In the streaming age it can be quite hard to find what you want to watch, when you want to watch it but happily four interrelated volcano docs were on Netflix, BBC iPlayer, YouTube and Disney+ at the same time this weekend...
La Soufriere: Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster (1977)
A short documentary where mad lad
Werner Herzog and two crew members stay and film on an island that has just been evacuated due to the volcano apparently being about to erupt. They find an silent ghost-town world, littered with evidence of hastily abandoned life, dead pets and one drunk and/or loopy villager with a death wish. Not as crazy as you'd expect, or hope it to be.
Into the Inferno (2016)
I was expecting this to just be one of a series of volcano documentaries which
Werner Herzog has made but he perpetually strays so far off on various tangents, for such lengths, that you start to question where it's going, or if it's coming back. It's all fascinating material, presented with Herzog's trademark poetic musings on human existence but it didn't totally hang together. I was also constantly distracted by how much, our enthusiastic and knowledgable on screen guide to this world, volcanologist
Clive Oppenheimer looks like
Harpo Marx.
The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022)
This is more what I was expecting from a
Werner Herzog volcano documentary. He combines an almost dialogue & sound free assembly of footage from the archives of volcano film-makers
Katia and Maurice Krafft, with his own continuous narration of what we are seeing and his thoughts about it. The soundtrack is made up of various classical requiems, giving the apocalyptic footage the feel of
Stanley Kubrick's "dawn of man" sequence from
'2001: A Space Odyssey'. Most of the footage is extraordinary but the jaw-droppers are the shots where the Kraffts appear to be mere feet from raging torrents of lava flowing past them at terrifying speeds.
Fire of Love (2022)
It's a brave woman who decides to compete with
Werner Herzog by releasing a documentary on the same subject, at the same time but Writer/Director
Sara Dosa does a fantastic job. One thing
'Fire of Love' obviously does better than Herzog's
'The Fire Within', is by not cropping the spectacular 4:3 volcano footage captured by
Katia and Maurice Krafft down to widescreen. The alarming scale of the volcanic clouds and walls of lava are magnified by the extra height looming over the shots of Katia. The voice-over goes a bit too far into making pronouncements about the relationship between Katia and Maurice (considering that I doubt anybody involved with this film actually knew them, or were even alive at the same time) but it also gives Herzog's philosophical ruminations a run for their money. Watching this right after 'The Fire Within', it's interesting to see the different ways the film-makers use the same footage. Dosa tends towards the romantic, Herzog towards the realist, Dosa's film is more powerful and epic but Herzog has more of the mundane moments of life. On balance I prefer Dosa's film but ideally, you should watch both together, for a rounded portrait of these two extraordinary people.