Original subtitles

This film is in memory

of Katia and Maurice Krafft,

volcanologists from the Alsace region in France.

Almost everything that we are going to see

is footage shot by them.

There is something so awe-inspiring in it,

so never seen before that attracted me as a filmmaker.

They lost their lives together,

capturing the might of volcanoes.

This is their legacy.

The lives and the death of Katia and Maurice are documented

in films and books.

And this here is not meant

to be another extensive biography.

What I'm trying to do here

is to celebrate the wonder of their imagery.

This here's Katia Krafft at a volcano in Iceland.

And this is her husband, Maurice.

Alsace, Eastern France, both were born in villages,

not far apart of each other,

surrounded by vineyards with a deep tradition

of unchanged, peasant life.

They were roaming the entire globe in pursuit

of erupting volcanoes, but they would always return

to the quiet landscape of their origin.

Katia studied geochemistry at Strasbourg University

with a goal to become a volcanologist.

Shortly later, at the same university,

Maurice began his studies in geology.

The bug of volcanoes had been in him since he was seven

when his parents took him to the Italian volcano, Stromboli.

Katia and Maurice met in Strasbourg in 1966

and never left each other ever after.

This is the place of their death,

the southern island of Kyushu in Japan,

right in the middle of the volcano, Mount Unzen.

May 30th, 1991.

The Kraffts arrived there on that day.

The mountain had shown signs

of a serious impending eruption.

When they arrived near the volcano in a rented car,

a friend and colleague Harry Glicken is with them.

Japanese reporters, photographers

and TV crews are already there.

This is the established viewing point for the media.

Authorities have declared an evacuation advisory area

some four kilometers distant from the crater.

Its delineation in the movements

of the Kraffts would later lead to lasting controversies.

They were blamed for luring cameramen and journalists

into a dangerous position,

but these positions were taken days

before the Kraffts arrived.

The point where...

The smoke is?

Here they make a first assessment

of the situation.

Small so-called pyroclastic flows have occurred recently.

- Over five kilometer. - Good.

Over there, small one there, one kilometer.

Oh.

The newspapers have reported

about the pyroclastic flows,

highly dangerous clouds of super heated particles and gases.

Maurice is setting up his camera.

He still shoots 16 millimeter celluloid.

The local TV crew now captures Katia

who is setting up the tripod for her photo camera.

What?

Maurice has problems

with the battery of his zoom.

The mountain is quiet.

Nothing worth shooting right now.

Katia, Maurice and Glicken seem to be at ease.

The Japanese media people are also oblivious

of the impending doom.

Whoever stayed here at this outpost,

cameramen, reporters and taxi drivers would be dead

in a few days.

Helicopters can be heard in the distance.

They monitor the crater.

Police is also present maintaining the exclusion zone.

Now something important is coming.

And if we stay on the top of this hill,

it's possible about.

Maurice just hinted at moving their position

onto a hill closer to the volcano.

Apparently this idea is taking root right now.

If there is a road going there, Katia agrees.

If you have a road, it's okay.

And here, suddenly a small pyroclastic flow

that will stop in the distance.

And then, because you have these pyroclastic flows

coming down and there is a lot to understand,

to take pictures and then to study the pictures.

And also we like very much to come in Japan

because you have very good observatories

and very good volcanologists.

So we can learn a lot with them.

After that you can meet your planned,

pyroclastic flow.

That was very small one.

Very small.

Yes. Very small.

I hope to see bigger ones than this one

because this is very small really, yes.

This is one of the smallest pyroclastic flow

I have seen in my life.

Well, yesterday's pyroclastic flow was very, very big one.

And that is the biggest one.

The cloud cover the full of mountain.

Oh yes. Uh-huh.

Yeah, I would like to see this kind of thing, bigger.

Yes, sure.

But probably at all part

of the dome collapsed at this moment.

So maybe it will need some, some hours or days

to make a new domes that may collapse

and part of the dome.

Sure.

This is exactly

what would happen a few days later on June 3rd,

the day they would perish.

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?

We know that Katia had much deeper concerns

about the dangers than she would admit on camera.

In fact, there was a crisis in their relationship

because Katia wanted to leave for the Philippines

where the volcano Pinatubo was about to erupt.

Maurice insisted he would stay no matter what.

And Katia stayed with him.

I have seen so much eruptions in 23 years

that even if I die tomorrow,

I don't care.

