Original subtitles

In a cold world, all the watches started to freeze.

The sun came and went between blizzards and gusts which erased all bearings.

In this world lived a fire

and in this fire, two lovers found a home.

All right. The volcano is ready, waiting for us.

Yes.

Okay.

Katia?

This is Katia, and this is Maurice.

It's 1991, June 2nd.

Tomorrow will be their last day.

They will leave behind samples.

Words.

Hundreds of hours of footage.

Thousands of photos.

And a million questions.

The Muana Loa.

They meet 19 years ago.

In 1966.

There is no definitive account of this first encounter

and the visual record of their budding romance is sparse.

There is this photo...

and these rose-tinted moments a few years later.

Parts of Katia and Maurice's story remain lost to time.

As in love, there are mysteries.

You fall hard for what you know.

Harder for what you don't.

In one story, Katia and Maurice meet by chance on a bench

at the University of Strasbourg.

In a second,

they meet at a new film by renowned volcanologist Haroun Tazieff.

The most detailed account is a blind date at a café.

They bond over their first loves, Mount Etna and Mount Stromboli.

Katia, a rebel who was sent to a school for unruly girls,

convinces her parents to take her to Italy's volcanoes.

Maurice would return to Stromboli

at age 19,

feeling at once ecstasy and loneliness.

Katia understands this loneliness.

It is also hers.

Growing up in the rubble of postwar Alsace,

the world felt to them unsafe, uncertain.

They take refuge in the mysteries of the natural world.

Dreaming, just 20 kilometers apart.

The Vosges and Rhine fault lines shifting imperceptibly beneath them.

At the end of this version, the café closes and it begins to rain.

They will never leave each other.

November 19th, 1967,

a U.S. fighter plane drops two snake-eye bombs

along the South Vietnam border...

the territory once colonized as French Indochina.

One week later,

Katia and Maurice join anti-war protests in Paris.

The next day, they show up on the front page of L'Humanité.

But human pursuits of power begin to feel vain and absurd

next to the power of the Earth.

It's also the plate tectonic revolution,

and the field of volcanology is finding its form.

They devour each hypothesis, each myth.

Everything that has been gleaned so far from the archives of the Earth.

The truths...

the fragments...

the questions.

They wonder what forms and re-forms the world.

To these mysteries they long to get closer.

With just enough grant money and a donated car,

Katia and Maurice go seek Iceland's volcanoes

with their friend, Roland.

Katia is the geochemist,

Maurice the geologist.

Alone, they could only dream of volcanoes.

Together, they can reach them.

Except the car breaks down 27 times.

Then crashes.

And Maurice gets into hot water.

Here is an actor reading Katia's account.

Undeterred, they spend the next few summers

studying their mutual friends, Etna and Stromboli.

They also bring along more human friends.

L'Équipe Vulcain, they call themselves.

Katia and Maurice are after

the strange alchemy of elements,

the combination of mineral, heat,

gas and time that incites an eruption.

What is it, they ask, that makes the Earth's heart beat?

Its blood flow?

They study, examine and question.

Katia and Maurice begin to learn the secrets of the planet

that few others know.

Understanding is love's other name.

1970,

Katia and Maurice marry in a small ceremony in Alsace.

They honeymoon on the volcanic island of Santorini,

believed to be the secret location of Atlantis.

Katia and Maurice decide they will not have children.

“From here on out, life will only be volcanoes,

"volcanoes, volcanoes,” Maurice says.

The young field of volcanology

has found two young stars.

The camera loves them.

And they love their own cameras back.

Photography is a means of remembering, revisiting,

stretching their time with volcanoes.

This photo shows the parabolic trajectories

of volcanic bombs ejected from Stromboli.

This one shows how lava is stretched into glass wool

called Pele's hair.

And this shot helps visualize plate tectonic theory.

Volcanology is a science of observation.

The closer they get, the more they see.

The very instant a volcano wakes up,

these weirdoes are notified

by a growing network of local friends and guides who help them

reach the craters as fast as humanly possible.

Maurice and Katia make their expedition to Nyiragongo,

a volcano that sits between two diverging plates.

They are guided by fellow volcanologist Jacques Durieux.

You arrive at the mouth of the volcano,

then you have to go

in the mouth of the volcano. So you are going down.

Not so high, 300 meters. But very bad rock.

All kinds of fumaroles went through, and so it's not strong.

Here, Maurice and Katia make their home

for the next two weeks.

Katia would later write...

Suddenly, the lava plunges down

ten meters in seconds.

Katia and Maurice will eventually emerge

from this crater unscathed and emboldened.

In the immense universe

that is the classification of volcanoes,

the Kraffts will eventually adopt two general classes.

Red...

and gray.

Red volcanoes, like Nyiragongo,

form as tectonic plates pull apart,

and at hotspots on the ocean floor.

