Into the Inferno (2016)
“So, it’s quite clear that you’re sane. I never doubted that a moment from our first encounter.”
Chinese writer-director Jia Zhangke’s latest film, the wondrous Caught by the Tides, premiered recently in Portland, which is why I wrote about it for the Mercury. A culmination of some two-plus decades of footage, both previously used and not, Caught by the Tides is as much a self-reflection as Jia’s attempt to rid himself, maybe even revise a bit, the historical burden his filmmaking carries.
Watching Caught by the Tides, as well as revisiting some of the films from which Jia culls sometimes-whole scenes, I thought about how often I reuse and recontextualize my own work; this blog is pretty clear evidence of that. Even the Cokemachineglow book—which in so many ways was meant to preserve an ephemeral spirit that ran through the website and its community of writers—isn’t entirely accurate. I was given the chance to edit my old pieces, and I did so willingly, excising some of the more poorly aged or casually egregious material. It felt good to rewrite myself.
And watching Caught by the Tides and thinking about the Cokemachineglow book, I also thought of Into the Inferno, Werner Herzog’s 2016 round-the-world documentary, ostensibly about how volcanoes have shaped countless cultures throughout time, but really about how Werner Herzog doesn’t want people to think he’s crazy.
Into the Inferno was one of four original documentaries Netflix sent to the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. In a press announcement in August of that year about the glut of films at the storied Canadian festival, Netflix, “the world’s leading Internet TV network,” declared it was “continuing to build on its innovative and award-winning slate of documentary programming” by producing “Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer’s Into the Inferno, a global cinematic journey on the deeply rooted relationship between humans and volcanoes,” though the movie had already premiered at the Telluride Film Festival. Into the Inferno officially hit Netflix on October 28, 2016.
So Into the Inferno is Herzog’s Netflix movie—which means pretty much nothing anymore. I was genuinely surprised to find it still available on Netflix, because anyone’s first assumption when searching for these, relics of a moment when a proto- version of a streamer wasn’t so suffused with disposable content that the service put some actual ceremony behind its output, would be that they’re gone, sold off or dumped for tax purposes or just forgotten, disappeared as if by elemental forces. Because that is what this stuff’s purpose is anymore: its will is that of impermanence.
As Herzog says to Oppenheimer upon first meeting in Antarctica while making Encounters at the End of the World—their first meeting’s footage featured in Into the Inferno—when asked if he sees volcanoes as inherently destructive forces, Herzog responds that it’s “good that they are there” because it reminds him of the impermanence of “the soil we walk upon.”
There’s no permanence to what we are doing, no permanence to the effort of human being, no permanence to art, no permanence to science.
In voice over, Herzog, Into the Inferno’s narrator, claims “this movie” truly started with Encounters at the End of the World, his film about Antarctica, where he visited that continent’s Mt. Erebus at about 12,500 ft above sea level and met a “strange and wonderful tribe of volcanologists, some of them overcome by altitude sickness.” One man who seemed to jovially endure the environmental extremes was Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist from the University of Cambridge. Herzog remembers they became fast friends.
And then within that old footage, from 2006, Oppenheimer brings up Herzog's 1977 short, La Soufrière, chronicling Herzog’s visit to the Caribbean island of Guadaloupe as its active volcano was showing signs of eruption, the whole island’s population evacuated except for one man who refused to leave, who Herzog naturally admired as both philosophical and existentially sleepy. The volcano never erupted.
Into the Inferno reminisces alongside Oppenheimer, and we delve even further into Herzog's filmography. We are given actual scenes from La Soufrière, Herzog’s narration providing adequate and quite literal context, accompanied by a text card that says, “From Werner Herzog’s film, La Soufrière” as if we needed a reminder that it was his film, as if it was anyone else’s in the midst of this Herzogian dream, within which we’re already two levels deep.
Returning to 2006, Herzog reiterates that he doesn’t, contrary to popular opinion, have a death wish: “For me, there is no personal excitement to go down [into the chasm where magma is exposed]. There is a curiosity. Yes, I would love to see it from close up. But since it is too dangerous it would be silly.”
Here’s where, if you’re sensitive to the grand inconsistencies that spew from Herzog’s mouth regularly like so much underestimated lava, you may think he’s full of shit.
