Playing with Fire
“An Eruption of Vesuvius” (1824), by Johan Christian Dahl
Werner Herzog dives headfirst “Into the Inferno”
Last week, the Hammer Museum concluded “The Contenders,” a 10-film series that combined screenings with live interviews (director, leading actor, etc.) and an audience Q&A. Among the motion pictures shown this year were “Manchester by the Sea” and “Arrival,” but the one I want to talk about is “Into the Inferno,” which was attended by its director Werner Herzog.
For this documentary, Herzog teamed up with vulcanologist Clive Oppenheimer of Cambridge University, and along with a film crew and other scientists they traveled to Vanuatu in the South Pacific, Ethiopia, North Korea, Iceland, and Indonesia. The result is not only a portrait of several active or dormant volcanoes, such as Mount Merapi, which last let loose in 2010, and North Korea’s Mount Paektu, it is also a series of portraits of various people who live in the shadows of these volcanoes. Herzog’s perennial quest for “images on the horizon” is well known, and his abiding interest in anthropology (which in this case brings in the mythic and the magical) has surfaced repeatedly in such films as “Wodaabe: Herdsmen of the Sun” and “Where the Green Ants Dream.”
As with most of his work, Herzog’s “Into the Inferno” is rather idiosyncratic, a blend of the subjective and objective, where the fictional and factual can change places. For the filmmaker, there are two sorts of truth, the poet’s truth and the accountant’s truth, the former being a kind of white lie to emphasize a viewpoint or perspective. For example, as he is quoted on the back cover of one set of interviews, “The question is always, how much stylization does the truth need?”
Herzog’s documentaries, in short, should be approached with an open mind.
Werner Herzog and his latest obsession. Photo: Netflix
When your luck runs out
Volcanoes will always be a hot topic, and are as temperamental as the late Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s one-time leading man, commemorated in “My Best Fiend.” Volcanoes are also nature’s opera stars, which the director last explored in “Encounters at the End of the World,” a documentary about Antarctica that he made in 2007. It was at that time, with his interest in Mount Erebus, that he first met Oppenheimer. The latter is also the author of “Eruptions that Shook the World” (2011), a book that influenced the present film.
Oppenheimer opened certain doors, not least the one that gained Herzog entry into North Korea. Although “Into the Volcano” is clearly labeled as being directed by Werner Herzog, the film is credited to both men.
The picture has its moments, but it also wanders off like a two-year-old child when no one is looking. This is partly why it clocks in at 104 minutes whereas 50 or 60 might have been more palatable. It puts on that extra weight when it stops to graze in Ethiopia and North Korea. Realizing that he may never get to film there again, Herzog’s North Korean sequences have little to do with the subject at hand, which isn’t to say they aren’t interesting, just not all that relevant.
When they’re dormant, they look inviting. Photo: Netflix
Apart from “Encounters at the End of the World,” Herzog also references “La Soufrière,” a half-hour film he shot in 1976. When he goes into the jungle (“Fitzcarraldo”) or the desert (“Fata Morgana”) or high up into the mountains (“Scream of Stone”) there is always some danger, but the risk that Herzog took by going to the island of Guadeloupe was truly a gamble with Fate, and the town of Basse-Terre had already been evacuated: Its residents didn’t want to go down in the history books on the heels of nearby Martinique, in which 30,000 people died when St. Pierre was incinerated by its own volcano, Mount Pelée, in 1902. Only one person was spared, a prisoner kept below ground in solitary confinement. Shades of Kurt Vonnegut, Dresden, and “Slaughterhouse Five.”
And then they wake with a start. Photo: Netflix
At the time, Herzog was in his mid-30s, an age when people are still daredevils, and he decided, along with his two cameramen, that the film was more important than their lives (or their asses, as he’s put it more bluntly). The volcano didn’t erupt, but if it had the trio might today be remembered like Robert Landsburg, who was photographing Mount St. Helens from four miles away when it exploded. Landsburg must have quickly realized that his number had come up, but he took a few more shots, rewound the film, put it in his backpack, and lay down over it to keep it safe. Several days later his body was recovered, and with it the camera and the valuable information it contained, which is reminiscent of Timothy Treadwell’s last moments, Treadwell of course being the “Grizzly Man” who met a grisly death.
Even if Herzog had said, C’mon, Clive, let’s risk our asses and tempt Fate, there’s no way that Oppenheimer would have taken a foolhardy and unnecessary risk. Oppenheimer is affable and level-headed, and so when he’s around or in the frame the film proceeds on an even keel. Imagine if it had been Klaus Kinski up there instead. On second thought, maybe we don’t want to imagine that.
Some like it hot: Let’s assume this is Clive Oppenheimer and Werner Herzog. Photo: Netflix
Wagner, Smaug, and Goethe
The opening sequence of “Into the Inferno” is a small masterpiece in itself. We see the volcanic cone from afar as a drone (and I assume it’s a drone and not a helicopter) approaches, scales the incline, peers down at the handful of men lingering on the rim, and then focuses on the maelstrom of red-hot magma bubbling below in the cauldron. This last, prolonged shot, is reminiscent of an early scene in “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” when the camera stares into torrential waters. The result is mesmerizing, and in fact Herzog returns again and again to such shots where he all but dangles us over the red and yellow molten rock.
To accompany these scenes, Herzog pumps in choral music, chanting monks, and composers like Verdi and Wagner. Of the soundtrack, as he has said elsewhere, “It makes certain things more visible than they were without music.” A good example of this can be found in “Lessons of Darkness,” his so-called science-fiction film that’s really about the burning oilfields of Kuwait, which the retreating Iraqis set on fire during the first Gulf War. Wagner is an old standby, and in Herzog’s last documentary, “Lo and Behold,” the prelude to “Das Rheingold” is cleverly inserted towards the beginning when the filmmaker is shown what is ostensibly the birthplace of the Internet, located on the campus of UCLA.
With or without the music, however, we never lose sight of the fact that these volcanoes are true maneaters, as ready as Smaug in “The Hobbit” to wipe out entire villages. We’re reminded of this yet again when Herzog shows us footage taken by the husband and wife volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, killed in Japan along with 41 others by a pyroclastic flow.
If Herzog had snipped some of the Ethiopian footage in which a macho UC Berkeley professor brushes the soil in search of fossilized bone fragments, he could have thrown in a few words about the supervolcano that sits under Yellowstone National Park, or he could have flown us over Pompeii and then Mount Vesuvius, which is probably the one volcano everyone knows on a first-name basis.
From “Into the Inferno.” Photo: Netflix
In fact, one of Herzog’s countrymen, the great poet Goethe, once trekked up to the very top of Vesuvius and at a time when it was showing some activity. As he recounted in his “Italian Journey” (1786-88), “there is something about an imminent danger which challenges Man’s spirit of contradiction to defy it, so I thought to myself that it might be possible to climb the cone, reach the mouth of the crater and return, all in the interval between two eruptions.” As with Herzog slogging up the flank of La Soufrière it was a risk, and sure enough Vesuvius put on a little show. Later, Goethe continues, “happy to have survived, we reached the foot of the cone under a rain of ashes which thickly coated our hats and shoulders.”
We’ll dust off our shoulders, too, and call it a day. It remains to be seen whether Herzog’s “Into the Inferno” joins the other contenders when award season comes around, but in the meantime the film is available on Netflix. ER