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Interview: Sara Dosa on Fire of Love, Unrequited Love, and Indifferent Volcanoes

Dosa discusses her connection to Katia and Maurice Krafft as filmmakers and people and how the film has shaped her thinking of time.

Sara Dosa on Fire of Love, Unrequited Love, and Indifferent Volcanoes
Photo: National Geographic

Love is understanding’s other name,” said zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh in a quote featured in the narration of Fire of Love. Sara Dosa’s documentary is a requiem to the unconventional life of Katia and Maurice Krafft, two French volcanologists who achieved cult celebrity status in the 1970s and ’80s before their untimely 1991 deaths on Japan’s Mount Unzen. The love they shared for each other was matched, if not surpassed, only by their awe and admiration of the geological features that captured their imagination.

Fire of Love combines publicly available interview footage with the 16mm footage that the Kraffts shot during their fieldwork, with Miranda July’s narration providing another layer of intrigue to the proceedings in an inquisitive rather than prescriptive tenor. The love triangle that emerges between the Kraffts and the volcanoes they study together is a testament to the power of listening to the heartbeat of people and the planet alike. Yet Dosa’s documentary also highlights the unrequited nature of their romance, emphasizing the inherent unknowability of the natural world even when applying rigorous scientific methodology to study it.

I spoke with Dosa shortly before the theatrical release of Fire of Love. Our conversation covered her connection to the subjects as filmmakers and people, why she and her collaborators wrote an entire backstory for their nameless narrator, and how the film has guided her toward an exploration of time in future projects.

Your previous documentary feature, The Seer and the Unseen, described Icelandic “seers” like the protagonist Ragga as people who “could intervene between human and spirit worlds to restore the harmony and repair the wounds in nature that humans had wrought.” Do you view Maurice and Katia as seers?

Yes, different kinds of seers than Ragga, of course. But that’s actually something I’m just drawn to in the films I want to make and have made. I’m really excited by people whose lived experience can teach us how to see in different ways. I believe that Ragga, of course, did that in The Seer and the Unseen by how she communicated with the nature beings of Iceland and thus the landscapes and their earth processes. I really believe that the way Katia and Maurice saw volcanoes, and how they pressed their imagery and sight to posterity through their use of the camera, has forever changed the way that humans experience the natural world. They’re able to communicate so much love, depth, meaning, and joy—as well as the destruction and the power of creation—through their cameras. I think they’re profound seers, and it makes me really happy that you’re picking up on that continuity!

You discovered Maurice and Katia’s film archive while making The Seer and the Unseen. Did you connect to them as filmmakers early in the process?

Absolutely. There’s actually a long journey of how we came to decide to make Fire of Love. We first learned about them when we were making The Seer and the Unseen. But the more we saw their footage and learned about them as people, the more we became drawn in. Actually, Shane [Boris], one of my producers, Erin [Casper], one of my editors, our associate producer, Elijah [Stevens], and I were making a different film. It was supposed to be an observational film that was going to be shot in Siberia about these mysterious methane explosions that were happening in the Yamal Peninsula there. We were going to go on a scout in April 2020, but, of course, the world changed, everything closed down, and that project ended up falling through. But we remembered that there was this delightful French couple who had shot hundreds of hours of archival footage of volcanoes, and we thought this could be the new adventure we go on. So that’s actually how we decided to pivot from the Siberia film into making Fire of Love.

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There’s a line in the film stating the volcanology is the art of observation. Since you couldn’t go into the field, was this how you converted that energy?

Yeah, we thirsted to get into the field so desperately, especially during this moment of lockdown where we were so isolated and fearful amid these uncertain times. Getting to see Katia and Maurice’s footage, and also getting to understand their philosophies about how they reconciled fear, how they navigated through the unknown and through uncertainty, that was just such a refuge for us. They were such guides, not just in the story we were trying to tell, but also in our own lives as we were dealing with this tremendous tumult and challenge and darkness of the pandemic. But we had a lucky opportunity to go to Iceland in June of 2021. I had an artist’s residence where we got to see the Fagradalsfjall eruption happen, and that did get us up [on the volcano]. I mean, we definitely didn’t get as close as Katia and Maurice…probably for the best! But we did get to observe volcanoes ourselves in a way that scratched a little bit of that itch, that desire to observe them the way that they once did.

Do Maurice and Katia represent to you what the volcanoes did to them? They’re living, organic beings, but they also can’t communicate back in a traditional sense.

