#the fire within: a requiem for katia and maurice krafft

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (Werner Herzog, 2022)

[filmografie]

Favorite films of 2022:

Hive, dir. Blerta Basholli

Great Freedom, dir. Sebastian Meise

The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, dir. Werner Herzog

T��R, dir. Todd Fields

What Do We See When We Look At The Sky?, dir. Alexandre Koberidze

The Eternal Daughter, dir. Joanna Hogg

One Fine Morning, dir. Mia Hansen-Løve

Nothing Compares, dir. Kathryn Ferguson

Aftersun, dir. Charlotte Wells

Decision to Leave, dir. Park Chan-wook

[brody75]

The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft 

[celestialmega]

The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft by Werner Herzog.

[frnndlcs]

The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, Werner Herzog, 2022

[enterfilm]

THE FIRE WITHIN: A REQUIEM FOR KATIA AND MAURICE KRAFFT (Werner Herzog, 2022)

[ennaih]

Every Film I Watch In 2023:

23. The Fire Within: Requiem For Katia And Maurice Krafft (2022)

[haverwood]

The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft Werner Herzog UK/Switzerland/USA/France, 2022 ★★★ The guy was 45 and his ears were already full of hairs.

At 43, this worries me.

[yngsuk]

Werner Herzog (German, b. 1942), The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, 2022.

[trestisse]

Werner Herzog on a volcano during the making of his film: The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, 2022.

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (Werner Herzog, 2022)

[eugenny]

Favorite films watched in 2022

Licorice Pizza (2021)

Light of my life (2019)

Red Rocket (2021)

The man from earth (2007)

Memoria (2021)

Wheel of fortune and fantasy (2021)

What do we see when we look at the sky? (2021)

The triplets of Belleville (2003)

Benny and June (1993)

George Carlin’s American dream (2022)

Tokyo Sonata (2008)

Pig (2021)

Giuseppe makes a movie (2014)

All the light in the sky (2012)

5B (2018)

The last movie stars (2022)

The hand of god (2021)

Cha cha real smooth (2022)

Victim (1961)

The vast of night (2019)

Humans (2021)

Adrienne (2021)

Murder on Middle Beach (2020)

Messiah of evil (1973)

Triangle of sadness (2022)

You can count on me (2000)

Sick of myself (2022)

The fire within: requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022)

Society (1989)

Once (2007)

Aftersun (2022)

Love at sea (1964)

Stutz (2022)

Outside in (2017)

The Party (2017)

[kforourke]

Ideas of Others

Color me both frustrated and unsurprised: a few days ago, The New Yorker published a long interview with one of my very favorite people on earth, Werner Herzog. This being the New Yorker, and this being Herzog, the article was of course required reading, and I may or may not have yelped with pleasure when I first saw the link. But then I started to read it, and this humdinger of a sentence was...the second sentence in the piece:

During quarantine, he finished two films: a documentary called “The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft,” about a pair of French volcanologists; and another, “Theater of Thought,” about neurotechnology and artificial intelligence. Both are forthcoming.

Why, you might ask, would this frustrate me? Well, and I’ve written about this before, my getting-there-but-still-not-done book about surviving suicide includes a chapter about none other than...Katia and Maurice Krafft. So it’s frustrating to hear that Werner Herzog of all people—the guy who made Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man and Happy People, among so many others!—and a dude whose work I **quote in said as-yet-unpublished-but-finished chapter** is making a film about the Kraffts. Sigh! I knew I should have finished this thing earlier.*

Then again, running into others with similar ideas should hardly be new for any artist—the sometimes (frequently?) false lure of originality is as much a part of artistic production as is rejection.**

So why should finding out that one’s ideas might not be as original as one thought sting, sorta? Aside, of course, from our innate desire to be special?

The eighteenth century British poet and writer Edward Young, in his (admittedly wordy, but it was written in the 1750s, so c’mon) “Conjectures on Original Composition,” might have an answer why:

Originals are, and ought to be, great favorites, for they are great benefactors; they extend the republic of letters, and add a new province to its dominion: imitators only give us a sort duplicate of what we had, possibly much better, before; increasing the mere drug of books, while all that makes them valuable, knowledge and genius, are at a stand. The pen of an original writer, like Armida’s wand, out of a barren waste calls a blooming spring: out of that blooming spring an imitator is a transplanter of laurels, which sometimes die on removal, always languish in foreign soil.

To which I can only respond with a nod, a shrug, and an image of perhaps the most famous tortured-artist print, Durer’s Melencolia I.

...

*Not that my not publishing my work before Herzog’s film comes out really matters, because my work is hardly in competition with Herzog’s (ha!). But the point re: frustration re: “I did it first, ugh, man!” stands.

**And really, how much art is produced alone? Sure, in the silence of one’s mind, it happens alone there, but it takes a village to publish any book, or exhibit and publicize and sell any work of art, et cetera. “No man is an island entire of itself; every man / is a piece of a continent, a part of the main.”

...

Thanks to Wikimedia for the amazing picture of Herzog et al. (come for Herzog, stay for Donald Sutherland and Brad Dourif‘s hair) posing during the press tour for the poorly received 1991 film Scream of Stone, which is “about a climbing expedition on Cerro Torre.”

Here’s the trailer. It’s dramatic!

Melencolia I image via the Met.

[celestialmega]

The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft by Werner Herzog.

[frnndlcs]

The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, Werner Herzog, 2022

[enterfilm]

THE FIRE WITHIN: A REQUIEM FOR KATIA AND MAURICE KRAFFT (Werner Herzog, 2022)