Volcanic eruption films aren’t plentiful enough to make their own genre. Most of them fall into the disaster genre or the straight documentary video. Werner Herzog’s 1977 film La Soufrière, about the anticipated eruption in 1976 of an active volcano on the island of Guadeloupe, is different. Like his quasi-science-fictional films — Fata Morgana, Lessons of Darkness, Wild Blue Yonder — the film has a tone of tender and lyrical, apocalyptic beauty, a resignation in the face of what appears to be humanity’s passing. Like Aguirre, Heart of Glass, Grizzly Man, and several of his other films, it is also about the human encounter with an indifferent but powerful (capital-n) Nature.
The same elements that later appear in Lessons of Darkness (about the burning oil fields of Iraq), and in different permutations in several of his other films — moving vehicle and helicopter shots of a landscape emptied of humans, classical music including the Prelude to Act I of Wagner’s Parsifal, and the feeling of a waiting, as if something momentous is about to occur, or has already occurred, or both — is already present here, though without the cinematographic intensity of Lessons of Darkness. At times the film is like an archaeological dig through an abandoned city, or a devastated one (the town of Saint-Pierre in Martinique). At others it is about sheer contact — between the camera and the world — and about its embarrassed failure, the “inevitable catastrophe that did not take place.” This is the failure that, Herzog seems to be suggesting, haunts the cinema verité desire to be there when It, whatever It may be, happens.
Like most of Herzog’s films, La Soufrière blurs several sets of lines: between documentary and fiction (a line that Herzog prides himself on dissolving, though here he hews closer to the first pole than he usually does), between observation and performative enactment (meaning that his own persona is ever-present, which in this case includes taking his crew up to the caldera to poke their camera inside the steaming volcano, as if to dare nature to scald them with some smoke and ash), and between the hilarious and the deadly serious. The film highlights the barbed existential irony that when, in 1902, the inhabitants of neighboring Martinique were preparing to leave before an anticipated volcanic eruption, their governor persuaded them to stay; 30,000 died. Now, seventy-five years later, the inhabitants left (except for the few that Herzog’s crew finds and interviews, and of course, Herzog himself, attracted to the volcano like a moth to the flame). And the volcano… balked.
All of Herzog’s films, one might say, are about the Event, an Event we witness only through its “before” and its “after,” its ominous, rumbling premonitions and its decisive, if perplexing, aftermath. Unlike Badiou’s Event (or Christianity’s), however, it is not a historical one, not a lightning streak that marks history with the shadow of its exposure — May ’68, or the Revolution (Russian, French, or American), or for that matter Jesus’s Passion and Resurrection. The Event is one before which humanity pales into insignificance, even if our creative capacity to reach out to that Event is worth celebrating (which is something that practically every Herzog film does). The Event is really something closer to a non-Event, an Event sous rature, an Event, and Herzog, sublime ironist that he is, takes this Derridean absence to be part of the evental structure.
What better name for an event than Eyjafjallajökull? As one tourist site puts it, under the emphatic title “No reason for travelers to worry”:
“There are no reasons for travelers to worry about their trip to Iceland. This is a small volcano. Yet immensely beautiful and uniquely situated in stunning surroundings. The lava waterfalls tumbling down hundres of meters are a lifetime memory for all that can behold it! [. . .] It is difficult to predict how long the volcanic eruption will last. It could end tomorrow but it could also last for days, weeks or even months. All the more reason to COME NOW and see nature at its finest!”
Come. See. Nature at its finest.
(For more links to Herzog’s films and articles about him, see Catherine Grant’s Film Studies for Free page on him.)
I love your analysis of Herzog’s film in relation to the non-Event! Your analysis made me think more about the cinematic implications of when the Event actually does occur…
Films in which the Volcano actually does erupt often create a tension between just escaping (Dante’s Peak) and being permanently frozen in time (documentaries chronicling Pompeii). In the case of escape, Dante’s Peak follows the trajectory of a fairly standard disaster film. However, Pompeii documentaries (in which people become permanently petrified) seem to play up fantasies of cinema verite’s capacity to capture a moment.