I have a lot of questions I wish I could ask them, and that’s one of them. The way they talk about volcanoes, they understood their profound sentience. There’s a clip that we almost put in the film where Maurice talks about having a way of communicating with volcanoes. He said that he would try to talk to a volcano, and he would try to hear what it says back to him. And, at the same time, he and Katia would always say that volcanoes are beyond human understanding. For us as filmmakers, that’s something we marveled at: the fact that they went deeply into the unknown all the while knowing that they could never fully understand.

But that journey toward the unknown brought them such love and meaning. And, for them, that’s how they decided to live their meaningful life…all the while knowing there’s a constant unrequitedness to that. But for us, yeah, there’s nothing more romantic than unrequitedness. We were excited to play with that resonance. Maurice often used the word “indifferent” to describe volcanoes, which I thought was fascinating. In my head, I can imagine him shaking his fist, being like, “Why don’t you love me back, volcano?!” [laughs] But, at the same time, he knows the answer is that [he] can never know, and that’s part of the beauty of their journey.

Did you feel that sentience at all working with the archive? I’ve talked with a few documentarians who have said it just feels like the narrative of a giant trove of footage reveals itself without having to impose your own will onto it.

Yeah, absolutely. The way that they shot volcanoes, you can really see just how alive and how beautiful they are. You can feel Katia and Maurice’s love behind the lens. In their writings, they emphatically talked about how in love they were with volcanoes. They wrote poetry, for example, as well as scientific writings. I remember when I was first watching the footage, I had this log sheet where I was writing descriptions, and I kept writing, “Use! Use! Use! That shot is amazing, it feels like a monster coming to life!” Then I’d watch the next clip, and it’d be the same thing. I was just like, “This is incredible, feels so monstrous, beastly, gorgeous, enchanting!” It was clear that they recognized the lifeforce in volcanoes and connected to that behind the cameras. That was something that they really hoped to communicate in their work, not just the scientific knowledge. The way that they lived their life and the way they shot their material also allowed others to enter into a relationship with volcanoes in their own way. Whether it’s just through curiosity or by perceiving, it’s the ontology of volcanoes, so to speak.

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How did you apply the lens of your background in anthropology to make Maurice and Katia feel like people and not just specimens?

We were lucky that they left behind such an incredible record—not just their imagery, but also their writings. They touched so many people’s lives, and we interviewed a number of people who knew and loved them. We wanted to infuse the film with as much of their personality as possible. They were very savvy storytellers, and they also knew that the characters of themselves could cause people to connect with them. And by connecting with their characters, they were a conduit for people to also understand volcanoes. They understood the way to tell stories and how them as characters could relay these greater messages about the world.

Did you find things in their personal archive that showed the people behind the characters that they didn’t show to the world?

Their 16mm footage didn’t come to us with sync sound. That was all silence, so we couldn’t actually hear them talking to each other. It was only the TV appearances where we could really hear them and observe them with each other. But it seems the way that we understood their public persona was always very true to who they were as people. And, at the same time, they knew that [they were] playing a character of themselves—not in an inauthentic way, but there was a savvy about it. They had their jokes, their kind of greatest hits. For example, Maurice loved the joke that Katia had seen 20 more eruptions than he had, and he would always say, “Katia is cheating on me with volcanoes.” He knew that that always brought a laugh, but also using that language that she has like a romantic relationship with volcanoes, that for us was the confirmation that telling this love triangle story was true to them in their way.

Sara Dosa on Fire of Love, Unrequited Love, and Indifferent Volcanoes
Amid the brown and barren stretches of Iceland’s highlands, Katia and Maurice Krafft look at a map. © Image’Est.

All this to say, yeah, they were they were playing themselves. They knew what worked, but it wasn’t false. It didn’t seem like they were pulling a fast one. From all accounts of the friends and loved ones that we spoke to, they were very genuine people, so in touch with what was meaningful to them and what was true. They knew that, at any point, their lives could end, and they had reconciled that at an early age. And so, because of that, there’s kind of a freedom of shedding falseness. At least, that’s how I’ve come to understand them through the testimonies of friends and loved ones. Because of that, I feel like they wouldn’t tolerate fools. They wouldn’t put on airs; they would go toward an authentic truth for them as much as possible.

I’d love to unpack the distancing effect of Miranda July’s narration. The words make us so aware of how the film is something that has already passed, even though it feels so immediate and present to us. How did you manage this temporal balance?

Robert Bresson once said, “If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear.” There was always a fine balance between providing just enough context or prompting questions in a way that we hoped wouldn’t distract from or get in the way of the visuals. First and foremost, we wanted to center Katia and Maurice. We wanted to hear them as much as possible, and so we really did use as much of that imagery of them together or them speaking as we could, but that was limited. The archive is finite, and there’s so many gaps in the archive.

