Into the Inferno

Into the Inferno is a 2016 documentary, ostensibly about volcanoes, directed by Werner Herzog.  The movie is about ninety minutes long and can be seen on Netflix.  (Netflix is one of the film's producers.)   Although it is relatively short, Herzog packs a vast amount of material into the picture, so much so that the film's narrative thread is sometimes hard to follow.  Images of volcanoes trigger the filmed equivalents of footnotes to those images and, then, the footnotes expand and have footnotes of their own -- in effect, the movie is a sort of labyrinth.

Into the Inferno begins with a bravura shot, possibly accomplished with some kind of CGI or a camera-mounted on a drone.  We see a greasy-looking tarry pinnacle.  There is nothing to signify scale -- the pinnacle could be a heap of tar dumped at a construction site and eight feet tall or it could be thousands of feet high.  The black spire is veiled in sinister mist.  (At the beginning of Herzog's Fata Morgana, there is a similar shot -- a huge range of mountains in the mist accompanied by a burst of choral music.  On close inspection, or upon hearing Herzog's commentary, the viewer discerns that the mountains are just piles of sand and rock heaped up where a foundation is being poured.  While watching Into the Inferno, I immediately wondered whether a similar trick was afoot since the oily-looking black peak was not in good focus and seemed improbably steep and pointy.)  The camera rises to glide over the sheer slopes of the peak.  Suddenly, we see a half-dozen tiny figures standing in the soot at the top of the mountain.  The camera floats over them and, to our utter amazement, we see that the are standing on a knife-edge rim overlooking a deep chasm filled with a lake of molten lava.  The image is so extraordinary that it takes your breath away.  Choral music impresses upon us the solemnity of the image, its divinity, as it were.  Then, we see close-ups of the magma hurling forth flares of lava and writhing like a living being -- there is no doubt that we are in the presence of some kind of powerful god, a point that will be reinforced by later interviews and sequences involving the worship of volcanoes. 

This volcano is on an island in Vanatu and, soon enough, we meet the chief of the local village and his huge family -- he apparently has a fifty or more sons.  The chief is avuncular and talks a little about the volcano.  But he also wants to show Herzog a cannibal dance performed by his little boys who snarl and grimace at the camera.  This sequence is followed by images of Mount Erebus in Antarctica where Herzog met the volcanologist, Clive Oppenheimer, whose adventures the film chronicles.  The film, then, develops into a funky collage of anthropological exotica intercut with astounding footage of volcanoes erupting.  Two digressions bring us so far afield that, for a time, the film's apparent subject seems forgotten -- in one lengthy sequence, we see a paleo-anthropologist collecting bone fragments from a nightmarish rift desert in Ethiopia.  Herzog justifies the scene because the landscape is charred-looking and obviously volcanic.  But the scene exists as a platform on which a flamboyant, Klaus-Kinski-inflected scientist, dressed like an extra in a Mad Max film, can rant and rave.  (The scene is also justified, perhaps, because of its intrinsic historical interest -- we see the paleo-anthropologists collecting fragments of one of only three ancient hominids of this type discovered in Africa.)  The other lengthy digression involves a trip to North Korea; the sequence is justified, if only slightly by the fact that the ruling regime established its legitimacy by fighting the Japanese invaders in the vicinity of a misty volcano with a sinister crater lake at the border with China -- images of the volcano are ubiquitous in the Hermit kingdom and we see people making pilgrimages to a grandiose sculpture garden on the slopes of the peak.  (A group of identically uniformed students trots up to the rim of the volcano's crater and, then, sings a song as a tribute to the heroic mountain -- the men pump their fists in time with the music, and say what you want about North Korea, it's male choruses can really sing.)  Herzog is reticent in these sequences -- he presents the images without commentary and, of course, the extraordinary pictures speak for themselves in a variety of ways.  Throughout the picture, Herzog and his surrogate, Clive Oppenheimer, withhold comment -- they seem to be ideal listeners, completely sympathetic while also formidably intelligent.  (This being a Herzog film, a number of the performers seem to feel that they must exude operatic, larger-than-life fanaticism -- this is particularly true of the flamboyant anthropologist who seems to be acting as the star in a Herzog movie.)  From time to time, Herzog slides into self-parody, although this is also intentional in my view and intended as a sly kind of witticism.   Commenting on the magma rumbling beneath our feet, Herzog says in his husky voice:  "It pays no attention to scuttling roaches or retarded lizards or vapid human beings -- it is completely indifferent to us." -- Of course -- it is not sentient, but instead a roiling mass of molten rock. 

William Blake said that "Energy is Eternal Delight."  Herzog's Into the Inferno celebrates a quasi-divine energy that trembles in the veins and bowels of the earth.  This energy is both destructive and creative -- we see its lethal force and, then, its power to revivify the very terrain that it has devastated.  This vast energy must be accommodated to human meaning -- hence, the power of the volcano puts a halo around a pudgy North Korean dictator or inspires an Icelandic myth about the end of the world, a theme to which the film obsessively returns and on which note it ends, having traveled full-circle back to Vanatu.  In a sequence that is both sad and eerily apocalyptic, Vanatu islanders sing a kind of vehement blues, strumming on ukuleles and pounding on storage crates -- they are crying out for the return of John From, their Messiah, an American GI who has promised to return to the archipelago with cargo.  The people are crammed into a dimly lit warehouse, all of them sweaty and singing in unison -- the camera slowly tracks away from the warehouse and into the jungle outside and, there, in the distance we see the scarlet flares of an erupting volcano, a cataclysm far too close for comfort.