Red and Grey, Two Faces of "Fire of Love"

It is not easy to tell the story of volcanoes and humans. Volcanoes are silent and towering, and the time they have experienced is immeasurable. Compared with humans, it can even benefit the earth: Creating islands and fertile soil and regulating climate and temperature. Apart from watching it from a distance, can the stories happen between us and volcanoes?

"Fire of Love," nominated for the 2023 Oscars for Best Documentary Feature, shows what happens when humans meet volcanoes. The film, directed by Sara Dosa, focuses on the story of Katia Krafft and Maurice Krafft, a couple of volcanologists obsessed with volcanoes. After meeting at the University of Strasbourg, they never separated. They became acquainted because of volcanoes and eventually annihilated there.

In the same year that "Fire of Love" was released, German director Werner Herzog made a film about volcanoes, "The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft," also based on the story of the Krafft couple. Although the theme is the same, they have completely different colors.

If Sara Dosa's romantic epic is reminiscent of heaven, Herzog's story begins with death. Two volcanologists challenge hell, and I see two faces of a story.

The most intuitive manifestation of this difference is color. Both directors and volcanologists are extremely sensitive to color. For volcanologists, they believe there are only two most important classifications of volcanoes: gentle red volcanoes and dangerous gray volcanoes. Interestingly, this classification also applies to the two films, "Fire of Love" in red and "The Fire Within" in grey.

Red and gray, Two colors

In "Fire of Love," red is the most eye-catching visual language, but volcanoes and magma rarely represent red. People instinctively think it is a different kind of red, and what the Krafft couple photographed was this kind of red redder than red.

The volcano shots they shot on film surpassed all computer special effects and human imagination. Sara Dosa shows these shots, and this kind of fatalistic romance takes place between the two and between them and the volcanoes.

● The Poster of "Fire of Love"

In Herzog's "The Fire Within," the gray of death is the more eye-catching color. And I frequently saw dead animals, human remains, and the volcanic ash that silently killed these lives. Compared with the flowing sense of life in "Fire of Love," "The Fire Within" is closer to death. For example, Herzog describes the couple's near-death moments, the Una Una volcano's eruption in 1983, and the St Augustine volcano in 1986.

● The Poster of "The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft"

"The Fire Within" also details the tragic end of the Krafft couple in Japan, where Harry Glicken, a volcanologist who survived at Mount St Helens, died with them in 1991. These are all scary gray.

Growth story, Cut two sides

Behind these two colors, the stories of the two films gradually unfold, and the Krafft couple's epic and complex life is very imaginative. As long as you face these shocking shots, your can sort out your storyline by intuition and experience without too much theory.

The story genre of "Fire of Love" is romance, and the film takes voiceover to tell their love story. So at the film's beginning, the director combs the footage and Katia and Maurice's first love, which goes back to the moment when the two were first obsessed with volcanoes.

As a teenager, Katia saw Mount Etna, where she confirmed her imagination of volcanoes. Maurice first saw Stromboli when he was seven and later returned at nineteen, happy and lonely. In Sara Dosa's narrative, this loneliness brings the two together.

Their love seems to be a kind of love against the civilized world. The two experienced war in their youth and were disappointed with human nature, so they chose to convert to nature. They became acquainted because of volcanoes and even held a wedding on a volcano so that it could witness their marriage.

But another theme of love stories is often death. As they see more and more volcanoes, they also witness more and more deaths. Their hearts are full of regrets. They try to save humans with their expertise until they give their lives.

However, for Herzog, the love story is not the part he's most interested in, and he is more concerned about the Krafft couple's growth story as filmmakers. In her decades as a volcanologist, Katia took hundreds of thousands of photographs, and Maurice edited plenty of footage. They are like a pair of filmmakers with a strong interest in image recording, which may be a desire to preserve the truth and fight against death.

So Herzog describes the two as "film apprentices," in Iceland in 1968, they were at a loss in front of the camera, and in Vulcano in 1970, their shots were simple and rough. Gradually, they learned to act in front of the camera. In short, the two directors grew up in a series of mistakes together.

Every time they go to a volcano, they have to earn money by writing books or participating in TV programs before they can afford to go to the next volcano, similar to film production. Finally, they become respected masters. At the beginning of "The Fire Within," Herzo quotes a stunning scene shot by them, a volcanologist in a heat-proof suit standing on a rock in the foreground and red magma spewing out in the background. Volcanologists go beyond most filmmakers to see the most hidden thing, the heat of the whole world.

One Art, Two Styles

Sara Dosa chooses an appropriate style when depicting the destiny of love and death. You can often see split-screen narratives in the film. She presents the composition of the two in the meantime, with Maurice's image on one side and Katia's on the other, representing the moment they build together.

Narrator Miranda July tells their story, and of course, Sara Dosa adds some fictional elements to her description of their relationship. For example, she imagines the two thinking about volcanoes in two places when they were young or compares Maurice to a seal and Katia to a bird. But compared with their real romance or volcanic adventures at the cost of their lives, perhaps these imaginations are nothing at all.

On the other hand, Herzog's style is more simple and more profound. He doesn't need fictional elements, new shots, or split-screen narrative techniques. He just skillfully manipulates the existing shots. He feels that they contain a great film but have not been edited.

In this way, Herzog plays their editor, who chooses the time point of the shot switch, controls the rhythm of the narration, and gives it a sublimated ending.

After watching the two films and comparing them carefully, I suddenly realized that the most powerful thing was not the creativity of the two documentary directors but the volcanic images of the Krafft couple. In these two films, the boundary between fiction and record is blurred. And the search for the truth through theory or movies is a science, of course, also an art.

Okay, which of these two films about humans and volcanoes do you like better? See you in the comments!