The Kraffts had a few narrow escapes

in their lives.

It was sheer luck.

In 1983, they chartered a boat

to approach Una-Una Volcano in Indonesia.

The volcano had erupted leaving destruction

on this small island.

It does not look good.

Despite all science, volcanoes are still unpredictable

but Katia ventures out, exploring.

Maurice following her with his camera.

And then they come across some livestock left behind

when the island was evacuated.

The cows, thirsty and starving, seem to sense something.

The goats look uneasy as well.

And then there is a new eruption menacing enough

to make the Kraffts retreat

but they don't know what's coming very soon.

Seeing Katia here, taking her time,

and Maurice clearly still filming from the shore.

We feel like hurrying them up.

They made it to safety.

There was no danger for them anymore.

And then this, the entire island exploded.

Later Katia writes in her diary,

"We would have been cooked in a second."

Three years later, 1986,

the Kraffts were lucky again.

A helicopter took them

to the volcano Saint Augustine in Alaska.

When both were near the crater itself

a massive explosion released a gigantic pyroclastic flow,

inside the cloud temperatures can reach way

over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the cloud can travel

at speeds up to 400 miles an hour.

The strange thing is that what's coming at you is silent.

The pyroclastic flow comes

within about 100 feet of the camera

but Maurice does not flee.

He calmly keeps it in frame until he runs out of film.

And Katia, who took this picture, doesn't flee either.

It was a long way for the Kraffts

to become the figures in their later films.

This here is Iceland, 1968.

They did not do camera work themselves.

All the early footage was shot

by Roland Haas who had formed a company with Maurice.

Katia's and Maurice's roles were not defined yet.

Maurice, still boyish, looks uncomfortable on camera.

Katia appears to be aimless,

just embellishing a shot.

Most of the time she disappears quickly.

1970, they were on the Italian island of Vulcano.

The crater is inactive except for some escaping steam.

Their film looks like home movies made by tourists.

Everything is unspectacular.

Their means of transportation are as primitive as it gets.

What is interesting is

that we see them doing scientific measurements.

Maurice monitoring seismic activities

and Katia measuring chemical compositions of gases.

And here, for the first time,

we see Maurice doing something for the camera,

yet to no avail.

Volcanoes have a natural attraction.

Tourists are climbing up the crater as well.

A bold young lady makes it all the way up to the rim

in high heels and bikini.

We see them now arriving in their base camp at the bottom.

Their life is documented as if they were tourists.

The focus is on jam, bread and Italian sausage.

Two years later, there is a shift.

Now on the Italian volcano Stromboli,

they come up with something

that looks like out of a carnival.

They brought along specially made helmets, rather grotesque.

The idea behind it was protection

against chunks of flying rocks.

And now they stage it, fake it for the camera.

They shoot several takes.

Watch the guy in the background.

I love his fake acting.

Katia seems to be embarrassed, unconvinced.

These helmets make your movements clumsy.

No serious volcanologist ever used them

and the Kraffts abandoned their idea quickly.

Soon, the Kraffts were able to attract sponsors.

They made an extensive expedition to Indonesia

with a van and two smaller vehicles all supported

by the city of Mulhouse in Alsace.

Maurice began a phase where his styled himself after

the world-renowned underwater film maker Jacques Cousteau,

wearing his trademark red woolen cap

and smoking a pipe.

The Kraffts apparently found it cool

to use pathetic looking inflatable seats.

Katia's role on camera was still diminished.

Frequently, she would be used for a scale.

Here in Yosemite, she's hit by some drops of hot water.

For the camera, they repeated several times all fake.

Increasingly they became filmmakers.

From now on, we rarely ever see them doing science.

They film others doing science.

Katia becomes a sound recordist

using state-of-the-art microphones and tape recorders.

She also takes a role of photographer.

Her pictures were published in magazines

and the book, more than 400,000 pictures of hers are

in the archive, enough to fill several more volumes.

And here, like out of a fog,

Maurice's real persona seems to emerge.

The mask comes off, his face raw, grown up, just him.

And at the same time, as if out of nowhere,

the image has become grandiose.

A great filmmaker is born.

This is Iceland, 1973.

The small southern island of Heimaey was surprised

by a trench opening and spewing red hot lava.

Maurice captures here an apocalypse

that we have never seen before on film.

When looking at Maurice right at the eruption

it seems that this is more than just a volcanic event.

