The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022)
“It wasn’t that I was discouraged or that I knew I wouldn’t be able to continue, but that I was sure I wasn’t going to live much beyond the age of thirty-two."
Two documentaries from 2022 present Katia and Maurice Krafft as naturals of cinematic spectacle. Both sample and edit the volcanologist couple’s work, re-stitching the incredible footage they shot together over the course of decades across the world, to reconstitute their artistic accomplishments and reconstruct some semblance of the passion they held—for each other, but mostly for volcanoes. Both are odes to forces beyond our ken. Both (likely) benefit from being seen on huge theater screens. Only one is up for an Oscar on Sunday, and it’s not Werner Herzog’s.
The other, Fire of Love, I saw at the True/False documentary film festival almost exactly a year ago. Which meant I got to see it big. When I assembled a list of the best documentaries of 2022 for Paste Magazine, I wrote on Sara Dosa’s film:
Even if the film is too committed to being a biography that reaches past their images, the Kraffts’ footage stands alone, thrilling and magnificently shot, as much a testament to their lives as a reason to catch Fire of Love on as towering a screen as possible.
As far as Oscar chances go, Fire of Love posts decent odds against the likely winner, Navalny, and the actual best documentary in the category, Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a film whose urgency feels limitless helmed by a director whose past success with the Oscars can’t hurt. And then in the blurb right below Fire of Love’s, I wrote about the other Kraffts doc:
Like Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, The Fire Within introduces us to Maurice and Katia Krafft, iconic volcanologists, via their incomprehensibly moving documentary films, but Herzog prequalifies the lack of biographical rigor by admitting his only goal is to celebrate the wonder of the Krafft’s filmmaking, and not, necessarily, their lives. He then does exactly that, running through their oeuvre as artists with an eye for eras, beginning with their amateurish beginnings—“Their films look like home movies shot by tourists. Everything is unspectacular”—and then eventually showering praise on their compositions, as well as their move into more “humanistic” themes. As is his wont, Herzog scores broiling lava and the otherworldly mutations of molten rock to “Pie Jesu” and Verdi’s “Requiem”—as well as two playful, aching ballads by Mexican artist Ana Gabriel—and it’s difficult to not be swept up in Herzog’s awe for what is clearly awe-inspiring. Romanced by it.
Herzog has only been nominated for one Oscar, for Encounters at the End of the World in 2009. He lost to Man on Wire. As the above write-up goes on, I assume that, in the same way Herzog likely wouldn’t care about awards nominations against the context of his unquantifiably well-regarded and otherwise full life, he wouldn’t put much thought into Dosa’s doc either.
Any degree of research, I should have known, would prove me wrong. At a Q&A following the film’s premiere at DOC NYC 2022, Herzog addresses the nature of his communicating with the dead, and the responsibility of using the footage. He says, “...I had the feeling that it was good that I could step in. And it was probably good that another filmmaker stepped in as well and made another film on [the Kraffts], and there could be five, six, seven more films made of this footage. There’s enough in it.”
During a conversation with Jeremy Kagen, replayed on a December episode of the DGS podcast, Herzog adds further context to his affinity for the Kraffts. He discovered their archive of films when he was making Into the Inferno in eastern France (Herzog has made numerous films about volcanoes; they’re a bit of a running element of his work), but was unable to get the funding together to do anything with the footage before it was bought by Swiss media company Titan Films. Undaunted, he “plowed on” with other projects—until, as is often the case, funding appeared. By that point, he successfully struck a “very fair deal” with Titan to get the footage they owned for free, as long as they shared in revenue and were listed as producers. Still, Dosa and her team were able to purchase footage from the French archive before Titan took over, so they got out ahead. “And because of all these delays with the finances, my film was finished, I think, eight days after Fire of Love was shown at Sundance, even though I had started two and a half years earlier.”
Can’t help but sense some bitterness in Herzog’s recollection. But not at Dosa, not at her film; maybe instead at the unlucky essence of filmmaking as he’s weathered it over the past five decades. Because if there’s anyone who could understand the Kraffts, it’s Werner Herzog, but that means nothing to the reality that “the money” just wasn’t there when he needed it most.
Here’s another thing I wrote about The Fire Within:
I’m reminded of Herzog’s recent doc, Fireball, which clips some scenes from Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, one of two asteroid movies from 1998, the other being Armageddon, just two movies about the same thing in the same year, one never really acknowledging the other as if we’re blinking between parallel universes. There was Volcano and Dante’s Peak in 1997. The zeitgeist in superposition.
Much of the same footage appears in both documentaries, though the archive apparently boasted more than 200 hours. This is just how this tends to happen.
In my first post for the Herzblog, I wondered what Werner Herzog thought of fear, if he thought of it at all, as though unearthing a clue from his oeuvre would be the blog-long project I’d undertake. A new purpose for this stage of my life, on the cusp of 40 years old, which feels like the stage and age at which one needs something like “purpose.” I posited the question dramatically: What does Werner Herzog think of fear? And then a day or so later I found the answer pretty quickly.
