Fire of Love

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Sara Dosa (“Tricky Dick” & “The Man in Black”) directs an affecting documentary “Fire of Love” about the volcano-chasing couple Katia and Maurice Krafft, delivering an eccentric and personal addition to Werner Herzog’s “Into the Inferno” (2016) and “The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022). This film is swift, engaging and a bit odd, given the subject matter of an obsessive couple.

The Kraffts are a husband and wife team of French scientists. Both are spellbound by volcanoes. There are no concrete facts about Maurice and Katia’s first meeting but the consensus is that they met over coffee and were both driven by the subject of volcanoes in equal measure. The two became inseparable, and compelled to seek out the most dangerous volcano and get the best imagery be it by film or photograph. Together their most favorite volcano is Mount Etna in Italy.

Both Katia and Maurice were compelled by volcanoes precisely because they were let down by humanity, specifically the tragedy of the Vietnam war.

After seeing many red volcanoes close up and personal (red volcanoes are friendly ones, according to them) the pair were more drawn to gray volcanos, as they are spontaneous and unpredictable and therefore more dangerous than red ones.

Like terrestrial astronauts, the pair stays glued to the earth, plumbing the craters. Spiritually, rocks from eruptions have become the couple’s food.

Maurice in particular, runs right to the lava on film. Danger means nothing to him. His dream is to pilot a boat on the flow of lava, an infernal sailor with a suit of fire.

In one compelling scene, Maurice rows a boat on a sea of acid. He does not make it.

The couple’s collective dream is to warn people of future eruptions as well as making the most striking films. Maurice and Katia receive tons of media attention but several TV hosts laugh nervously not quite knowing what to say. after all, Maurice is on record calling himself a kamikaze. He would rather have a short intense life than a long uneventful one.

Weird it is to hear the two of them refer to volcanoes in terms of affection. To paraphrase Maurice, he prefers to be living deep within a volcano’s ashen core, munching on Cimmerian rocks as his staple.

Both Katia and Maurice repeatedly stress that they see volcanoes as loving, not scary in the slightest and even bordering on the benevolent.

Indeed, the Kraffts have branded their influence upon science. Hot menacing lava transforms into incarnadine love syrup within their camera.

Not all of the Krafft’s journeys are bliss. They witnessed the horror of Colombia’s Ruiz volcano which killed 25,000 people first hand. Their collective warnings went unheeded and both were nearly devastated.

Though the tone of the film is quirky and offbeat for the most part, the film is laced with sinister foreboding, with images of fossilized animal corpses frozen in horror which recall the apocalyptic imagery in Geoffrey Reggio’s “Koyaanisqatsi” (1982).

Maurice and Katia died while filming the eruption of Mount Unzen Japan in 1991. There were two known markings in the ground, clearly indicating they were standing together before the volcanic gasses overtook them in a final warm embrace.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com