A movie about obsession can be as satisfying to watch as any other. “Fire of Love,” one of the movies that are opening the Sundance Film Festival tonight, is a documentary about an unassuming French couple, Maurice and Katia Krafft, who became the world’s most ardent volcanologists. Starting in 1966, when they met, and over the next 25 years, the two traveled to as many active volcanos as they could find, from Zaire to Colombia to Iceland to America to Japan — and when I say active, I don’t mean wisps of smoke billowing out of the crater. The Kraffts were able to witness the spectacle and danger of seismic tectonic explosions from the earth’s depths. They stood right beside gleaming rivers and huge showers of hot rock and documented it all. The result is a unique photographic and film record of volcanic activity.
That footage shows a lot about what makes it so special. “Fire of Love”This film is truly a magical experience. It also tells the captivating story of two unrelated lives. The Kraffts were born 40 km apart in Alsace, northeastern France. This is because the region’s control has changed over time between French and German. They were daredevil soulmates who were addicted to awe and unified in their obsession. Part of the film shows that they loved one another. ThroughThey love volcanoes. It’s not surprising, is it? “Fire of Love,” which has been directed by Sara Dosa with a discursive, let’s-try-it-on lyricism, is like one of Werner Herzog’s documentaries about fearless outliers, only this one is touched with romance. (The Kraffts were, in fact, featured in Herzog’s “Into the Inferno,”This movie is far more incendiary about volcano love.
The Kraffts were scientists? She was a geochemist, he was a geologist, and they became global experts in the field, but they weren’t academics, and they weren’t researchers hauling their specimens back to the lab for study. The knowledge of Being there, right on the edge of the earth’s convulsions, This wasTheir finding. They were a bit like storm chasers or vertical-rock climbers. They presented their findings in books or documentaries.
Their connection to volcano eruptions was primal and mystical, and they were filled with wonder. They wanted to touch the uncanny and they did. Volcanoes were their life force. “Once you see an eruption,” says Katia, “you can’t live without it.”Dosa was able to access their vast archive of volcanic footage. It contains some of the most stunning, frightening, and beautiful images of nature ever captured. Jackson Pollock’s motion pictures of spewinglava look like Jackson Pollock paintings. The flowing tributaries made of moltenlava with a crust that melts under it, look like a Biblical inferno. The black rock chunks that ooze out are like something from a movie. “The Blob.”The Kraffts were, in their own way, true filmmakers. When you see a shot of one of them in protective gear, silhouetted by a shooting curtain of red-orange liquid, it’s pure sci-fi.
Do the Kraffts come off as…you know, Characters? Yes and no. They’re attractive and charismatic, but in a weirdly normal way, like a couple who could have spent their lives running a cheese shop in Alsace. Maurice, a genially bearish, curly-haired man with brown hair, looks like John Laroquette. Katia, with her short hair and glasses, and a lively grin, is like Terry Gross’s pixie version. They wore their obsession on their sleeves, yet they’re winningly unpretentious and middle class about it. They would be impossible to look at and not think. “Yes, these two were religious about going to the ends of the earth to watch spewing volcanos.”
The film’s narration, which is read in spun-sugar tones of beguiling curiosity by Miranda July, says at one point that “Katia and Maurice were into volcanology because they were disappointed in humanity.” They had grown up in the rubble of postwar France, but the protest fervor of the ’60s didn’t incite them; it alienated them. The film begins with a revelation about them that makes it hard to breathe. Miranda July says, “It’s 1991. June 2. Tomorrow will be their last day.” The two are headed for another volcano stakeout (of Mount Unzen in Japan), and it’s clear what we’re being told: that this is the one that killed them. This shockingly frightening fact sets the scene for the entire movie. Maurice and Katia knew that they were putting their lives at risk. In an early foray, the skin on Maurice’s leg was burned off by 140-degree mud — a baptism of fire. But from the start their mantra was (in Katia’s words), “Curiosity is stronger than fear.”
One way that Maurice and Katia weren’t conventional scientists is that they rejected the scientific community’s minute classification system for volcanos. Their view was that each volcano is unique. However, they had their own classification system. There were two types of volcanoes to them: red and gray. The red type is those that spew lava, and they are dangerous. The gray type is the one that creates impossibly large clouds of smoke, such as the famous Mount St. Helens images. One of these clouds looks almost like an atomic bomb cloud. The smoke volcanos may look less dangerous than the liquid fire ones, but, in fact, they’re much more dangerous. The Kraffts shifted from looking for the red to the gray over time. There are many stories about the deadly effects of gray volcanoes, with the smoke often exploding like an explosion and sometimes reaching far beyond what was predicted. And that’s what happened at Mount Unzen. Maurice and Katia stood several kilometers away from the volcano, but that wasn’t far enough. They were all swallowed by it. But “Fire of Love”It is a powerful movie that will convince you that they died happy.