18/46
Presented by Ernst Reijseger
Maurice and Katia Krafft have dedicated their lives to exploring the world’s volcanoes. Their legacy consists of groundbreaking images of eruptions and their aftermath, collected in this stunning visual collage. Sabat MaterTrad. It’s all Wonka will buy those golden tickets to tour the chaotic outskirts with some operatic fantasy. Its great danger is matched only by innocence; it’s almost childish to go through great dangers. From The Cave of Forgotten Dreams to Lo and Behold, Herzog builds towards a total abandonment of the natural world, a psychic universe that leads to total internal and external distortions.
The Kroffts themselves
Ordinary people are not interested in it. I also take it from his documentary Chatwin, the lost art of the psychic researcher, those nuggets of culture and history in the catalogues… now everything is a click away, everything is crowd-sourced. A filmmaker can find some that remain. In fact, the resources of these researchers are so scarce that another director beat Herzog to the punch to make a sister documentary to Fire of Love. BUT, another documentary beat them both to the punch as well.
Herzog will turn natural disasters into acts of creativity
Like another great director, Terrence Malick, Herzog takes his time to always give you one thing after another. He is that operatic director who drops the moves that lead to crescendos at the right moment, he can paint the whole film, then blame you, hit you with that label that changes you. Other directors will try to cram as many vertices into the piece as possible. The image of children playing with volcanic ash as sand on the beach recalls Herzog’s own biography of when he was a child and played among the ruins of buildings destroyed in World War II, still in the completely safe environment of his childhood adventures. In this way, a few scattered images can achieve depth in cinema, which is a cross between literature and photography. He’s famous for considering himself an anti-intellectual artist, but most of Herzog’s great moments seem to be both, when he collapses in the final passage about the cloud that destroyed them.
Beneath Herzog’s circus-like exterior lurks an academic professor
The repertoire of images he encounters here reads like an apocalyptic acid western by Jodoworsky, like Kurosawa’s depiction of moving groups or the flying saucer films of the fifties. Herzog has his own formula, but he goes so bold and effortless with his experience that he can do it in his sleep. Opera. He holds back the images we’re here for until the very end, all that lava as the visual climax of the opera. Nine times out of ten, directors just show the lava and let it run until the very end. Those last scenes, this is where the maestro leaves you crying again.
That’s why we resort to these completely surreal parallels, juxtapositions, beauty and anxiety
Ultimately, it’s not just a parallel to his themes, but a new take on Herzog’s love of cinema, filmmaking and the image. That’s the beauty of Herzog, because he always seems like the audience standing beside us.