asakiyume | Impressions of Into the Inferno

This was more an invitation to tag along with Werner Herzog and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer as they shoot the breeze and visit some volcanoes than it is a volcano film. There are volcanoes in the film, to be sure, but there's no underlying structure, questions to be investigated, or organizing principle, and it spends a lot of time on topics that have only very tangential--or no--relation to volcanoes at all. You can still enjoy the conversation, but.

Herzog obviously made a deliberate decision not to do certain things. Early on, in footage from the film he made that first brought him and Oppenheimer together, Oppenheimer asks him if he knows about the various types of volcanoes, and he responds by talking about a particular volcano and telling a story. So no. The film isn't going to explain about volcano types or give you schoolbook information. It's not, as Herzog said in an interview, a Nat Geo film. Nor is he going to talk about famous eruptions--no Pompeii, no Krakatoa, no Mount Tambora. That's fine; no need for the film to spent time retreading familiar stories.

Early on, Herzog says "Obviously there was a scientific side to our journey, but what we were really chasing was the magical side, no matter how strange things might get." I think what disappointed me was how little there was of this, and how random the bits we got were. I enjoyed the sections in which Herzog and Oppenheimer talked with Mael Moses, the head of a village near Ambryn (on Vanuatu), one of the very few persistent lava lakes in the world. He was a gracious host, insightful, humorous--everything good--and his way of talking about belief/faith relating to the volcano slipped very easily into my mind/heart. I would love a whole movie like that--focused on people living with volcanoes and how they do.

You could say the very long segment shot in North Korea was that, because it talks about how the North Korean regime has incorporated Korean reverence for Mount Paektu into the myth of the state, but really what that segment was doing was talking about ideology, leadership cults, and how you frame your narrative for both yourself and a wider public. Fascinating topics, but not really about living with a volcano.

And a section shot in Ethiopia was just a head scratcher. Ethiopia has Erta Ale, another persistent lava lake (the fact that Herzog visited both Ambryn and Erta Ale made me hope that he would also visit Nyiragongo, the lava lake in my icon, but alas no). However, after some shots of the lava lake, the focus was **entirely** on excavations of early hominids nearby. Again, interesting topic, but it might as well have been about widening the Panama canal or colony collapse disorder among honeybees as far as relevance to volcanoes.

One minor, entertaining note: Oppenheimer twice measures the power of a volcano's eruption/explosion in terms of the amount of pumice it put out, and that in terms of how deeply it would bury people for how far a geographic area. ("Enough pumice to bury everyone in the United States to head height" in the case of the eruption that produced Lake Toba in Indonesia and "enough to bury the whole of New York City--only the highest buildings would poke out at the top" in the case of the "millennium eruption" of Mt. Paektu in 946).

Verdict: very beautiful to look at, and engaging in its way, but not what I was hoping for.