Now, calm down. Herzog is, admittedly, often full of shit, which is one of the reasons I love him. Because by the time he makes The Fire Within—his film about Katia and Maurice Krafft, two volcanologists who died in a pyroclastic flow in Japan, and who Herzog introduces in Into the Inferno—he’s sympathizing with the scientists’ death drive, comparing their need to get too close to liquid rock to his need to save the world’s fleeting images from the abyss by risking his life countless times.
Nor does his statement about safety and silliness vibe with the theme of so much of his writing, which is that because he believed he would die young, he was able to approach his films fearlessly, and expected his crews and his fellow creatives to share in that fearlessness. Only then could he transcend his physical limits and take flight.
Returning to 2016, to Into the Inferno’s “present,” Clive Oppenheimer is now on Lake Toba in Indonesia (“there’s no country in the world that has more volcanoes than this one”), no longer in Antarctica, 10 years older than he was in Encounters, and he just repeats the information we were just shown, that he and Herzog met 10 years ago during the making of Encounters at the End of the World and that they became fast friends.
Talking to the camera, and therefore to Herzog, Oppenheimer concludes, “So, it’s quite clear that you’re sane. I never doubted that a moment from our first encounter.”
In a Hollywood Reporter roundtable from November 2016, barely a week after Into the Inferno was released on Netflix, Herzog speaks more about the danger of what he does, and again affirms how little he actually wants to take risks to make movies. He describes the making of La Soufrière via an anecdote about Ed Lachman not wanting to die on the island, allowing that some “lottery” is involved in his filmmaking, but that he doesn’t intentionally want to put himself in harm’s way if he can help it.
He annoyingly argues with Kirsten Johnson about the nature of his documentary films; we’ve heard this from him so many times before. Raoul Peck stares holes through him. But behind Herzog’s point, which I think is that he knows he has a reputation for being “mad” and out of pocket when really his films are much more controlled, his nearly 50 years of filmmaking seems to prove otherwise.
Herzog’s never needed a reason to globetrot, but I can only hope the Netflix branding meant a budget that guaranteed substantial freedom. I can’t imagine he sees working with Netflix as a compromise; he’s so much more practical. Netflix means expensive drones and access to North Korea.
There are shots in this film that are some of Herzog’s most astounding, but obviously, amidst visits to Ethiopia—where the charismatic professor Tim White of UC Berkeley hunts for the world’s earliest human remains—or the tiny Tanna Island in the Pacific Vanuatu archipelago—where the people who live there worship an American GI named John Frum, a messiah they believe will one day come back with the bounty of American opulence to share with the poor island inhabitants—the film’s real draw is Herzog’s visit to North Korea and Mt. Paektu.
But even then, submerged in spectacle and forbidden sights and the pageantry of both, Herzog reassures the audience that he knows it’s all staged. Carefully controlled. Herzog is aware that his North Korean excursion is inward-looking, at least in the context in which he presents it.
Because so much of who he is as a filmmaker is irrevocably bound to the way he deals with, as he calls them in the roundtable clip above, the “no-nos” of documentary filmmaking. His fiction features are closer to documentaries than his documentaries, his documentaries are closer to fiction than his fiction features, yaddah yaddah, etc. Try as he might to cast Into the Inferno as a treatise on forces beyond even his control, he’s still captured those forces within his need to prove that he is not a bonkers insurance risk refusing all reason. No, he is a sane man. A man who has a solid grasp on reality. A man with a considered perspective.
The more we burrow into Herzog’s past, the more the structure of the film begins to represent an inverted volcano, cone-shaped, with the inferno at the bottom, Herzog's earliest flirtations with the void when he first went to La Soufrière, recognizing the fire at the core of him—an inexhaustible passion that may kill him, needing to burst forth. Herzog’s observation about these eternal fuels at the source of all things gives way to perhaps one of the simultaneously most beautiful and most godawfully ugly sentences he's ever written and then successively said aloud: "This boiling mass is just monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles, and vapid humans alike.”
Thankfully, Chief Mael Moses, leader of another island in the Vanuatu archipelago, ends the film on actual poetry: “I think everything will melt. That is what I’m thinking. Everything will melt. The stone, the trees, the soil, everything will melt. Like water.”
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