Sara Dosa‘s Fire of Love (Neon/National Geographic, 7.6) tells the story of devoted (one could say obsessive) volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died in a volcanic explosion atop Japan’s Mount Unzen on 6.3.91 — 31 years ago.
The married couple — French natives, deep soulmates — had been studying, cataloguing, filming and photo-snapping volcanic eruptions since the early ’70s, and were among the most fearless and exacting in their field.
Dosa’s 93-minute doc is mostly composed of volcano footage (color, 16mm) that the Kraffts shot over the years, and which apparently was only made accessible to Dosa and her producers somewhat recently. The film also contains a fair amount of footage of the Kraffts themselves.
The dynamic visuals (miles-high clouds of gray ash, thunderous rumbling, pools of intense red-gold lava bubbling over and streaming down mountainsides) are exciting or at least fascinating until they become familiar, at which point you’re left with “okay, here are some more lava flows” and “wow, more shots of nuclear blast ash clouds.”
The problem, for me, is Dosa’s decision to weave it all together with Miranda July‘s whispering, barely enunciated narration. I was on the verge of abandoning the doc because of this aspect. July sounds like a parent quietly reading a Babar the Elephant story to a small child at bedtime.
The idea, presumably, is to pass along a certain romantic sensibility as well as (I gathered) soft-spoken Katia’s view of volcano worship, marriage, the twists and turns of nature…the whole magilla. But if ever a narration track rubbed me the wrong way, it was this one.
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The honest truth is that I found Fire of Love a tad boring at first. If the Kraffts hadn’t been killed there would be no film, just as Werner Herzog‘s Grizzly Man wouldn’t have been a film if Timothy Treadwell hadn’t been eaten by a bear.
Herzog’s Into The Inferno (’16) covers roughly the same ground as Fire of Love, and I for one found it a bit more intriguing than Dosa’s decent–enough film.
Why were the Kraffts so into volcanoes? “Both Katia and I got into volcanology because we were disappointed in humanity,” Maurice said. “Since a volcano is greater than man, we felt this is what we need. Something beyond human understanding.”
But were they really seeking a mystical communion with the primal forces of nature? Or were the Kraffts simply volcano junkies in the same way that some photojournalists obsessively cover war zones, and Joanne and Bill Harding (Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton) were tornado junkies in Twister?
The Kraffts were doing valuable work, but they were primarily, it seems to me, moths lured by flame. Was their story a replay of the ancient myth of Icarus? You could certainly start with that interpretation.
The Kraffts were killed not by lava but a pyroclastic cloud — a fast-moving current of boiling hot gas and volcanic matter that flows along the ground away from a volcano at average speeds of 100 kph but sometimes as fast as 700 kph. They and American volcanologist Harry Glicken were standing on a ridge near the volcano and suddenly the cloud surged up and over and killed them “instantly.”
I found it odd that Dosa’s doc doesn’t mention that 43 people were killed that day by the same tragic event — the Kraffts, Glicken and 40 journalists. Wouldn’t the deaths of so many people in the same area warrant an explanation of what happened? Dosa barely gets into the specifics.
Narration quote: “Katia and Maurice know that these [volcanic] rocks will long outlive them. They are not religious. [They know] we all have one short life, and then we return to the ground.”
Okay, except I knew that large rocks would outlive me when I was nine years old and going on nature hikes with my Cub Scout pack. I remember asking this very question of an adult — “how long have these rocks been here?” Thousands of years, I was told.
