When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie — and One of Them Is Werner Herzog

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. Their cou­ple­hood makes the Kraffts a slight excep­tion in that line­up, but it also makes them even less resistible to a more con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­tar­i­an — not that a doc­u­men­tar­i­an could get much less con­ven­tion­al than Her­zog.

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. These do noth­ing to advance a nar­ra­tive, but every­thing to put forth what Her­zog has often referred to in inter­views as a sense of “ecsta­t­ic truth,” a dis­til­la­tion of real­i­ty that can­not be cap­tured by any con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­tary means.

The video’s host Tom van der Lin­den describes Fire of Love as “much more fast-paced. Images come and go so quick­ly that they don’t real­ly have a chance to reveal that strange, secret beau­ty, to take the spot­light with their own mys­te­ri­ous star­dom. Instead, they feel sub­servient to what­ev­er pre­de­ter­mined emo­tion the nar­ra­tive wants you to expe­ri­ence,” as if the direc­tor is giv­ing you orders: “Be in awe. Feel the romance. And now the com­e­dy.” That hard­ly sug­gests incom­pe­tence on the part of Dosa and her col­lab­o­ra­tors, or any defi­cien­cy in her high­ly acclaimed film. But it does give us a sense of what becomes weary­ing about the tech­niques of main­stream cin­e­ma in gen­er­al, fic­tion­al, or non­fic­tion­al. The truth is that Wern­er Her­zog may be unique­ly well placed to appre­ci­ate not just the fear­some­ly enrap­tur­ing object of the Kraffts’ obses­sion, but also the dri­ving pas­sion, and flash­es of ridicu­lous­ness, in the Kraffts them­selves — who were, after all, fel­low sol­diers of cin­e­ma.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dream-Dri­ven Film­mak­ing of Wern­er Her­zog: Watch the Video Essay, “The Inner Chron­i­cle of What We Are: Under­stand­ing Wern­er Her­zog”

An Intro­duc­tion to the Paint­ing of Cas­par David Friedrich, Roman­ti­cism & the Sub­lime

Watch the Destruc­tion of Pom­peii by Mount Vesu­vius, Re-Cre­at­ed with Com­put­er Ani­ma­tion (79 AD)

Under­wa­ter Vol­canic Erup­tion Wit­nessed for the First Time

Two Ways To Shoot The Same Scene: A Com­par­i­son of The Shop Around the Cor­ner (1940) and You’ve Got Mail (1998) Shows How Film­mak­ing Changed Over the Decades

Wern­er Her­zog Dis­cov­ers the Ecsta­sy of Skate­board­ing: “That’s Kind of My Peo­ple”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.