In the 2014 book of conversations—and the closest thing I’ll ever read to a personal Bible, I suppose—A Guide for the Perplexed, Herzog states that as far back as he could remember he was convinced, with every new film and every new endeavor, that it would be his last.
“It wasn’t that I was discouraged or that I knew I wouldn’t be able to continue, but that I was sure I wasn’t going to live much beyond the age of thirty-two. I thought a metaphorical stray bullet would hit me, that my life wouldn’t be a long one. I remember being convinced of this at the age of twenty-four…”
And with that he declares the obvious:
“I knew I had to be careful about how I use my time, that I couldn’t waste a single second or allow myself to be afraid of anything or anyone. Fear no longer exists for me. The man who frightens me has yet to be born.”
If Fire of Love is about the love triangle between the Kraffts and volcanoes, then The Fire Within is about the films the Kraffts made, a literal requiem—a “musical” as Herzog’s described it—for their inimitable work. During the DOC NYC Q&A, Herzog tells of both his process and his motivation: “It became very quickly evident what I was after. And of course it was not only the spectacular footage, which is quite obvious–you have to have it in the film. But what I wanted to do was celebrate the achievement, the imagery they have created and left us. …beyond that I had the feeling it should be a celebration of cinema itself.” (On the DGS podcast he says something nearly identical, but even more ebullient: “And these images are so grandiose and so cinematic that I’m totally in awe… It’s the third time I’ve seen it on the screen and it overwhelms me when I see it. I say it easily because I didn’t shoot it…it’s a celebration of cinema.”)
Herzog’s films are rapt with holy fools, with dreamers who risk existential punishment to kiss the void. “I feel a kinship,” he’s said of the Kraffts. “There’s something that brings them very close to me. I admire the courage…” He admits the inevitability of their approach, too: “…the Kraffts, in a way, they probably knew the borderline, they probably knew that most of the time they were just too close, and for doing real science you don’t need to be 10 feet from a crater eruption…”
Something, regardless, compelled them. And Herzog, who describes countless “close calls” he’s had films all over the world, conveys the same compulsion. The same fearlessness, commiserating with Maurice Krafft, a man who dreamed of literally riding pyroclastic lava flows in an impossible canoe—a dream Herzog admires, but more than that: a dream with which he sympathizes. He has stood too close to natural doom before and felt that seductive tug towards nonexistence. That hypnotic communion with chthonic rhythms, life splayed out in visual spectacle— this is what a movie can be, what filmmaking aspires to capture. “There is something of spectacle in them that is unique and very cinematic, this kind of kinetic energy and this enormous conditions of forces is something which is very much cinema. And this is why Mad Max has been such a success from the very first moment: kinetic energy of high speed collisions of vehicles. It’s very very cinematic. Why it is, I don’t know.”
Dosa’s doc admittedly fits the Academy’s narrative better than Herzog’s. Fire of Love is more of a movie movie, replete with beautifully not-quite-abstract animation and a (unexpectedly phlegmy) Miranda July voiceover floating delicately on semantic flourishes about love and the soul and destiny. It’s found some success in theaters, where it belongs, and on Disney+, while Herzog’s rests comfortably on the History Channel here in the states, seemingly edited for commercial breaks. Both are stirring tributes to incredible people, and Dosa’s doc has already been optioned for a narrative feature.
Both are made by filmmakers who clearly take their responsibility for this story seriously. During that Q&A, Herzog said, “It’s a very strange correspondence between footage and people that aren’t alive anymore… you all of the sudden take the responsibility on your shoulders. I had no problem whatsoever with it.” Both films explore the sensational awe the Kraffts must have felt more times than any of us could imagine. But has Dosa ever dreamed of surfing on lava? Been soothed by thinking about the obliterative bliss of deleting herself in the earth’s womb? See what few eyes have seen, hold onto that, cherish that vision until the world dies, hoping that such experience existing only for itself will outlast us because what is beauty if not our brief encounters with the unknowable? I know I haven’t.
The Fire Within is available to rent on most streaming/on demand services.
Sources:
“DOC NYC 2022 - Q&a for the FIRE WITHIN: REQUIEM for KATIA and MAURICE KRAFFT with Werner Herzog.” Www.youtube.com, 17 Nov. 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBI2uHjcwbg. Accessed 6 Mar. 2023.
“The Fire within with Werner Herzog and Jeremy Kagan (Ep. 394).” Soundcloud.com, soundcloud.com/thedirectorscut/the-fire-within-with-werner-herzog-and-jeremy-kagan-ep-394. Accessed 6 Mar. 2023.
Herzog, Werner, and Paul Cronin. Werner Herzog : A Guide for the Perplexed. London, Faber & Faber, 2014.