"Fire of Love" delves into celebrity volcanologist couple
By Lindsey Bahr
There is a curious love triangle that sits at the center of the new documentary "Fire of Love." It's between a man, a woman and a volcano. Well, all volcanoes really.
The names might not be especially well-known today, but in the 1970s and '80s, French scientists Katia Krafft and Maurice Krafft were to volcanoes what Jacques Cousteau was to oceans. The married couple traveled the world for some 20 years in pursuit of their studies, capturing the spectacles with 16mm cameras and writing colorfully about their findings until their deaths in 1991 on Mount Unzen in Japan. On that June day a current of gas and volcanic matter called a pyroclastic flow took 43 lives, including the Kraftts and American volcanologist Harry Glicken.
Their deaths were covered globally, but their story has somewhat receded in the popular imagination in the past three decades, though Werner Herzog did spotlight them in his 2016 documentary "Into the Inferno."
Filmmaker Sara Dosa stumbled upon the Kraffts while making an earlier film about Iceland. The Kraffts, who first bonded over Mount Etna and Mount Stromboli and were married in 1970, witnessed some 140 eruptions on every continent except Antarctica and won an Emmy for their National Geographic documentary "Mountains of Fire." They would famously drop everything to get to an active volcano, and were often the first on site. They were also known for their willingness to get dangerously close.
When the pandemic scuttled plans for another project, Dosa remembered this fascinating couple and the stories about their hundreds of hours of disarmingly beautiful footage of active volcanoes.
"I'm endlessly curious and just fascinated by how humans make meaning out of non-human nature," Dosa said. "I feel like I got to see that in their works so beautifully."
And she set out to make something about the Kraffts in the spirit of the Kraffts. "Fire of Love," from National Geographic Documentary Films and Neon, opens in theaters in New York and Los Angeles today (7/6) and more cities in the coming weeks.
With the help of Image'Est, an archive house in Nancy, France, and Maurice Krafft's brother, Bertrand Krafft, Dosa and her collaborators were able to get remote access to over 180 hours of 16mm footage shot by the Kraffts and start piecing the story together. A line written by Maurice Krafft in one of his books helped justify something Dosa was already onto: That this was a love story.
"I wanted to be guided by Katia and Maurice first and foremost," Dosa said. "They were so playful and full of humor. Their banter is infectious. They're also philosophical. In their writings and recordings, they wrestle with themes of existentialism."
Taking inspiration from the time when the Kraffts were coming of age, Dosa and her team decided to draw on the aesthetics of French New Wave films to help inform the tone and style of their film, including playful split screens and zooms. Even their writings, Dosa said, reminded her of the narration in François Truffaut films. So they leaned into the absurdity and profundity of this strange love triangle with a "deadpan curious" narration by Miranda July and an original "retro-futuristic" score from Nicolas Godin of the French music duo Air.
"It was important to us to, of course, tell a story that's factual, that was accurate and reflected their lives and lived experience. And at the same time, we wanted to tell a story that felt true," Dosa said. "But there's kind of a true spirit to Katia and Maurice that extends beyond the literal factual."
In other words, "Fire of Love" is anything but a filmed Wikipedia page. The film even begins with credits starring "Katia and Maurice Krafft."
"We wanted to kind of lean into that idea of them playing themselves from an early stage. We see them as the authors of their own myth and this as kind of a mythic love story," Dosa said. "This is a co-creation, shot by them and starring them. We're just kind of stringing along the pieces of their life for the audience to connect with."
Lindsey Bahr is an AP film writer.
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More