The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft

 A negative review of Werner Herzog's 2022 The Fire Within:  A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft describes this documentary as a "highlights reel" of exploding volcanos and flowing magma. This characterization is, more or less, accurate, although I think the film is far more interesting and thought-provoking than this description suggests.  As always with Herzog, his documentaries function as self-portraits and this elegy is suffused with whiffs of the great director's own mortality.  The movie has a valedictory aspect -- the incineration of its title figures also signifies the impending death, I think, of the 82-year old Herzog.

On its face, The Fire Within is extremely simple:  Herzog declares in  his voice-over that he is not producing a documentary about volcanoes or a biography of Katia and Maurice Krafft.  His intent is to memorialize their passing in a non-linear, non-narrative opera of image and sound.  After some spectacular footage (by the Kraffts) of Katia standing on the brink of a wall of fire -- it's lava spewing out of a volcano -- we see the husband and wife documentarians at the base of Mount Unzen in Japan.  The mountain is shedding clouds of steam and gas with periodic pyroclastic flows -- that is, bursts of thousand-degree fumes suffused with molten particles.  Maurice Krafft, who has seen hundreds of eruptions, denigrates the pyroclastic flows as very small.  His wife Katia wants to leave the mountainside for more promising eruptions in the Philippines.  Krafft overrules her and they advance to a knoll within the zone of exclusion extending about 4 km from mountain's base.  These scenes are tinged with foreboding because we know that an immense pyroclastic flow incinerated the couple and another volcanologist, Harry Glicken, on June 3, 1991, a couple of days after the footage that we have just seen. (In total, the pyroclastic flow killed 43 people, including 16 journalists.)  Herzog is not re-making his movie about fatal obsession, Grizzly Man -- the movie isn't about the hubris of the Krafft's nor does it suggest that they took unnecessary or reckless risks to film the mountain.  Rather, Herzog contends that they were the victim of bad luck -- after several previous close calls (which we see in the movie), their luck simply ran out.  If you work in the proximity of a hundred erupting volcanoes, one of them will ultimately, it seems, snuff you out.  

From the initial sequences at the foot of Mount Unzen, Herzog deploys images shot by the Krafft's to trace their development as film-makers.  The movie is austere in concept -- with a few minutes of exceptions, it's basically nothing more than a procession of shots showing erupting volcanoes.  This may sound dull, but, in fact, the footage produced by the Krafft's is so spectacular and unearthly as to impose on the film a transcendent aspect -- we are seeing God's wrath, the apocalypse, the end of the world, the doom that may await all of us in a poisoned future.  Some of the footage is unbelievably beautiful and strange:  we see huge domes of lava throbbing in seas of fire, rivers and oceans of magma with rafts of black stone continuously being reabsorbed into the fiery molten rock; sometimes, the lava glows with a purplish or indigo tint.  Clouds of ash bury villages and kill cattle.  A lahar (meltwater and boulders from a glacier vaporized by an eruption) kills 20,000 people and leaves villages under level plains of sullen grey mud.  As the film progresses, the footage becomes more amazing until the images seem to escape reality and become roiling abstractions of fire and rock.  All of this is scored to music -- mostly opera arias but also jaunty pop tunes and Mexican polkas -- in one scene, a Mexican village suffocated in ash with men on horseback trudging through the wasteland (there's a wrecked crucifix and a dying bird in the monochrome dust), Herzog wryly remarks that it looks like a "spaghetti Western shot on-location in Hell."  An eruption fills the air with black particles and, at noon, it looks like midnight -- we see people riding around in the gloom on bicycles with plastic sacks on their heads.  (Herzog suggests that this is what the polluted future may look like for all of us.)  An eruption in Iceland results in a town being ripped apart by fifty-foot high columns of lava -- in the background, we see gaseous vapor and glowing fires:  it looks like a  hellscape from Bosch.  Herzog commends the Krafft's by saying they "went to hell to claws these images from the Devil's talons" -- this is melodramatic, but considering what we see in the picture, pretty accurate.  Most of what the movie shows is indescribable and, so, I am conscious that my words here are inadequate.

There is a sort of narrative, albeit faint and, often, interrupted by digressions.  Herzog means to trace the increasing sophistication of the Krafft's as filmmakers.  In their early efforts, they are surrounded by tourists and seem to be tourists themselves.  Herzog says their first films are nothing more than home movies.  They, then, pass through a phase in which they imitate Jacques Cousteau (down to the French oceanographer's trademark red stocking cap) and attempt to put a scientific burnish on their images.  At one point, they experiment with ludicrous-looking helmets and fire-protection suits.  But, their artistry increases and Herzog celebrates their ascent to become great visionary filmmakers with an unerring sense as to how to position their cameras as well as brilliant framing and editing.  The Krafft's seem to have made a variety of films, some of them not about volcanoes and we see clips of these pictures:  some sort of religious festival in Japan, a komodo dragon gutting a decomposing animal, raging rivers and snowy mountains.  In one montage, Herzog shows the difficulties that the Krafft's experienced in reaching their locations for filming -- we see horses struggling to cross terrifying rapids, a car slid fifty feet into an Indonesian ravine and, then, hoisted out inch-by-inch (the scene looks a little like the transit of the steamer over the mountain in Fitzcarraldo); in other shots, boxy trucks navigate fields of yard-wide boulders.  Herzog says that such travel is "travail" and that it is exhausting and horrible and, yet, he wishes he could have been with them every step of the way.  In fact, time and again, Herzog expresses his envy for the couple's achievement and remarks on his desire to have accompanied them to these awesome and terrible places.  He also observes that, with their maturity, the Krafft's became ever more conscious of the human suffering caused by volcanoes and the picture doesn't flinch from showing us horrors of various kinds.  Returning to Mount Unzen, the movie depicts the enormous pyroclastic explosion with people fleeing from the huge deadly cloud of dust roaring across the landscape at 400 miles an hour.  A last shot near the mountain seems to catch, accidentally, the Krafft's with their cameras and tripods aimed up at the exploding peak.

Herzog has mined this vein before, most notably in his chilling and beautiful short documentary La Soufriere, a film about an eruption that never occurred.  That film is scored to Wagner as is the final sequence in The Fire Within .  Somewhere, probably near Mount St. Helen, a road has been torn in half; the camera moves along the ragged edge of an abyss where the asphalt is sheared off.  Herzog says that to get his shot, Maurice Krafft (who used a 16 mm. Arriflex) had to walk dangerously close to the yawning gulf into which half the road has fallen -- it looks like the hole is a hundred feet deep.  Herzog surmises that Katia had to hold tightly to Maurice to keep him from falling into the abyss.  Wagner's Liebestod underlines this imagery.  

The film's narration seems to contain an error.  The picture shows Katia Krafft sprayed by a geyser of hot water jetting out of big house-high knob of calcium.  Herzog says this is Yosemite.  It's not.  It's a thermal feature in Yellowstone.