to me, and I like to forget the scientific work and just to look at the power of nature." For her own part, in the same documentary, Katia made no bones about the extent to which she and her husband's quasi-mystical obsession with the spectacle of unalloyed nature eclipsed attachments to a life without these transcendent experiences: "It's really something very dangerous. But it was so fascinating to look at it and to try to be close, to see better, to see what is happening, that we don't worry about death, 'cause it was so fantastic to see, that you just forget. Okay, it [death] can happen, but, we will try."
It was on June 3, 1991 at 4:08 p.m. that a massive eruption from Mt. Unzen on the island of Kyushu in Japan released a pyroclastic flow that swept down the mountainside towards the city of Shimabara below. This eruption took the lives of 43 people, many of whom were journalists and cameramen who had staked out positions some four kilometers away from the volcano's lava dome, gambling their lives on the probability that they could capture the smokey roar of the mountain for T.V. audiences, and yet still have just enough time to escape the unpredictably massive tidal wave of super-heated debris and gas that would inevitably spew forth. Among the lives lost that day were those of Katia and Maurice Krafft, as well as their colleague Harry Glicker. Defying even the perfunctory "safety zone" established for members of the media, and at Maurice's insistence, they had moved their cameras even closer to the heart of the volatile action, assuring their long-tempted destruction. And though their lives were consumed by that grey inferno, the Kraffts left behind a tremendous archive of photographic and filmic documentation of active volcanoes from across the globe. Their unprecedented footage has continued to crop up in nature documentaries throughout the successive three decades. Now, however, we have two documentaries focused on chronicling these materials all but exclusively, as well as the dynamic and eccentricities of the enigmatic couple who made themselves the stars of their own omnibus epic of natural fury and human awe in its face.
The first, Fire of Love, is directed by Sara Dosa, and is presented as a comprehensive yet lyrical biography of the scientist-lovers, in which the various volcanoes they visited and documented are themselves presented in the opening credits as if they were the ensemble co-stars in a great romantic epic. Narrated by none other than indie darling Miranda July, the doc premiered at Sundance this January, and is now being distributed theatrically by Neon, with National Geographic Documentary Films prepared to handle its eventual VOD rights. The second, The Fire Within, despite being the latest project by the prolific art-film veteran Werner Herzog, had its own U.K. premiere this past June. It was then released almost immediately for streaming rental on Amazon Prime Video, complete with inelegant ad-breaks telegraphing its intended televisual presentation, and with so little fanfare attached that the community over at the Internet Movie Database have yet to even update its webpage to acknowledge that the project was completed. And though Herzog's narration declaims any intention to present his film as a primarily biographical or educational piece, The Fire Within more or less follows the same narrative arc, structured around more or less identical biographical beats as its theatrical contemporary.
There proves to be a fascinating give and pull between these two unofficial companion pieces, both weaving variations of the same story of love and creation, both paying homage to the Krafft's cinematic output as well as, if not more so than, their contributions to contemporary science. It is quite fascinating being able to recognize the same pieces of media being utilized in quite different ways. And on the aesthetic front, the unabashedly showy precision of Dosa's film (edited by Erin Casper and Jocelyn Chaput) compensates for the eventually somewhat lethargic process of Herzog's more technically compromised work, which is about ten minutes shorter than Fire of Love, but feels substantially longer. On the other hand, despite his international reputation for spontaneous and philosophical musings, Herzog brings to The Fire Within a far more exacting and illuminating commentary than does July's breathless recitation of the script for Dosa's film, in which sound and imagery only ever really gestures at a frankly juvenile sense of romantic grandiosity. If forced to choose between the two, I think it's fair to say that Fire of Love, at a purely technical level, is easily the better film, whereas The Fire Within, for all its roughness around the edges, is nonetheless the superior documentary. The ever greying Herzog is not unlike the lonely grandmaster whose control of his art is so deft that its refinement and skill should be mystifying to the ingratiated Dosa as pupil. But, then again, there's a reason why we're drawn more to stories about disciples of the arts rather than the masters. The development of their vision is often more identifiable, or at least unpredictable, than the routines of the more experienced, and thus complacent craftsmen. And in their respective curation of the Kraffts' life and work, both Herzog and Dosa manage to deliver beautiful, if significantly imperfect movies.
