Gate to the other side

Author speaks about filmmaker Werner Herzog's friendship with volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer

A well-regarded independent filmmaker, Werner Herzog made a name for himself in the non-fiction space with the 2007 documentary “Encounters at the End of the World”. With vast, serene vistas of Antarctica, that film earned critical acclaim as much for its breathtaking camera work as for Herzog’s German-accented narration. It also won him an Oscar nomination.

During its filming, Herzog met Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at Cambridge University who was studying volcanoes beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet at the time. A friendship ensued, resulting ultimately in the new Netflix documentary, “Into the Inferno”, the hellish visions engendered by the title an apt description for magma-spewing volcanic epicentres.

The film owes its origin to more than Herzog and Oppenheimer’s friendship. For his 1977 documentary, “La Soufrière”, Herzog visited the French island of Guadeloupe, where an impending volcanic eruption had failed to convince a peasant to evacuate the town. Snippets of Herzog’s conversation with him are included in “Inferno” too. 

Herzog and Oppenheimer visit nearly every major active and latent volcano around the world and cast an anthropological eye on the communities that live in the shadow of abrupt annihilation. What emerges is a fascinating account of survival and religiosity, with a generous dash of myth-making.

The journey begins in Vanuatu, an island in the Pacific, where Herzog interviews a local tribal leader who evocatively describes a lifetime spent in the vicinity of an active volcano. “When I first peered into the crater,” he says, “I wondered why the sea had come inland. There was water everywhere, but it was red.” As he speaks the camera juxtaposes waves lashing the island’s rocky shore against red-hot lava angrily gushing forth from the crater only to settle into a passive drag.

Locals believe that the volcano harbours the spirits of the dead who protect the village from harm. In Indonesia, Herzog comes across a tribe that believes that the volcano is the home of an American GI they call John Frum who will appear one day bearing gifts as varied as candy and cars. In this telling, the volcano becomes the receptacle of not just the locals’ worries but also their desires. 

The film also travels to Iceland, whose Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in 2010 and spewed such massive quantities of gas into the atmosphere that air travel was disrupted over western Europe for close to a week. Standing on a plain uniformly covered in grass and stretching to the horizon, Oppenheimer introduces us to the Laki eruption of 1783. 

“Everything we see now has been set in stone,” he says. “But if we’d been here at the time, we would’ve seen jets of fire, fountains of fire, rising a kilometre-and-a-half into the air and then cascading down to the ground again.” For a film about volcanoes, the vision is not entirely unexpected but imagined in the backdrop of a peaceful vastness, it jolts the viewer.

In Ethiopia, Oppenheimer works with other scientists in the vicinity of Mount Nebro, as they scour the fine sand for relics of the Paleolithic era. The 3.2 million-year-old skeleton of the hominid “Lucy” was discovered in the nearby Awash Valley in 1974, so the palpable excitement of the group, led by palaeoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, is understandable. 

The most interesting journey, though, that Herzog and Oppenheimer make is to North Korea whose Mount Paektu is enshrined in the nation’s history as a place that safeguards the population from invaders. In this narrative, Kim II-sung, the grandfather of the current leader, drew power from the volcano in defeating the Japanese imperialists and founding the modern North Korean state.

Herzog uses this conceit to play along with the military historians who take him on a tour of the volcano, peppering their speech with frequent nods to the first family. Mount Paektu becomes not just a geological curiosity but a living, breathing monument to the ability of powerful men to wield elaborate spiels that hide the rottenness of the system they preside over.

In “La Soufrière”, when Herzog locates the farmer, he is found sleeping under a tree with a cat by his side. He is indifferent to Herzog’s questioning, bothered more by the intrusive camera than the raging fire ready to consume him at any moment. Ultimately, he just walks away; tantalisingly, Herzog omits to mention if he found out what became of him.

“Everything will melt, the stones, the trees, everything, like water,” the tribal leader at Vanuatu says, describing a recurrent dream. In Indonesia, Herzog speaks to a man who claims to have had a conversation with John Frum. “When the end comes,” he says, “John Frum will open the gate to the other side.” The other side, one can wager, will be a place of peace and prosperity, a place where death is finally done with.

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