A fire within has taken hold of him.

And it is certainly the same with Katia.

She clearly expressed it in an interview,

"I cannot live without volcanoes."

1980, Mount St. Helens in the state of Washington.

In fact, this image was taken years before.

The volcano still has its pointed peak covered in snow.

A series of earthquakes and steam venting episodes

beginning in March signaled a major event.

Seismic recordings went wild.

On May 18th at 8:32 in the morning,

a magnitude 5.1 earthquake occurred.

This triggered the largest landslide

in recorded history and an explosion.

The horizontal blast accelerated to 670 miles per hour.

Within a radius of eight miles,

everything was obliterated.

And up to a distance of 19 miles

the shock wave flattened every single tree.

Katia and Maurice, having acquired a reputation

to be the earliest on the scene,

this time came a few days late.

Approaching the zone of destruction,

everything looks normal.

The forests are still standing.

Then 20 miles away from the volcano,

first signs of devastation.

Mid-'80s, Hawaii.

The Kraffts increasingly are attracted to the magnificence

and mystery of the inner earth flowing to the surface.

They are no longer volcanologists,

they're artists who carry us, the spectators,

away in the realm of strange beauty.

This is a vision that exists only in dreams.

There is nothing more that should be said.

We can only watch in awe.

There is a fascination about the beauty of volcanoes

but they have caused terrible disasters.

This is the summit of Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia.

Its peak was covered with glaciers and snow

that had accumulated for decades.

At 9:09 p.m., on November 13th, 1985,

an eruption occurred.

It was only 3% of what was ejected from Mount St. Helens,

but the glowing lava and pyroclastic flows

melted the ice almost instantly.

The white summit turned dark.

This was filmed by the Kraffts a few days after the event.

And this is the flank of the mountain

where the water and mud came down,

growing larger and larger.

So called lahars formed.

What we see here was filmed by the Kraffts years earlier

in the Alps of Italy.

It is completely unrelated to Nevado del Ruiz

but we can get an idea what came down in Colombia.

Water eroded soil and dislodged rocks came sweeping down.

However, the lahar in Colombia was 100 feet deep.

It took more than an hour until it reached the town

of Armero some 30 miles away.

By then the huge stream had widened to a kilometer,

sweeping through the town.

Out of 29,000 inhabitants,

over 20,000 of them perished.

Only a few buildings on higher ground remained standing.

This was a fourth deadliest disaster in recorded history.

What we see here used to be the center of town.

The power of the flood can be imagined

by the size of boulders it carried along.

There used to be a bridge here.

These here are lucky survivors,

lucky because no one was warned.

The volcano had given signals so strong

that later a volcanologist said the volcano was screaming,

"I'm about to explode."

After the eruption, there was more than an hour time

until the flood hit the town.

It would've taken most of the inhabitants

just 200 meters to reach higher ground.

We have to imagine the water rose higher

than the bulldozers.

The level of the mudflow reached almost to the top

of the building in the background.

And yet a safe elevation is right behind.

Here we see the high mark of the mud flow.

Days after the flood, the soft mud was still treacherous.

It was 15 feet deep

and had swallowed up cattle and humans alike.

To cross it required some ingenuity.

Over the remains of Armero hovered the stench of carrion.

There was silence.

Here we can see cows that sank into the mud days ago.

They are irretrievable.

They will die here.

And then, human remains.

In the magnitude of the tragedy,

they were still left where they died.

The Kraffts wanted to see the source of the disaster,

the summit of Nevado del Ruiz over 17,000 feet high.

This is where flood had come down.

The marks in the rock show the gigantic magnitude

of the lahar.

Peasants tried to reach cut off villages

that had suffered great loss of life as well.

Bad visibility stopped Katia and Maurice

from climbing higher.

Turning away from the volcano,

they focused their attention

on the suffering of the survivors.

This marked a fundamental shift in their work.

They were shocked

by the failure to alert the local population.

In order to raise awareness of the dangers of volcanoes,

they were looking for media attention.

And because of that,

they increasingly became the daredevils

and parallel to that,

their gaze became less scientific

and more and more humanistic.

The shift did not happen overnight

as can be seen in footage the Kraffts filmed

in Indonesia a year before the tragedy of Armero.

Volcanic eruption had obscured the sky,

day turned into night.

These traffic scenes were shot at midday.

It took hours until some light returned.

