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Fire of Love

This is a film I watched earlier in the week.

When I first started teaching, there were very few videos which had been made close to volcanoes. Plate Tectonics as a theory was only about twenty years old. The films we did have were mostly made by a couple of French volcanologists: Maurice and Katia Krafft.

They were the Jacques Cousteau of volcanoes. He explored the sea, they prowled the edges of lava flows, photographing, filming and sampling. They made frequent media appearances and made films and wrote books to fund their research. The style of filming and the red hats are similar to those of Cousteau (and the Wes Anderson homage as well)

They divided volcanoes into the red and the grey.

The grey volcanoes were the dangerous ones... think Mt. St. Helens, Pinatubo, Nevado del Ruiz and Unzen in Japan.

The film is made from media from their archive, with a few animation elements and other elements, with a narration by Miranda July. It's really beautiful and the shots of eruptions are mesmerising. I remember hearing the news of their death and seeing the shots of the pyroclastic flows on Unzen.

I highly recommend that you go and see this film at the cinema.



A film by Sara Dosa.

Katia and Maurice Krafft loved two things — each other and volcanoes. For two decades, the daring French volcanologist couple roamed the planet, chasing eruptions and documenting their discoveries. Ultimately, they left a legacy that forever enriched our knowledge of the natural world. 

Director Sara Dosa and the filmmaking team fashion a lyrical celebration of the intrepid scientists’ spirit of adventure, drawing from the Kraffts’ spectacular archive. FIRE OF LOVE tells a story of primordial creation and destruction, following two bold explorers as they venture into the unknown, all for the sake of love. 

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