Magma rises and fills in the gaps opened up by the movement of the Earth,

creating new land.

Red volcanoes are basaltic.

Effusive.

And up to 1200 degrees Celsius hot.

Katia and Maurice have their differences.

Katia is like a bird.

Maurice, an elephant seal.

Katia is drawn to details, the interconnectedness of things.

Maurice, the singular, the grandiose.

They both observe the world, but in their own distinct ways.

Katia, with her still camera, captures one moment with one frame.

Maurice chases motion...

recording a stream of seconds, 24 frames each.

He thirsts to get every possible shot, because the spectacle could vanish.

But this causes him to wander...

and wander...

and wander.

Katia's greatest fear is that she will lose sight of him...

and never see him again.

A surprise telegram summons Katia...

and Maurice to Nyiragongo,

their beloved volcano that they met four years ago.

Katia and Maurice knew

this kind of destruction was possible.

But this is the first time they experience it firsthand.

The lava flows were going very... very fast.

They were probably running at 60 to 70 kilometers per hour.

And this was in the morning where a lot of people were on the road

going for the market.

We think that around 100 people were overwhelmed by the lava flow.

Very unusual eruption.

No amount of scientific research

could have prepared them for this shock.

The language of myth instead feels apt.

They're in the cauldron of the devil,

the portal to hell.

Or caught amid the warring spirits of the volcano,

according to the stories from their friends in Goma.

For Katia and Maurice,

the unknown is not something to be feared.

It is something to go toward.

At only 52 years old

an infant Indonesian volcano begins to throw a fit.

Katia and Maurice go chase it.

In 1883, its parent, a volcano named Krakatau, exploded.

It conjured a tsunami so forceful that it swept

neighboring coastlines, killing 36,417 people.

It also ripped up this coral from the seafloor

and parked a colonial Dutch steamship two miles inland.

Ash traveled the globe, intensifying sunsets that transfixed

the gaze of scientists and artists, especially one Norwegian painter

who described the sunsets as a scream.

Then the volcano collapsed into the sea...

only to spring up again as a newcomer called Anak Krakatau.

Katia and Maurice must be totally in sync.

Any mistake that one makes can be costly for the both of them.

But Maurice cannot do this work without Katia.

Neither can Katia, without Maurice.

And together, they're there for the volcano,

who is indifferent in the face of their adulation.

Katia and Maurice know

that these rocks will long outlive them.

They are not religious.

"We are scientists," they say.

"We have but this one short life, then we return to the ground."

With her one short life, Katia dreams of growing old

with the volcano, of turning over its every stone.

Maurice burns to get closer to the fire, no matter what.

He once wrote,

Maurice hatches this plan

from another boating adventure

during their first trip to Indonesia in 1971.

Here, they study the largest reserve

of sulfuric acid in the world.

MAURICE: F

Suddenly, the acid eats through the steel cable

and claims the sample bottle at the bottom of the lake.

This mission is over.

A headwind sweeps them further from shore.

They will spend the next three hours struggling to get back.

Katia is furious.

Over time, Maurice perfects

the legend of Maurice Krafft.

And together,

he and Katia have gotten good at playing themselves.

Despite what Maurice says,

their footage suggests otherwise.

For instance, how do they show that their work is grueling?

Perhaps like this?

Or this?

How do they show how to gaze into the abyss?

Perhaps like this.

How do they stage geologic scale?

With images like this?

But what about this?

Why was this moment captured with their rationed feet of film?

What or who was it for?

Now and again, Katia and Maurice must go back to Alsace

to turn their photos and footage into books and films.

Here, they are denizens of this human world.

In order to get back home to the volcano,

they must pay the bills.

Katia catalogues their images,

writes the books

and handles the logistics.

Maurice takes the lecture tour, media appearances,

tries in vain to plan his lava canoe trip.

He also edits their films.

Ball is in.

Danger.

Danger.

Over in the United States, volcanologist Harry Glicken

takes this photo of Mount St. Helens on May 17, 1980.

What follows are some of the best-known images

of what will happen here tomorrow,

starting at eight hours, 32 minutes, 11.4 seconds Pacific Daylight Time.

Fifty-three kilometers to the east on Mount Adams,

a hiker takes these photos.

Fifty-six kilometers to the northwest,

this image is taken.

Somewhere further, an eight-millimeter film camera records this.

As for Maurice and Katia,

they did not film or photograph this eruption...

because they could not see or hear it.

As ash descends on the surrounding area...

Katia and Maurice make their approach.

Katia and Maurice will spend three months amid the ash...

monitoring, photographing, studying this force.

And little by little, they and their fellow researchers

will paint a clearer picture of the event, with numbers like

two point eight,

the number of cubic kilometers of land cast off by the mountain.

Twenty-five thousand, the eruption's force measured

in atomic bombs like the one that the United States dropped

on Hiroshima.

