Fire of Love

Plat­forms such as Tik­Tok and Insta­gram pro­vide an out­let for peo­ple who want to film them­selves doing dare­dev­il stunts. Swipe: guy cracks his nuts on a ban­nis­ter after slip­ping from his skate­board. Swipe: women slips off a roof and into a recy­cle bin. Swipe: girl dives off a sheer rock face but mist­imes her dive and slaps down on her back.

This is a very reduc­tive thing to say, but the late Katia and Mau­rice Krafft would have been pre­mi­um social media influ­encers had they been around and doing their thing today. The major­i­ty of the footage they col­lect­ed would have no doubt acquired ​“sick met­rics” had it been uploaded online, as it large­ly details the death-defy­ing wan­der­ings of these two French vol­ca­nol­o­gists as they wan­der dan­ger­ous­ly close to the bub­bling mag­ma pools of active volcanoes.

In one of many jaw drop­ping sequences in Sara Dosa’s whim­si­cal doc­u­men­tary Fire of Love, the pair even pitch up a lit­tle tent in a vol­cano crater as explo­sive lava rivulets dance in the back­ground. The pair are super chill and con­fi­dent that they’re not going to be burned alive. On this occa­sion, they opt not to wear their bespoke met­al head­gear designed to pre­vent such acci­dents from occurring.

In their hands-on and pub­lic-fac­ing research, they engaged with rig­or­ous acad­e­mia but with an added com­mer­cial edge. They were seen as rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies in the field, often using their celebri­ty as a way to high­light the tran­scen­dent joys and hor­rif­ic dan­gers of these geo­log­i­cal won­ders. Mau­rice, with his tou­sled locks and nice line in vol­cano humour, would take to the media cir­cuit, while the book­ish Katia would stay back on the ranch and pro­duce all the pub­li­ca­tions that would chron­i­cle their wild journeys.

The footage the pair col­lect­ed is often jaw-drop­ping. You can some­times feel the heat of mag­ma ema­nat­ing from the screen. Through a glob­al net­work of vol­cano watch­ers, they would receive a telegram let­ting them know of any rum­blings, and they’d be straight on a plane in order to see things first hand. And, if it was too late for them to wit­ness an erup­tion, they would instead stick around for months on end to observe and report on the fall­out. Their work on the dev­as­tat­ing post-erup­tion site of Neva­do del Ruiz in Colum­bia in 1985 has been seen as vital for evac­u­a­tion pro­ce­dures for set­tle­ments near active vol­canos around the globe.

Dosa’s film is a slick, mov­ing and cute­ly Her­zo­gian por­trait of this lov­ing, mono­ma­ni­a­cal cou­ple who strad­dled the line between the eccen­tric and the earnest. Miran­da July pro­vides a breathy and slight­ly affect­ed voiceover nar­ra­tion which serves the director’s over­ly-ornate script which seems a lit­tle too focused on fram­ing the Kraffts as this paragon of roman­tic kin­ship – an idea that is nev­er trans­mit­ted in the footage itself beyond the fact that they did every­thing (includ­ing die at the hands of a vol­cano in Japan) togeth­er. But def­i­nite­ly stay for the land­scape porn and crazy stunt work.