Opening the first edition of UnArchive Found Footage Fest is the new masterpiece signed by Werner Herzog entitled THE FIRE WITHIN – A REQUIEM FOR KATIA AND MAURICE KRAFFT. Intrastevere, a historical theater in the middle of Rome, is fully booked and swarming with people, waiting outside and ready to be taken into an audiovisual trip that starts with the German movie. Held in the first week of May, the festival was a celebration of experimental documentary filmmakers from all over the world.
But on that starting Wednesday night, two very different filmmakers were brought to the attention of the public: Katia and Maurice Krafft. “The Fire Within” is in fact, as the title states, “a requiem” for the both of them: Two people whose exceptional story is told for the second time in a documentary in 2022, along with the Oscar nominated “Fire of Love” by Sara Dosa.
If this newborn Roman festival is already a success, The Fire Within is just the type of film that has made it so: films that use archives to form a narrative. In this case, the film rolls were shot by the two protagonists themselves.
No, they were not directors: they were volcanologists. A couple of scientists who came from the same little town in Alsace (France), fell in love and decided to dedicate their life throughout the‘70s and ‘80s to study whimsical mountains and follow the erupting lava all around the world, accompanied only by their passion, their camera and very minimal equipment. From Indonesia to Japan to Italy, Katia and Maurice started to travel the world and document their trips. They became so fond of the images they were shooting — first as a part of their research and secondly as art — that they slowly started to embrace the latter even more, as one was nourishing the other.
Not only do we get to see them in everyday moments while they actually stand on the slopes of a volcano – eating a sandwich, making jokes, splitting up the workload, commenting on the surroundings and the “to do list” — but we gradually get captured by what truly seized their heart and their sight. Rivers of lava, of fire, of red, of darkness; huge mountains spitting out the content of the earth that we do finally get to witness with images that get plucked out of the core of our planet. Katia and Maurice did get to the very center of it, the inside, the gutter of the bizarre rock we live on, understanding the turmoil that lies underneath the surface, and confining it into the film roll so that some decades later someone could put it together in an audiovisual symphony and give it to the future. The one that they didn’t get to live to see, but that now welcomes their work and their contribution not only to science and awareness-raising in endangered communities, but to art and to the power of filming itself.
Herzog did have a good start: more than 200 hours of magnificent archival images like no one did before. He put together the pieces of the puzzle of his friends’ lifelong dedication (he knew the couple well), edited them magnificently and brought it to a finish it by his voice over and astounding music, thus creating a sublime experience that also questions us about what we are willing to do for what we believe in, for what we love. They were willing to risk their life to get a closer image, a better image.
They were scientists, they became artists, and their story tells us that maybe there is no difference after all, it’s just about the way you decide to investigate, whether with data and analysis or with creativity, maybe the result is different, but the process is somehow the same: it’s the obsession, the will to understand, to capture, to give something to the rest of the world, whether it is knowledge or beauty, or even terror. To bring things to life, by saving them from the realm of the unknown to the human brain. Or eyes.
The work of Katia and Maurice — who died before their 50s in the Kushu Island in Japan while filming the Unzen volcano after the eruption and were swept away by the pyroclastic flow — tells us the importance of keeping things for others, the importance of sharing things, of saving things.
That’s, in a nutshell, the very idea at the core of the archive, and at the core of this festival: to preserve knowledge and/or simply beauty from the chaotic flow of time.
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