That’s where we thought narration could fill in some of those gaps, as well as speak to the gaps. We had so many questions, and rather than guess the answers, we let the gaps come to the fore. We hoped that could mirror Katia and Maurice’s own scientific inquiry into the unknown. They had so many questions that they could never answer about volcanoes, so we hope that came through in the narration and the voice that we were crafting as well.

We wanted our narrator to feel like a subtle guide, but if there was too much personality or embellishment, it would distract. We didn’t want the viewer to think, “Who is this narrator? Are they a research assistant?” We just didn’t want the questions to cause you to turn away from Katia and Maurice. So that’s part of why we tried to create a tone we called “deadpan curiosity.” It was important to us that how we wrote the narration felt curious, not declarative.

My producer, Shane Boris, my two editors, Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput, and I wrote the narration. In order to have a cohesive perspective, we actually wrote this whole backstory for our narrator that was quite detailed! We never wanted the audience to know who that person was, but it really helped to anchor us. We’d say, “Would our narrator say this?” and then be like, “No, no, they would never say that.” It was a very useful tool for us in going through the writing process. But, of course, when Miranda came in, she just brought such richness, curiosity, and vulnerability. I could go on and on and on about her talents. She brought so much the performance that was so much more than we ever could have dreamed for it.

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There’s also some French New Wave influence to the film’s style as well, which feels sincerely felt rather than ironically put on. Was that a natural choice given that Katia and Maurice almost seemed to envision themselves as protagonists in a Truffaut film?

We could recognize some of the hallmarks of the New Wave in their work. There are all these fun snap zooms in their cinematography. In their nearly 20 books, many of them were first person. It reminded us of the narration in a François Truffaut’s film, so that was actually one of the initial inspirations for having narration. This feels in line with the cultural and aesthetic movement that forms the backdrop of their lives as they were coming of age. It just felt very true to them. Especially later [in their many years of filming], those hallmarks show up more and more in their footage. There’s performativity there. Again, not in a way that feels inauthentic, but we always wondered if they were inscribing themselves in their own myth because they could be gone at any moment. They really understood they were committing themselves to their own records. They’re authors of their own story. That’s something that seemed true based on everything we knew about them and saw and observed in their footage. But it’s one of those questions that I’ve always wished I could have asked them.

You’ve mentioned time, especially as it pertains to the hegemony of the prime meridian, as an area of fascination for your next project that came in part out of Fire of Love. Where and when did you start thinking about that in the making of the film?

I’ve always been fascinated by the human relationship with non-human nature. I feel like there’s such profound violence to the alienation of humans from nature. Getting to explore themes of time through Katia and Maurice’s story was endlessly inspiring for us. Getting to think about kind of the fleetingness of human lives amid the enormity of volcanoes and geologic time pulled into focus some of the violence and the absurdity of how, especially through processes of colonialism and capitalism, these notions of time become constructed and the continual violence that they inflict upon the planet and people.

It’s just material that I’m really curious to explore moving forward, but it’s something that we were reading a lot about as we were making the film. There are some really beautiful sets of writings. Rebecca Solnit is a writer whose work I absolutely love, and she writes so much about time. And we have that scene that we call “railway time” in the film that explores this idea of really trying to quantify the rhythms of the earth, but in a way that is actually divorced from it, and how contrary that is to the life cycles and the unpredictable nature of volcanoes. That, to me, was absolutely fascinating. That was kind of one of the initial sparks that made me think, in the next film, I want to dive more deeply into these dynamics.

Katia and Maurice saw some of the impact of their work, but they didn’t really see the enormity of its long tail. As the filmmaker introducing them to a new generation, did you feel like you were finishing their story or carrying on their legacy with Fire of Love?

That’s my greatest hope, quite honestly. I’m always so moved by the fact that they traveled around the world showing their imagery to people, trying to get people to understand volcanoes and the forces of our planet. The fact that we now get to do that, traveling the world through festivals and seeing the film released in theaters, it makes me so happy to think that people are seeing their imagery once again. In my very first conversation ever with Maurice’s brother, Bertrand Krafft, who’s luckily still with us and is a phenomenal scientist who studies spiders, he said to me on the phone, “Maurice and Katia must not be forgotten.” And that’s just always lived with me as one of my highest hopes for the film, that their memory can continue on and that they’ll be forces for inspiration and for people to really feel like the sentience, beauty, and power of our planet. I feel very humbled by their legacy and very grateful to have gotten to work with their imagery. It’s so gratifying to see people engage with it now.

Marshall Shaffer

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based film journalist. His interviews, reviews, and other commentary on film also appear regularly in Slashfilm, Decider, and Little White Lies.

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