Fifty-seven, the official human death toll.

At one point, they will find the melted tapes of David Johnston.

No matter what they discover after the blast...

they come no closer to understanding how

to make the most critical measurements before it.

From this moment on,

they will devote their lives to this kind of volcano.

The gray volcano.

The killer volcano.

Gray volcanoes may be killers,

but their ash makes the most fertile soil in the world,

as demonstrated by this killer turnip.

Unlike red volcanoes, which form when plates pull apart,

grays form when plates collide, causing pressure and heat

to build and build until a cataclysmic release.

A Who's-Who of such eruptions would include Vesuvius in the year 79,

Tambora in 1815,

and Pelée in 1902.

Here is a relatively small one,

Galunggung, in 1982.

And here's Una-Una in 1983.

There may be signs before an eruption,

but there is no certainty. No way of knowing the exact timing.

And timing is everything in the human world.

In 1884,

time was set to machines instead of the wild rhythms of the Earth.

No longer told by the Sun, Moon or stars,

it relied on manufactured intervals to coordinate railway cars

transporting minerals ripped from the Earth.

Embraced by the British Empire, this new railway time soon

mapped the globe.

But a volcano can't be scheduled.

The length of the fuse is never known.

This is a map drawn of Nevado del Ruiz,

a gray volcano in Colombia's Andean range.

It illustrates the threat if it erupts. And there's every indication that it will,

as Colombia's geoscientists communicated to officials in reports.

This one, presented on October 7, 1985,

states that there is a 100 percent probability of mudflows,

with great danger for Armero and the surrounding towns.

Katia and Maurice are part of a chorus

who call for warning systems and evacuation plans.

They know what will happen.

But the decision-makers deem these plans too costly.

On November 14, 1985, these images circulate around the world.

The volcano erupted the previous day,

and the mudflows swallowed the villages late at night,

while residents slept.

Katia arrives while Maurice is on a lecture tour in France,

promoting their latest film.

The official death toll climbs to 22,000...

and then 23,000.

Some reports say 25,000.

The exact number is not known.

Survivors would later recount.

Katia longs for Maurice,

who is likely lecturing

at this moment on the creative powers of volcanoes.

For the first time, she questions her life's purpose.

Katia and Maurice had spent their lives

documenting how the Earth's heart beats,

how its blood flows.

Now they feel their own human hearts beating and breaking.

Long ago, Maurice said...

Volcanoes must destroy to create...

but must this unruly cycle take human life?

Katia and Maurice set out

to hunt for the rarest,

deadliest forces for a new film on volcanic hazards.

It took them one full year to get these shots

on Alaska's Mount Augustine.

The camera shakes as if it's telegraphing,

whether to stay or run.

Perhaps it is because their colleague, Juergen Kienle,

is about to pull them away from the burning ash cloud

at the last second.

Several years from now, their obituary will cite this

as the moment where Katia and Maurice insisted that the risks

should always be minimized...

but that this type of close-up study had to be done.

Maurice once said,

“Look at how small we humans are against this volcanic force.

"The only thing that will remain of our passage is that we can write,

"tell stories, and film.”

When you could die at any moment...

what do you leave behind?

A set of forces collide inside the planet

throughout the enormity of geologic time

to trigger one instant, an eruption,

that forever re-shapes the Earth.

And across humanity's two million years,

two tiny humans are born in the same place,

at the same time,

and they love the same thing.

And that love moved us closer to the Earth.

June 3rd, 1991,

Mount Unzen begins to wake up after its 200-year slumber.

The mountain has been stirring since May,

but today, something will shift inside the Earth.

We hope always, but we cannot be sure, and we don't know nothing.

You have big blocks on the top and they have to...

to come down, but when?

Just after 4:00 p.m., it starts to rain.

Ash blows in on a north wind.

Something seems different this time.

The mist obscures their view,

so Katia and Maurice push closer

with their friend, Harry Glicken, to get a better shot.

A journalist who abandoned their camera captured this shot.

And there's this moment, just before the blast.

The last known shot of Katia and Maurice together.

Japanese officials gave Katia and Maurice's friend, Yves, this photo.

Their urns resting in the Shimabara Temple

at the base of Mount Unzen.

Near the site of the surge, the marks on the earth indicated

that Katia and Maurice were next to each other.

Two items were recovered.

A camera and a watch,

its hands forever frozen in time

at 4:18 p.m.

Just over the East China Sea, Mount Pinatubo trembles.

In one week, it will explode in the most spectacular

volcanic eruption the Philippines has ever known.

Fifty-eight thousand people will evacuate.

Officials took the warning signs seriously, thanks to Katia

and Maurice's film about understanding volcanoes.

Across the world, near the French-German border,

the Vosges and Rhine fault lines shift imperceptibly beneath a sleeping Earth.