La Soufrière

Minor phreatic eruptions of the volcano La Soufriere in 1976 resulted in Basse-Terre,the island's capital city being evacuated as a precaution.Whilst Guadeloupe was almost entirely deserted by its citizens the German filmmaker Werner Herzog traveled to the abandoned town of Basse-Terre to find a peasant who had refused to leave his home on the slopes of the volcano.His journey is recorded "La Soufrière"-eerie and poignant documentary about death and abandonment.The crew of three creatively insane filmmakers treks up to the caldera,where clouds of sulfurous steam and ash emit from within.Pure harbingers of death.Herzog converses with three poor men,who stayed in Basse-Terre:one says he is waiting for death and demonstrates his posture for doing so;another says he has stayed to look after the animals.They are all not afraid of dying.Fortunately paroxysmal eruption never happened,but we have to remember that there is no escape from death and loneliness.8 out of 10.

I love Herzog. I love travel movies, and I love documentaries. Anybody who is into "abandoned porn" would love this. The abandoned city seemed like a dream for a zombie film maker back in the day. Now computers could probably do it, but to see a whole city deserted like that, especially with the volcanic smoke in the background, truly was apocalyptic.

The conversations with the people left behind were a little hard to follow, but still interesting. If a guy has nowhere to go, why should he leave? It's his home and, in the end, the volcano didn't interrupt after all. Vindication if there ever was.

Check it out. It's only 30 minutes anyway.

Wonderful Herzog documentary, not least because it makes fun of his own certainties. The year is 1976, and the island of Guadaloupe is under a rumbling volcano. Herzog hears about how the town completely evacuated except for one man, and, being Herzog, flies out, with two cameramen, to meet him. Herzog has always had a rather tiring obsession with marginals of society, the dumb, the deaf, the wild, the insane, etc., anyone who refuses to live by society's conventions, but adamantly follows his own way, even if it is to destruction. This is tiring because this 'rebellion' is rarely chosen, or even conscious, and one gets the nagging feeling that Herzog is patronising his subjects, interpreting their pain for them, because they don't know any better.

So one's fears about the film are immediately raised as Herzog and friends helicopter into the island. But what he finds there is more like an episode of THE AVENGERS. There is something very frightening and eerie about an empty, abandoned town, prompting all kinds of disturbing fears. The traffic lights still flash, TVs are still on, donkeys roam the streets, on which lie dying, starving dogs. Snakes, fleeing from the imminent eruption, float drowned in the sea. There is not a boat or vehicle in sight in this coastal town. This is magnificent filmmaking, also reminiscent of Resnais' tracks in NUIT ET BROUILLARD through abandoned concentration camps.

Herzog then does typically loopy things, trying to get as far up the volcano as he can, only to be hilariously pushed back by toxic clouds. The man's hubris, usually so grating, is amusingly punctured here. To build up our fears, he relates the tale of nearby Martinique, whose volcano gave out the exact same warnings, and whose principle city was completely reduced to cinders, 20000 dying. Only one man survived, an incorrigible prisoner, locked in isolation. His burns made him a favorite on the freak-show circuit, and Herzog, somewhat suspectly, shows us photographs of him with his injuries, inviting us to join in the gawping.

I won't spoil what happens next, but Herzog's grand narrative of the epic, rebellion, the extremes of experience are give short shrift from Nature and Reality. But there's no denying the power of interviews with men just lying there waiting for 'God's will'. A great film, one of Herzog's best.

What makes a movie worthwhile? Do you get whatever value is there while you watch it, or afterward. Is it always complex? Is it always a mix?

I think not. I am coming to the opinion that in addition to all the other variety in films we find, films are weighted differently in their strategies for what rewards the viewer.

An example of this are the films that are otherwise lackluster, but have a particularly intriguing ending. All they have to do is keep you from rebelling through the film, which is all about setting up that end. You wander out of the theater dazzled, and that is the experience you recall.

Other films are all weighted on the entry. The filmmaker takes us to strange and wonderful places. Its actually not difficult to create those places. What's difficult is getting us there in the first few moments of a film. The thrill is all in the beginning of these, and much of the charm of being a tourist in these strange environs is the fact that you are there at all.

I think there is a small catalog of these strategies, just as you can say that there are only a few of what we call genres, which in fact are a collection of conventions agreed upon between the makers and viewers. And which are used as shorthandles in the cinematic grammar.

One of these — the film reward types — are films that aren't compelling as films themselves, but the idea of the film is. Perhaps there are several types within this. I suspect so, one of them having to do with the nature and intent of the filmmaker. I have a small study of one sort of these, where the filmmaker (usually a man) features the woman he loves in the film. Knowing that changes everything.

Herzog may have invented his own type, or at least be the modern exemplar. I've spent some time recently with films about the antarctic, because of my fascination with Frank Hurley. He was a photographer/filmmaker who about 100 years ago accompanied Shackleton on an expedition to the south pole. Even if the journey had been successful, it would have been hard, incredibly hard. But it turned disastrous. The story is one of the most amazing in history, but during this whole time, Hurley kept his cameras active.

Seeing these are transformative because you know the man put himself in harms way, encountered danger and hardship and STILL took those photos (the movie camera being too heavy to keep). Its the IDEA of the photograph, not the things themselves.

Here we have Herzog. He hears that a volcano is to blow. An entire island has been evacuated, streetlights still operating, TeeVees still on. The mountain is seething. Scientists know an eruption exceeding a nuclear bomb is certain. They have the example of a neighboring island where just the same preface presaged disaster. What does Herzog do? Why rush there of course with two cameramen.

He breaks rules, he cheats, he sneaks past barriers to actually climb the mountain where if the wind is blowing right the acidic clouds won't dissolve his lungs. And he waits for the thing to blow. As it turns out it didn't. The mountain settled and the people resettled. But the very idea. It isn't the sort of journalism that war correspondents practice, where we really need to know and danger is involved. Its different.

Herzog went there because the story was in his going.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Soufrière, La (1977)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

German documentary has Herzog taking his film crew to the island of Guadeloupe when he hears that a volcano is about to erupt and people there aren't wanting to leave even though it might cost them their lives. To be more point on, the entire town has evacuated except for three people who all believe that the volcano is God's will and that when it's their time to go they shouldn't fight it. This is yet another great documentary from the master director. Running just under 30-minutes the film gives us all sorts of great shots of the volcano firing up but in the end, for reason's scientist don't understand, the thing never went off. Herzog narrated the action and at one point he describes the empty and silent city as something you'd see out of a science fiction movie. That's a good way to describe the film because it really does look like something you'd see in a science movie just because of the beauty of the island that is now empty due to a looming threat. We also get a back story of the same volcano erupting in 1903 where 30,000 people were killed. There was only one survivor and how he managed to live is something I won't spoil.