Such a static endpoint (petrification) to a natural disaster film is also interesting to compare to disaster films which focus on the ability to nature to rejuvenate. Perhaps, the difference lies in volcano film’s focus on a destruction of civilization AT THE HANDS OF nature.
This process of petrification also preserves the civilization. In contrast, many disaster films centralize around the complete loss of humanity’s history. For instance, in Godard’s version of King Lear, humanity is decimated after Chernobyl (in the film) wipes out a large portion of humanity.
Volcano films can portray the desire for a preservation of society post-disaster.
The film Dante’s Peak poorly portrayed the real volcanic eruption that happened.
Chernobyl (the film) was a better representation of how a civilizations compensates with a battle against nature.
Adrian: All of Herzog’s films, one might say, are about the Event, an Event we witness only through its “before” and its “after,” its ominous, rumbling premonitions and its decisive, if perplexing, aftermath. Unlike Badiou’s Event (or Christianity’s), however, it is not a historical one, not a lightning streak that marks history with the shadow of its exposure — May ’68, or the Revolution (Russian, French, or American), or for that matter Jesus’s Passion and Resurrection. The Event is one before which humanity pales into insignificance, even if our creative capacity to reach out to that Event is worth celebrating (which is something that practically every Herzog film does). The Event is really something closer to a non-Event, an Event sous rature, an Event, and Herzog, sublime ironist that he is, takes this Derridean absence to be part of the evental structure.
Kvond: I really like this analysis in terms of non-Christian eventology, but I’m unsure why one would lapse into Derridean negation (the crossing through built into the “structure” of an event). Is this because of something Herzog has theoreticallly said?
What happens when the event is spread thin across a surface…? Is it that we should even call it an “event”? What is the event (with its structure of before and aftermath) in Nosferatu? Is the “event” of Grizzly man his death? Or even that moment he let the film run?
Perhaps trauma is a better notion, the way that Herzog describes Nature as an endless chain of murder. It doesn’t feel as if the event has been crossed out, or supressed, rather it is elongated, like a single note played to piercing degree.
I like Meg’s idea of petrification as the end-point, or perhaps the signature, of an Event of this (nonhuman, cataclysmic) nature. This is a kind of geological time-image, not so much in Deleuze’s sense where time is always movement but in a more Peircian semiotic sense where time is legible across the surface that spreads out before us, rather like a nuclear explosion leaves its radioactive shadow splayed across everything. Time becomes frozen, and we move across the frozen moment futilely attempting to make some sense of its charred remains.
I would say that the Event in Nosferatu is the plague, the virus that comes and penetrates things, invisibly but thoroughly. (At least that’s how I remember the film.) In Grizzly Man, yes, it is probably Treadwell’s death. The moment he (Treadwell) lets the film run reminds me of the moment in American Beauty when we watch the video of the plastic bag dancing in air – a kind of lively moment that crept in surreptitiously into our recording (freezing) devices, haunting them with signs of unencompassable life. (I’m assuming you mean the earlier moment when Treadwell’s camera keeps running and Herzog comments on the beauty of what gets captured.) Herzog’s not letting us hear the sound of the Event of his death is different, I think – it’s a kind of maintaining distance between Herzog and us; I’m not quite sure what to make of it.
I understand Derridean negation not as mere negation, but always as also an opening to what can’t be encompassed in language, to the “ringing at the origin of words,” of which all that’s left is cinders. Yes, it may be “elongated, like a single note played to piercing degree,” but I would say it’s also vacated – like an empty chair, a vacated apartment block, a frozen city (Pompeii), a meaningless (because illegible) cipher. There are signs all around, but we can’t ever know what those signs were intended to mean. Intention is lost, scattered in the wind, leaving behind only the figures, the layers, the (empty) signs, the shadowed contours, the appearances.
“Trauma” works in this context; as does a Lacanian gap.
It definitely seems so. Great stuff by the way!