One should, as far as I'm concerned, not choose between the two. If anything, the real challenge is deciding which is the right film to see first. What appears as a spare note in one version of the Krafft story is broadened into a whole symphony in the latter, and the coloring of Herzog and Dosa's different perspectives makes for its own juicy dialectical entertainment. While Maurice himself would claim that he was a scientist rather than a filmmaker, one of the best sequences in Fire of Love proves the incompatibility of this claim with the ways in which he and Katia actually shot their footage. Different takes presented one after another prove the extent to which the Kraffts did not merely set up their cameras and record the facts, but rather explored various options about how to communicate ideas and emotions in order to connect with a prospective audience. At the climax of this sequence, the Kraffts' instruction of some of their horse-riding companions in Mexico to gallop off into the horizon like an old Western is set to Ennio Morricone's "The Ecstasy of Gold" from his iconic score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. But whereas this all makes for a terrific sequence, it is Herzog who expands the contemplation of the Kraffts' filmmaking into the overarching thesis of The Fire Within. Indeed, Herzog treats his film, subtitled A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, as nothing short of an exploration of the development of the Kraffts' artistic vision, going from criticizing their immature and gimmicky home movies to lauding their gradually more expansive sense of purpose. Whereas Dosa gets a little doe-eyed over Katia and Maurice's weird mixture of passion and fatalism, Herzog - whose previous volcano film Into the Inferno clearly laid out his lack of sympathy for any kind of daredevil stupidity - is more apt in critiquing the nuances of the couple's footage, rather than simply marveling at it. Fully considering his position as a fellow artist, he shows greater respect for the Kraffts, rather than mere infatuation with them. And in this way, he also demonstrates a greater faculty for telling a clearer story, in which the progress of the Kraffts' footage gives expression to their development as people, not just love song archetypes.
In the same vein, both The Fire Within and Fire of Love acknowledge the imbalance of power in Maurice and Katia's relationship, which, as is often the case with career power-couples, is doubly-stifling because the line between personal and professional life is all but absent. Except whereas Herzog takes Katia's marginalization and being dragged along by her riskier husband more for granted, Dosa and her co-writers (including her editors and fellow producer Shane Boris) inflect their own version of the story with a feminist complexity. They both acknowledge Katia's marginalization, but also draw more substantially upon her interviews and personal writings. What's more, they place a narrative emphasis on Katia becoming a more prominent media figure in her own right in the aftermath of the disastrous Nevado del Ruiz eruption, as well as her role in pushing the couple to not merely explore and document volcanoes, but to more actively use the horrible footage they accumulated to work towards the cooperation of political authorities around the world in developing more sophisticated and organized methods of anticipating, predicting, and responding to the threats posed by active volcanoes to the people who often have but little choice but to live in their ominous shadow.
And, yet, at the very same time, Herzog will, in turn, curate the footage produced by the Kraffts in such a way as to call more attention to the human interests of these very same victims and survivors, demonstrating a far more sober and mature sense of the humanistic evolution in the Kraffts' documentary itself. If Fire of Love is lyrical, than The Fire Within is (at times tiresomely) operatic, and is thus more deliberate in its scope, taking several steps back from Dosa and her collaborators' overly whimsical preoccupation with these scientist-lovers themselves, in order to really consider the world that they traveled and captured for the benefit of all mankind. The Fire Within may not be as sensually engaging as Fire of Love, but what makes it essential as a companion piece, in whatever order you watch the two, is that it more straightforwardly and meaningfully explores the entire panorama of what came to fascinate the Kraffts themselves.
If my criticisms of Fire of Love come off as unfairly harsh, I will at least offer this: If you absolutely have to see only one or the other, than it is Dosa's film that will succeed on the level of being the most engrossingly cinematic experience, especially in the preferred context of a dark theater, right up close to the screen, such that the Kraffts' natural footage can achieve its most sweeping effect. Because the Kraffts shot their footage on 16 mm, Dosa has opted to present much of her film within that "square" aspect ratio, as opposed to Herzog, who blows up and crops the 16 mm footage to fit a 16:9 widescreen standard. The former aesthetic choice is more faithful to the original footage, but it means you should anticipate sitting much closer to the screen than you would for a widescreen presentation, in order for these natural shots to really encompass your field of vision. Herzog's own filmmaking isn't lacking in the proper sensualism, per se. But in light of a career as long and as varied as his own, The Fire Within, despite its more comprehensive exploitation of the Kraffts' own filmmaking, and presented in a manner that it really takes up the whole screen, just comes off as a little too assured, cliche, and listless. In the balancing act between the two films, the philosophical and analytical perspective of The Fire Within comes up short compared with the visceral, emotional punch of Fire of Love.
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