5 Days of Oscar Docs: Fire of Love
A week-long guide to the Academy Awards' strongest and most overlooked category.
Katia and Maurice Krafft are dead. Fire of Love wants you to know that up front. Only a few minutes in, narrator Miranda July informs us that we’re looking at images of the day before the married volcanologists’ “last day,” and the fact that it’s the same day for both of them suggests that their deaths won’t be natural ones. When the movie opens with images of them slogging through miles of snow (an unexpected beginning for a film with “fire” in its title), it’s as if they’re making the long journey back to meet us in the present day, and the wondrous archive they spent their lives amassing—still photographs and 16mm footage of molten color arcing through the air, tendrils of cooling rock snarled like skeins of yarn—is coming out of cold storage with them.
The way director Sara Dosa and her co-writers, Shane Boris and editors Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput, decline to leave us in suspense about the Kraffts’ fate is a measure of how deeply they trust Katia and Maurice’s images—and their story—to hold our attention, where so many lesser documentaries rely on manufactured tension that can’t withstand a quick Google. (Another indicator, simple but far from a given, is leaving Maurice’s 16mm footage in its original squarish shape, which was particularly striking when I watched the movie where it currently resides, in the digital annals of Disney+.) But Fire of Love is also straightforward about the fact that it’s as much séance as expedition, that there are some things that simply can’t be retrieved from the past, and any connections we draw must, of necessity, be our own. Although the Kraffts eventually became celebrities of a kind, regaling interviewers and talk-show audiences with tales of their brushes with death and their “volcanic” (womp womp) relationship, there’s no solid account of how they first met, and only a few images of their early life together beyond a faded front-page photograph of them at same anti-war protest. As the narrator, July doesn’t speak to us as an authoritative voice of god, but in the throaty whisper of someone venturing a guess, asking you to believe in the way, or one way, things might have been.
The Kraffts’ footage makes Fire of Love an astonishing spectacle; the moment I finished watching it as part of virtual Sundance 2021, I promised to make sure to see it on the big screen as soon as I could. (It’s returning to theaters for a single screening on Feb. 14, and even as someone who believes the best Valentine’s Day gift you can give is suggesting to stay at home, I have to concede it makes for a great date night.) But the movie also pauses to reflect on what it means to consume those images, which makes its release under the banner of National Geographic practically subversive. For the Kraffts, July says, “photography is a means of remembering, revisiting, stretching their time with volcanoes.” But the pursuit of moments worth stretching also made it harder to live life without them; while resting up at home, Maurice rigs up miniature models of volcanoes, eager for the next trip out. Despite their onscreen geniality, the Kraffts drift farther from the mass of humanity, and it’s not until the last phase of their career that they turn their attentions back towards other people, working on an early-warning system for eruptions that could save untold lives.
Or at least, that’s the story we’re told here. You could conceivably take the same footage and tell a very different one. (In fact, Werner Herzog did just that: his The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft premiered a few months after Fire of Love.) In Pictures From Home, a new play which opens this week at Studio 54 in New York, the photographer Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein) spends eight years of weekends at his parents’ California home trying to capture what he sees as the truth about the emotional sterility of postwar American ideals. (The real Sultan’s photographic memoir was published in 1992.) Over the course of the play, Larry systematically tries to get his father, Irv (Nathan Lane), a former Schick salesman, to drop what he sees as the mask of contentment and reveal the deep emptiness beneath. Irv, quite fairly, points out that Larry’s photographs, which are often projected on the back of the play’s set, are no less staged or contrived than the immaculately posed headshots in which Irv looks like an icon of 1950s masculinity. At best, they tell a different truth, Larry’s instead of Irv’s, but not by any means the truth. It’s a story about how the impulse to capture the things you love, to wrest their images from the flow of time, can be both compassionate and monstrous, taking you out of the present moment so you’ll be able to look back on it in the future. Eventually, Larry does succeed in breaking down his father’s defenses, and achieves an instant of real vulnerability in which Irv, no longer sure he has all the answers, turns to his son and lets the mask of certainty drop. The moment can’t last, and Larry knows it won’t. So when his father reaches out to him for help, Larry stands firm, raises his camera—and clicks the shutter. There’s time to either experience it or capture it, but not both, and Larry knows what his choice has to be.
I spent much of Pictures From Home thinking about documentaries, as I have all week, and as I do all the time anyway. In the last decade, our individual image-capturing capacity has become practically infinite, an ever-swelling and roughly curated mass we carry around in our pockets without giving it much thought. But it’s worth pausing to contemplate the answer to a question Fire of Love poses: “When you could die at any moment, what do you leave behind?”
Well, we did it, Joe. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, All That Breathes, A House Made of Splinters, and Navalvy, plus Fire of Love, in the course of one week. I hope these writeups encourage you to watch some, maybe even all, of the Oscar-nominated documentaries. And even better, I hope they inspire you to watch some of the other non-nominated documentaries from last year: Descendant, Last Flight Home, and The Territory, which were all on the Academy’s shortlist and would have made equally deserving nominees, and many others—Riotsville USA, 32 Sounds, I Didn’t See You There, Tantura, Nothing Compares, Children of the Mist, Three Minutes: A Lengthening, Sirens, and Jackass Forever (yes!) among them. (I’ve been reminded of a few I never caught up with myself, although first I have half a season of You to get through.) Also, the Super Bowl is kind of a documentary, if you think about it. Happy nonfictioning.