Dust was everywhere.

And the thought creeps up to me

that we are watching a scenario of the future.

Could this pollution happen

without a volcano just caused by human behavior?

El Chichon in the south of Mexico.

Every volcano the Kraffts filmed had its own heartbreak.

Destruction, dust and the agony

of a land left and forsaken by God.

Or more banal, are we here

in the Spaghetti Western turned nightmare.

And then there is footage the Kraffts created

that has no volcanoes in it.

They followed their curiosity.

They saw the world no one else had seen.

They left behind a mosaic

that is mysterious and stunningly original.

Hawaii, the Kraffts went there repeatedly.

This is where there's permanent volcanic activity.

This is where fire meets water.

It appears to me, the Kraffts were shooting a whole film

about creation in the making.

They just did not have the time left to edit it.

A good part of what we discover

in the archive of the Kraffts, is sheer hardship.

Many of the viewers

of this will probably be glad not to be there

but I would give much if I could have been their companion.

This is what the Mexicans would call

life raw, intense, and pure,

life with meaning at its fullest.

We witness a travail of their voyages,

cars, horses and we pray the horses will make it.

Back in Japan, Mount Unzen, June 2nd, 1991.

The situation is unchanged.

No eruption, no big pyroclastic flow.

No choice.

The Kraffts and Harry Glicken

are holding their position,

musing about the small events at the volcano.

Maybe the event they talk about,

you know, when they say 20 pyroclastic flows per day,

maybe they, because they says it because of the seismicity.

So maybe they even count the small ones, very small ones.

Yeah, maybe they don't really see them.

They're see the clouds up there.

Yeah, they're just, uh-huh.

Harry Glicken decides

to make better use of his time.

He leaves the Kraffts with their cameras

in order to study sediments

in the river flowing from the volcano.

His story is curious.

He had unbelievable luck

when Mount St. Helens exploded some 10 years prior.

He held an observation outpost close to the volcano.

After working six days straight, he had to leave

for an interview with his university.

His research advisor, despite safety concerns,

volunteered to replace him at his post.

This volunteer died in the cataclysm of that day.

In the lottery of the universe,

Harry Glicken this time would make his fatal move.

He rejoined the Kraffts at the camera position

and thus died with them.

Up near the mountain, boredom has taken hold.

Many of the camera people are sleeping.

The volcano, only partially visible, is just quiet.

Later, we will learn that even this position,

just outside the exclusion zone, is not safe.

The pyroclastic flow will wipe it out as well.

Only some locals make it to safety.

And now what we see appears to be from a new vantage point.

The Japanese cameraman who shot this image

probably has joined the Kraffts

to move into an advanced position.

It was their last.

What remains of the Kraffts are their amazing images.

And looking into their archive,

we discover images, not only of volcanoes

but landscapes that nobody has ever filmed like them.

Some of it has a quality of dreams,

like in the biblical apocalypse,

stones are raining from the sky.

And rocks are giving up their assigned nature

just to solidly sit there.

They tumble.

And plants and creatures

and our whole planet seem to be somewhere in outer space.

Minutes away from the catastrophe,

Mount Unzen has released a massive pyroclastic flow.

We have the radio contact

of our Japanese cameraman with his base.

They order him to evacuate at once.

He's afraid, but still takes the time to wipe his lens.

Only now he flees.

And while he flees, he still keeps filming.

And only moments later the end.

Mount Unzen explodes,

a gigantic pyroclastic flow comes rushing down.

No one in its path will survive.

The cameraman who fled reported

that the Kraffts had been nearby.

He thought we should revisit his footage.

And here wasn't there something.

Let's look at it again.

Now zoom in.

There is somebody, there are some figures.

Could that be the Kraffts and Glicken?

The probability is high.

Does this here capture the very last moment of the Kraffts?

We do know from the position their bodies were found,

they were the closest to the volcano.

There were survivors, but only those who were barely touched

by the edges of the flow.

The remains of Katia and Maurice were cremated in Japan

and their ashes are buried here together

in the grave of Katia's family.

They're back now in Alsace, their home.

In their lives together they walked along a precipice.

In their love, they became one.

This shot was made by Maurice walking with a camera,

the abyss too close.

Katia must have held him so he wouldn't fall.

Because of this unity and this togetherness,

they were able to descend into the inferno

and wrestle an image from the very claws of the devil

and that is why I wanted to make this film for them.