A volcanic love. This is how they defined between laughs Katia and Maurice Krafft, protagonists of Fire of Love, their relation. A passionate love that started in 1966 in Alsace and ended in 1991 in Japan, with his death wrapped by the other great love of their lives: the volcanoes.
Theirs was a three-way love. A passionate marriage, lived to the limit. “Katia and I and the volcanoes are a love story”, Maurice himself wrote. And on that premise, the filmmaker Sarah Dosa has built a beautiful documentary, Fire of Love, released this week at the Sundance Festival.
Using only the archive material of this couple, their recordings, their writings and interviews from those decades of glorious adventures of the 60s and 70s in which they became real stars, especially in France.
Katia and Maurice Krafft in their anti-volcano suits.
Dosa began the journey in Iceland, precisely the place where this couple first traveled in 1968. There, the director shot her previous film The Seer and the Unseen, about the founding of the island and traced ancient images of volcanoes. She that way she found the recordings of Katia and Maurice and she was hooked on her story. “I entered a path of asking myself so many things: about the human relationship with nature, awareness of nature, creation, destruction, love, life,” she explains.
They came to Image'Est, an archive in Nancy, France, which kept most of what was recorded, photographed and written by the Katias and Maurice Krafft. They digitized 200 hours and gave access to notes, writings, material never seen before by the public, even though the couple was a tireless disseminator of everything they discovered on their travels (and thus they financed their trips and equipment). But in the images selected and edited in Fire of Love, as if it were a Nouvelle Vague film, there are moments that did not seem intended to be shown in public. Good for intimate, good for dangerous.
ATTRACTION TO THE UNKNOWN
In Fire of Love , Dosa tries to rebuild the love story of three (as Jules and Jim) of this couple. She proposes three beginnings. The most plausible: a blind date in which they discovered each other as two crazy volcanoes from a very young age. They never parted again. Katia was a geochemist and Maurice a geologist. Etna and Stromboli were his icons. And her honeymoon was spent in Santorini, where they say the mystery of Atlantis is hidden. They decided early on not to have children, “only volcanoes, volcanoes and volcanoes”.
Katia in front of a volcano.
They traveled endlessly, from one side of the planet to the other, chasing eruptions. They were defined as "wandering volcanologists, traveling performers". They had a great sense of humor perhaps because of that constant vision of death so close. “Volcanology is a science of observation. The closer you are, the more you see”, says the voiceover (the one with the inspiring Miranda July) that not only tells us her story, but also asks us questions. They were not afraid to get close. And the more they knew, the closer they got, the less afraid they were. "Curiosity is stronger than fear."
They were pioneers of this science . Few then dared to come so close to the lava, to the explosions. And few have dared afterwards, in a world increasingly driven by drones. "They occupy an interesting time gap between 'this has never been done' and 'this will never be done again'," Dosa says.
They got there, Zaire, to Hawaii, Indonesia… Maurice carrying his 16mm camera and Katia with her analog camera. With her red beanies (hello, Cousteau; hello, Wes Anderson), their sci-fi movie outfits camp. As they progressed in their work, they became more and more filmmakers, storytellers. The shots they made from afar, with zooms, show an artistic intention and a desire for legacy.
AN END FORETOLD
They started chasing what they called the red volcanoes, those of lava, those who don't kill because you see them coming. And in 1980, with the explosion of the Mount St Helens (Washington, USA), one of the grays, "those who kill", the most dangerous, they fell in love with them. They were the most unknown and also the least predictable.
Fire of Love, premiered at Sundance.
After the volcano eruption Nevado del Ruiz, in Armero, Colombia, another gray, which ended the lives of some 25,000 people, change their objective again to focus on avoiding such tragedies. They renew their love for humanity with which they had always been so disappointed and had therefore abandoned in favor of nature.
They focused on teaching how to evacuate, how the authorities understood and heeded the reports and warnings that volcanologists like them did. Meanwhile, they continued to stick to the slopes of these earth monsters, reaching their mouths, determined to discover “why the heart of the Earth bursts and lets out its blood”.
On June 3, 1991, on the slopes of the Mount Untzen in Japan, an extinct volcano for 330 years, they were last seen. Fire of Love shows the last images of this couple proud that you considered them "the weirdos" of the trade. They only recovered from them a camera and a watch. They were always prepared to die in the arms of their great love. They and the volcano.
volcano stars.