![]() Herzog casts an anthropologist’s eye on them, and sees how these people have developed customs and rituals that are part fearful, part celebratory. Oppenheimer and Herzog travel to Indonesia, Iceland, Ethopia and North Korea to investigate not only the volcanoes, but also the people who live with them, and must co-exist with this terrifying Damoclean sword over their heads. But in any case, Herzog is, of course, his own wild man. ![]() Perhaps closer to this is the French volcanologist husband-and-wife team Maurice and Katia Krafft, who took crazy risks to get their stunning closeup photographs of lava flow and in 1991 died in the attempt. Could Oppenheimer be the wild man that Herzog so often looks for – the Aguirre, the Grizzly Man? Not really. There he encountered a committed British volcano specialist named Clive Oppenheimer, who does the presenting here and is effectively Into the Inferno’s co-creator. ![]() Herzog made a short in 1977, La Soufrière, about a terrifyingly imminent eruption in Guadeloupe, and a feature documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, in 2007, about Antarctica, where there is a volcano. This boiling mass is just monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles and vapid humans alike.” He also interviews a tribal community elder in Vanuatu, who lives in the shadow of a volcano and professes he is mesmerised by the fiery liquefaction of lava in which he sees a vision of the world’s end: “Everything will melt, the stones, the trees, everything, like water …” The nearest he comes to theology is a final monologue, delivered in his unmistakable rasp: “It is a fire that wants to burst forth and it could not care less about what we are doing up here. Or perhaps ecstasy.ĭespite the title, however, Herzog does not explicitly compare volcanoes to hell. He loves to fly over volcanoes in a helicopter and look down directly into the boiling epicentre. ![]() There is a nihilistic awe with which he presents his primeval images of churning red lava and throbbing magma, pulsing beneath the Earth’s crust with their terrible destructive power. W ith Into the Inferno, Werner Herzog returns to the subject of active volcanoes, for which he has long had an intense, horrified fascination. ![]()
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