Fire of Love

In a cold world, all the watches started to freeze.

The sun came and went between blizzards and gusts which erased all bearings.

In this world lived a fire

and in this fire, two lovers found a home.

All right. The volcano is ready, waiting for us.

Yes.

Okay.

Katia?

This is Katia, and this is Maurice.

It's 1991, June 2nd.

Tomorrow will be their last day.

They will leave behind samples.

Words.

Hundreds of hours of footage.

Thousands of photos.

And a million questions.

The Muana Loa.

They meet 19 years ago.

In 1966.

There is no definitive account of this first encounter

and the visual record of their budding romance is sparse.

There is this photo...

and these rose-tinted moments a few years later.

Parts of Katia and Maurice's story remain lost to time.

As in love, there are mysteries.

You fall hard for what you know.

Harder for what you don't.

In one story, Katia and Maurice meet by chance on a bench

at the University of Strasbourg.

In a second,

they meet at a new film by renowned volcanologist Haroun Tazieff.

The most detailed account is a blind date at a café.

They bond over their first loves, Mount Etna and Mount Stromboli.

Katia, a rebel who was sent to a school for unruly girls,

convinces her parents to take her to Italy's volcanoes.

Maurice would return to Stromboli

at age 19,

feeling at once ecstasy and loneliness.

Katia understands this loneliness.

It is also hers.

Growing up in the rubble of postwar Alsace,

the world felt to them unsafe, uncertain.

They take refuge in the mysteries of the natural world.

Dreaming, just 20 kilometers apart.

The Vosges and Rhine fault lines shifting imperceptibly beneath them.

At the end of this version, the café closes and it begins to rain.

They will never leave each other.

November 19th, 1967,

a U.S. fighter plane drops two snake-eye bombs

along the South Vietnam border...

the territory once colonized as French Indochina.

One week later,

Katia and Maurice join anti-war protests in Paris.

The next day, they show up on the front page of L'Humanité.

But human pursuits of power begin to feel vain and absurd

next to the power of the Earth.

It's also the plate tectonic revolution,

and the field of volcanology is finding its form.

They devour each hypothesis, each myth.

Everything that has been gleaned so far from the archives of the Earth.

The truths...

the fragments...

the questions.

They wonder what forms and re-forms the world.

To these mysteries they long to get closer.

With just enough grant money and a donated car,

Katia and Maurice go seek Iceland's volcanoes

with their friend, Roland.

Katia is the geochemist,

Maurice the geologist.

Alone, they could only dream of volcanoes.

Together, they can reach them.

Except the car breaks down 27 times.

Then crashes.

And Maurice gets into hot water.

Here is an actor reading Katia's account.

Undeterred, they spend the next few summers

studying their mutual friends, Etna and Stromboli.

They also bring along more human friends.

L'Équipe Vulcain, they call themselves.

Katia and Maurice are after

the strange alchemy of elements,

the combination of mineral, heat,

gas and time that incites an eruption.

What is it, they ask, that makes the Earth's heart beat?

Its blood flow?

They study, examine and question.

Katia and Maurice begin to learn the secrets of the planet

that few others know.

Understanding is love's other name.

1970,

Katia and Maurice marry in a small ceremony in Alsace.

They honeymoon on the volcanic island of Santorini,

believed to be the secret location of Atlantis.

Katia and Maurice decide they will not have children.

“From here on out, life will only be volcanoes,

"volcanoes, volcanoes,” Maurice says.

The young field of volcanology

has found two young stars.

The camera loves them.

And they love their own cameras back.

Photography is a means of remembering, revisiting,

stretching their time with volcanoes.

This photo shows the parabolic trajectories

of volcanic bombs ejected from Stromboli.

This one shows how lava is stretched into glass wool

called Pele's hair.

And this shot helps visualize plate tectonic theory.

Volcanology is a science of observation.

The closer they get, the more they see.

The very instant a volcano wakes up,

these weirdoes are notified

by a growing network of local friends and guides who help them

reach the craters as fast as humanly possible.

Maurice and Katia make their expedition to Nyiragongo,

a volcano that sits between two diverging plates.

They are guided by fellow volcanologist Jacques Durieux.

You arrive at the mouth of the volcano,

then you have to go

in the mouth of the volcano. So you are going down.

Not so high, 300 meters. But very bad rock.

All kinds of fumaroles went through, and so it's not strong.

Here, Maurice and Katia make their home

for the next two weeks.

Katia would later write...

Suddenly, the lava plunges down

ten meters in seconds.

Katia and Maurice will eventually emerge

from this crater unscathed and emboldened.

In the immense universe

that is the classification of volcanoes,

the Kraffts will eventually adopt two general classes.

Red...

and gray.

Red volcanoes, like Nyiragongo,

form as tectonic plates pull apart,

and at hotspots on the ocean floor.

Magma rises and fills in the gaps opened up by the movement of the Earth,

creating new land.

Red volcanoes are basaltic.

Effusive.

And up to 1200 degrees Celsius hot.

Katia and Maurice have their differences.

Katia is like a bird.

Maurice, an elephant seal.

Katia is drawn to details, the interconnectedness of things.

Maurice, the singular, the grandiose.

They both observe the world, but in their own distinct ways.

Katia, with her still camera, captures one moment with one frame.

Maurice chases motion...

recording a stream of seconds, 24 frames each.

He thirsts to get every possible shot, because the spectacle could vanish.

But this causes him to wander...

and wander...

and wander.

Katia's greatest fear is that she will lose sight of him...

and never see him again.

A surprise telegram summons Katia...

and Maurice to Nyiragongo,

their beloved volcano that they met four years ago.

Katia and Maurice knew

this kind of destruction was possible.

But this is the first time they experience it firsthand.

The lava flows were going very... very fast.

They were probably running at 60 to 70 kilometers per hour.

And this was in the morning where a lot of people were on the road

going for the market.

We think that around 100 people were overwhelmed by the lava flow.

Very unusual eruption.

No amount of scientific research

could have prepared them for this shock.

The language of myth instead feels apt.

They're in the cauldron of the devil,

the portal to hell.

Or caught amid the warring spirits of the volcano,

according to the stories from their friends in Goma.

For Katia and Maurice,

the unknown is not something to be feared.

It is something to go toward.

At only 52 years old

an infant Indonesian volcano begins to throw a fit.

Katia and Maurice go chase it.

In 1883, its parent, a volcano named Krakatau, exploded.

It conjured a tsunami so forceful that it swept

neighboring coastlines, killing 36,417 people.

It also ripped up this coral from the seafloor

and parked a colonial Dutch steamship two miles inland.

Ash traveled the globe, intensifying sunsets that transfixed

the gaze of scientists and artists, especially one Norwegian painter

who described the sunsets as a scream.

Then the volcano collapsed into the sea...

only to spring up again as a newcomer called Anak Krakatau.

Katia and Maurice must be totally in sync.

Any mistake that one makes can be costly for the both of them.

But Maurice cannot do this work without Katia.

Neither can Katia, without Maurice.

And together, they're there for the volcano,

who is indifferent in the face of their adulation.

Katia and Maurice know

that these rocks will long outlive them.