"The camera crew better stay at some sort of distance and when we are really getting close, it's a drone." "There is no perfect safety but I would rather certain risks for myself," Herzog explained in a recent interview. Today, an older and more cautious artist has created a full-length documentary, Into the Inferno, which looks at active volcanoes from Iceland to North Korea and the South Pacific, covering both the scientific and the cultural explanations of their rivers of lava, massive boulders and toxic plumes – phenomenon that were captured by cameras mounted on drones.
The project cemented the German director's reputation as an outrageous risk-taker on a film set, but La Soufrière ended in his embarrassment because the volcano failed to erupt. His notorious short film La Soufrière captured deserted streets and clouds of billowing smoke as well as recording the fatalistic thoughts of three impoverished locals who had chosen not to leave. In 1977, Werner Herzog risked his life travelling to the empty island of Guadeloupe, where the entire population had been evacuated because the volcano known as La Soufrière was about to erupt. As their filmmaking evolved, their cinematography gradually changed from pedestrian documentation to cinematic masterpieces: images of the land ‘as we have never seen it’, as director Werner Herzog says: ‘They were able to descend into the inferno and wrestle an image from the very claws of the devil.’ Herzog’s documentary, The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022), compiled largely from their own footage, is a tribute to the magnificence of their work.What a difference four decades and some drone technology can make in the career of a filmmaker. This proximity produced an archive of breath-taking footage. Fearless, reckless, obsessed: drawn ever closer they were aware of the risks they took, but said it was essential that their study of volcanoes be done close-up. It brings us face to face with all our cultural imaginings of the rage of apocalypse, and we cannot take our eyes off it.ĭrawn by this magnetic force, French volcanologists Katia Krafft and Maurice Krafft started their careers taking scientific measurements at the site of volcanic eruptions, using film as a tool for observation and study, but they were increasingly consumed by the passion for filming the eruptions that would eventually – literally – consume them. To watch the earth split asunder and spew up its entrails in a roiling inferno is to encounter the elemental turbulence that festers underneath the stable ground we tread. ‘The devil’s throat’, ‘the devil’s lair’, ‘the devil’s cauldron’: if volcanoes are the hearth of the devil, there is no question that Satan has an irresistible allure.
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