"In 1991, the French hus­band-and-wife vol­ca­nol­o­gist-film­mak­er team Mau­rice and Katia Krafft were killed by the flow of ash from the erup­tion of Mount Unzen in Nagasa­ki. Inex­plic­a­bly, Wern­er Her­zog did­n't get around to mak­ing a film about them for more than 30 years. These would seem to be ide­al sub­jects for the doc­u­men­tary half of his career, a large por­tion of which he's spent on por­traits of eccen­tric, roman­tic, often fool­hardy, and more than occa­sion­al­ly ill-fat­ed indi­vid­u­als who pit them­selves, or in any case find them­selves pit­ted, against the raw ele­ments of nature."
"Hence, per­haps, the appear­ance of two entire­ly sep­a­rate doc­u­men­taries on the Kraffts in the same year, 2022: Her­zog's The Fire With­in, and Sara Dosa's Fire of Love. The Like Sto­ries of Old video above per­forms a direct com­par­i­son of the two films, both of which make heavy use of the vol­cano footage shot by the Kraffts them­selves. Her­zog assem­bles it into word­less, oper­at­i­cal­ly scored, and some­times quite long sequences, inten­si­fy­ing their qual­i­ty of the sub­lime, which we feel in that aes­thet­ic zone where awe of beau­ty and fear of exis­ten­tial anni­hi­la­tion over­lap com­plete­ly."
Maurice and Katia Krafft, a French husband-and-wife volcanologist-filmmaker team, died in 1991 from the ash flow of Mount Unzen in Nagasaki. Werner Herzog waited more than thirty years to make a film about them. Two separate documentaries about the Kraffts appeared in 2022: Herzog's The Fire Within and Sara Dosa's Fire of Love. Both films rely heavily on the Kraffts' own volcanic footage. Herzog arranges that footage into wordless, operatically scored, sometimes very long sequences that intensify the sublime, prioritizing aesthetic immersion rather than advancing a conventional narrative.
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