of “Fire of love” The narration cites Maurice and Katia Craft’s feelings about the risks of their work of exploring and filming volcanoes. “I prefer an intense and short life to a monotonous and long life,” Maurice wrote. Katya admitted the danger, but she said she didn’t care at all at this point.
Kraft, who married a French volcanologist, was killed on June 3, 1991, when he observed the eruption of Mt. Unzen in Japan. But the stunning 16mm footage they shot throughout their careers is full of erupting lava, flying rocks, and huge clouds of smoke, and is a new all-archive documentary edited from about 200 hours of material. It remains in “Fire of Love”. With 50 hours of TV appearances and other clips.
In an interview with Tribeca last month, documentary director Sarah Dosa said, “I had so many questions that I wish I could ask them personally, one of which was that Lille didn’t work. It’s a thing. ” After all, visiting a volcano is full of danger. The film tells Maurice that he had burned his leg in boiling mud, throwing a rock at Katya’s head and playfully testing Katya’s helmet. Dosa said he did not use “a fun shot of Maurice throwing his melted boots into a lava flow.” It is safe to assume that not all of the couple’s film equipment survived.
But “Fire of Love” isn’t just about on-site crafting time. It’s also about their lives and marriage. Dosa, who learned about a couple during a previous documentary study, describes her film as a love triangle that includes Maurice, Katya, and volcanoes.
The film tries to stay true to them — “We always wanted to start with Katya and Maurice,” Dosa said — maintaining some important distance. Narration from Miranda Julai extends and sometimes complicates the craft description. For example, Maurice refutes Maurice’s claim that he is not a filmmaker, but simply a wandering volcanologist who was forced to make a film to wander. Couple — Katya with short hair and glasses. Bushy, brave Maurice — touring the world with lectures and screenings. Even today, thanks to many books and television appearances, they enjoy worldwide fame.
“We wanted to explore how they created their own image,” Dosa said. “They seemed to understand that their public image helped them continue to live the life they wanted to lead. They ran their version, but the way it wasn’t real at all. It wasn’t. It was almost like this higher truth about who Katya and Maurice are. “
Maurice’s brother, now 82, Bertrand Kraft maintained the footage after the couple’s death. “My parents didn’t know anything about photography and movies, nor did Katya’s parents,” he said on the phone through an interpreter. “Someone had to take responsibility for managing the assets left by Maurice and Katya, and I was the only one who could do that.”
Bertrand has allowed the images of Maurice and Katya to be used in other documentaries. Indeed, another feature utilizing Werner Herzog’s craft material “Inner Fire: Katya and Maurice Craft’s Requiem” premiered on June 26th at the Sheffield DocFestary Film Festival in the United Kingdom. The movie he participated in most over the years was from Dosa. “Her idea, her approach to her project seemed great to me,” he said. “So I did whatever I could to help her her.”
In the world of Werner Herzog
During his decades of career, filmmakers have become more and more like one of the existence-oriented dreamers who live in his work.
According to Mathieu Rousseau of Image’Est, a French archive that kept a craft collection of 800 reels of film and 300,000 slides, the footage is both fully finished and unedited. Was included. (After the documentary progressed, Bertrand Krafft sold the material to the Geneva-based company Titan Film.)
“It was complicated at first, but when Sarah needed to digitize everything to be able to make a movie, she needed to understand what Maurice did,” Rousseau said through an interpreter. rice field. Video call. Maurice said: He had his own logic. “
Dosa and her editor also had to understand hundreds of hours of footage. Jocelyn Chaput, one of the editors of “Fire of Love,” said on several reels: Another editor, Erin Casper, said the images were geographically loosely arranged, but not necessarily in chronological order, and were difficult to maintain accuracy.
In addition, none of the 16mm footage of the craft was sound. For example, I had to add all the audio that stirs the lava. The final version of Fire of Love combines Foley effects with a library of field recordings that sound designer Patrice LeBlanc has accumulated over 30 years. The use of sounds would not have been foreign to Katya and Maurice, Chaput and Casper suggested: some of the craft films used sound effects and narration, or while Maurice was lectured on them. Was executed.
Ken Hong, head of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory at the United States Geological Survey, knows crafts that began in the late 1980s and remembers that volcano photography at the time was rare.
“At that time, there weren’t many footage of volcanic eruptions, and certainly none were nearby,” he said. “To understand the process in progress, I had to be able to point the camera at the right thing, so I had to be a volcanologist to shoot like them.” Images are much more common thanks to lighter and cheaper equipment. “I’m going to love drones now,” Maurice said.
Hong remembered when Craft traveled to Hawaii. He sometimes took them to closed places, like the town of Karapana, which was hit by lava in 1990.
The shoot “was like a second nature to them,” he said. Don’t stop saying “they have cameras installed and they keep chatting” and “stop, have to focus, have to focus”. Hong was somewhat grateful for the challenges that Craft faced. He helped his wife and fellow volcanologist Cheryl Ganseki. Make a video About 20 years.
“It’s hot. It’s usually moist and acid gas is coming out of the volcano, right?” He said. “The combination of them is exactly what tells you not to immerse yourself in your electronic items.”
Volcanologist Stephen Brantley, who retired 37 years later in a geological survey but returned part-time, said that even when craft footage might appear to be harming them, they took a camera. “They could walk in front of it and live to tell the story over and over again,” he said. “In that sense, it may look different, but I think I was very careful.”
Hong also did not consider crafting to be cautious. “The types of eruptions that hit them in Unzen, the dome-forming eruptions with collapses and small explosions, etc., are the most dangerous types of eruptions because they are so unpredictable,” he said.
Another volcanologist, Harry Glicken, who died with the couple at the time, reported in the New York Times that “when the pyroclastic flow from the main crater two miles away plunged down the slope at an estimated speed, there was no opportunity to escape.” did. At 100-125 mph “
Brantley had never worked with Kraft in the field, but worked with Maurice. Video about volcanic disasters It was almost complete when Maurice died.The section was screened in time Warn Filipino residents Of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo that occurred within two weeks. Brantley emphasized that educating the general public about volcanoes is as part of the craft heritage as their impressive footage.
Through his delegation, Herzog said, just before the premiere of his own craft film, he hadn’t seen “Fire of Love” yet, but wanted to see it “in the theater within the next few weeks.”
The potential confluence of the two craft films reminded me of the overlapping releases of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” in 1997. This must be exactly the same as in a volcanic movie. “We don’t do them all at once,” he said. “We are always paired.”
