It's all the kind of thing Wonka would get out those golden tickets for, to tour the chaotic fringe with a certain operatic whimsy. The sheer danger of it is matched only by the innocence, it is almost childlike to tour the great dangers. From Cave of Forgotten Dreams, to Lo and Behold, Herzog is building toward a total abandonment of the natural world, into the mental universe, leading to total inner and outer distortions. He is not interested in regular people. I take this from his Chatwin documentary as well, the lost art of the explorer of the mental, those catalogue nuggets of culture and history... now everything is available a click away, everything is outsourced by the crowd.
A filmmaker can find the few remaining ones left. In fact, resources are so scarce of these explorers, another director beat Herzog to the punch with the sister documentary Fire of Love. BUT--another documentary beat both of them to the punch too. The Kroffts themselves. Like another great director, Terrence Malick, Herzog is not in a rush always to give you one thing after another. He is that Opera director putting down movements leading to crescendos at just the right moment, he can paint an entire film, then blam, hit you with that one mark that changes you. Other directions will attempt to cram as many peaks as possible into a work.
Herzog will turn the catastrophes of nature into acts of creation. The image of the kids playing with the volcano ash like sand on the beach, is calling to mind Herzog's own biography of being a child and playing in the wreckage of WW2 torn buildings, still in the total safety of childhood adventure. This is how a few scattered images can achieve the profundity, in the cinema that is a cross between the literary and the photograph. He is famous for considering himself an anti-intellectual artist, but most of Herzog's great moments seem both, as his breakdown in the final passage about the cloud that destroyed them. There is an academic professor beneath Herzog's circus exterior.
The sheer repertoire of images he finds here feel like a Jodoworsky apocalyptic acid western, Kurosawa-like depiction of groups in motion, or 1950s flying saucer films. Herzog has his formula but he just gets so bold and effortless with his experience that he can do it in his sleep. Opera. He withholds the footage we're here for until the very end, all that lava, as the visual Operatic peak. Directors will nine times out of ten just show you the lava and fire the whole way. Those final scenes, there is the master again leaving you in tears. It is why we go to these, the downright surreal parallels, juxtapositions, beauty and unease. It is at the end of the day not just a parallel to his subjects, but here it is a freshly meta take about Herzog's love of cinema, filmmaking, and the image. This is the beauty of Herzog is he always seems like the audience alongside us.
