In “fire of love”, the voice-over quotes Maurice and Katia Krafft’s feelings about the risks involved in their profession: exploring volcanoes and filming. “I prefer an intense and short life to a monotonous, long life,” wrote Maurice. Katia acknowledged the danger, but said she didn’t care at the time.
The Kraffts, married French volcanologists, were… killed on June 3, 1991, observing an eruption of Mount Unzen in Japan. But the stunning 16-millimeter footage they’ve captured throughout their careers – full of flowing lava, flying rocks and giant clouds of smoke – lives on in the new “Fire of Love,” a fully archived documentary composed of approximately 200 hours of their footage along with 50 hours of TV appearances and other clips.
“I have so many questions that I would have liked to ask them personally, and one of them is what the film didn’t make,” said Sara Dosa, the director of the documentary, during an interview in Tribeca last month. After all, visiting volcanoes is fraught with danger. The film tells how Maurice burns his leg in boiling mud and how he playfully tests Katia’s helmet by throwing a rock at her head. Dosa said they didn’t take advantage of “a fun photo we had of Maurice taking his molten boot and throwing it into a lava flow.” It’s safe to assume that not all of the couple’s filming equipment survived either.
But “Fire of Love” isn’t just about the Kraffts’ time in the field; it is also about their lives and their marriage. Dosa, who met the couple while researching for an earlier documentary, has described her film as a love triangle between Maurice, Katia and the volcanoes.
The film tries to stay true to them – “we always wanted to start with Katia and Maurice first and foremost,” Dosa said – while maintaining a certain critical distance. A voiceover by Miranda July expands on and at times complicates the descriptions of the Kraffts, for instance countering Maurice’s claim that he was “not a filmmaker” but merely “a wandering volcanologist who was forced to make movies to wander. ” The couple – short-haired, bespectacled Katia; Bush-maned Maurice, garrulous Maurice – toured the world giving lectures and holding screenings. They still enjoy a certain world fame, partly thanks to their many books and TV appearances.
“We also wanted to explore a little bit how they formed their own image,” Dosa said. “They seemed to understand that their public image was helping them to continue living the life they wanted to lead. They played versions of themselves, not in a way that wasn’t authentic at all – it almost seemed to be this higher truth of who Katia and Maurice were.
Bertrand Krafft, Maurice’s older brother, now 82, kept the images after the couple’s death. “My parents didn’t know anything about photography and film, and neither did Katia’s parents,” he said, over the phone through an interpreter. “Someone had to take charge of managing the assets that Maurice and Katia left behind, and I was the only person available to do that.”
Bertrand has given permission to use the images of Maurice and Katia in other documentaries. Another feature film utilizing the Kraffts’ material, ‘The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft’, directed by Werner Herzog, premiered June 26 at Sheffield Doc/Fest in the UK. But Bertrand said the movie he’s participated in the most over the years is Dosa’s. “Her ideas, her approach to the project seemed excellent to me,” he said. “That’s why I did everything I could to help her.”
The footage included fully finished movies and work material, both edited and unedited, according to Mathieu Rousseau of Image’Est, the French archive that had stored the Krafft collection of 800 rolls of film and 300,000 slides. (Bertrand Krafft sold the material to a Geneva-based company, Titan Film, after the documentary got underway.)
“What was complicated in the beginning, and also when we had to digitize everything in order for Sara to make her film, we had to figure out what Maurice had done,” Rousseau said through an interpreter during a video call. Maurice, he noted, “did the editing himself. He had his own logic.”
Dosa and her editors also had to understand the hundreds of hours of footage. Jocelyne Chaput, one of the editors of “Fire of Love,” said that on some coils I got the impression that someone had swept the cutting room floor of Maurice’s house and then re-taped everything, and that was that coil. Erin Casper, the other editor, said it was also difficult to ensure they remained accurate — with images arranged loosely geographically, but not necessarily chronologically.
In addition, none of the Kraffts’ 16-millimeter images had sound; for example, all audio of lava churning had to be added. The finished version of “Fire of Love” is based on a mix of Foley effects and a library of field recordings that the sound designer, Patrice LeBlanc, had collected over the course of 30 years. The use of sound would not have been strange to Katia or Maurice, Chaput and Casper suggested: Some of the Kraffts films used sound effects or voiceover, or would run while Maurice spoke about it.
Ken Hon, the scientist in charge of the United States Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, was familiar with the Kraffts beginning in the late 1980s and remembers that filming volcanoes was unusual back then.
“There weren’t many images of volcanic eruptions at the time, and certainly not things that were up close,” he said. “You had to be a volcanologist to film like they did because you had to be able to point the camera at the right thing to understand the process that’s going on.” Today, such images are much more common thanks to lighter and cheaper equipment. Maurice, he said, “would be so in love with drones right now.”
As the Kraffts traveled through Hawaii, Hon recalled, sometimes accompanying them to closed areas, such as the city of Kalapana when it was engulfed by lava in 1990.
Filming “was second nature to them,” he said. “They’re setting up cameras and keep chatting,” without pausing to say, “Stop, I need to focus, I need to focus.” Hon had some appreciation for the challenges the Kraffts faced: He helped his wife and fellow volcanologist, Cheryl Gansecki, make videos for about 20 years.
“High temperatures, it’s usually wet and there’s the acid gas coming out of the volcanoes, right?” he said. “The combination of those things is exactly what they tell you not to immerse your electronic item in.”
Steven Brantley, a volcanologist who retired from the Geological Survey after 37 years but returned part-time, said that even when the images of the Kraffts might appear as if they were in danger, they had “positioned the camera in such a way.” that they could walk and live to tell the story over and over,” he said. “So in that sense I think they were very careful, even if it may not seem like it.”
Hon didn’t think the Kraffts were careless either. “The kind of eruption that created them at Unzen, the dome-forming eruptions with collapses and small explosions and stuff, those are the most dangerous types of eruptions because they’re so unpredictable,” he said.
The New York Times reported at the time that the couple and another volcanologist, Harry Glicken, who died with them, “had no chance of escaping as the pyroclastic flow from the main crater, two miles away, descended the slope at an estimated speed of at 100 to 125 mph”
Brantley never worked with the Kraffts in the field, but did work with Maurice on a video about volcanic hazards that was nearly completed when Maurice died. Parts of it were screened in time to warn Filipino residents of the eruptions on Mount Pinatubo that occurred less than two weeks later. Brantley stressed that educating the public about volcanoes was as much a part of the Kraffts’ legacy as their striking imagery.
Herzog, through a representative shortly before the premiere of his own Krafft film, said he hadn’t seen “Fire of Love” yet, but hoped “in a theater within the next few weeks.”
The possible confluence of two Krafft films reminded Hon of the overlapping releases of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” in 1997. That’s the way it should be with volcano movies, he suggested. “We don’t do them all at once,” he said. “We always do a few.”