aka Die innere Glut
In some ways, Werner Herzog’s documentary about volcanologist documentarians Katia and Maurice Krafft is a bit of a series of our hero director’s greatest hits: there are the artists descending into the abyss to wrestle the devil for some great shots of film; the awe and terror of nature (and what expresses this view of nature more honestly than a volcano?); people walking the tightrope between artistic/scientific (which are clearly much closer related in Herzog’s world view than in many other people’s) truth seeking of the highest order and simple suicidal obsession, or truth and madness; the filmmakers looking for the poetic truth more than the factual one.
This is not a complaint: there’s nothing wrong with having themes and interests - obsessions, actually - and a philosophy of the world. Nor is there anything wrong with sticking to expressing them, and certainly not in the case of a filmmaker quite as intensely interested in finding these things in actually very different people and places. And very particularly not in the case of an artist as interested in his obsessions as he is in the way his subjects see themselves, how they think and feel, and are in the world.
In The Fire Within, Herzog finds all of this not in his own footage, but the footage the Kraffts shot over the years, finding kindred spirits in the archive, editing their material into a film they themselves didn’t end up making; out of what they found, into the kind of tribute only very few of us will get (though, if you ask me, most of us would deserve).
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