As he releases two documentaries in one week, Werner Herzog, aged 74, remains as fascinated as ever by both creation and destruction. In Lo And Behold, Reveries Of The Connected World he takes flight across the digital cosmos of the internet; in Into The Inferno, he explores his enduring obsession with volcanoes.
His basalt bug began in 1977, when Herzog journeyed to La Soufrière in Guadeloupe. Volcanologists said it would blow imminently (it didn’t) and Herzog came back with a film about it. Later, in Encounters At The End Of The World (2007), he stood on Antarctica’s Erebus as it vomited blocks of boiling rock above him. There he met volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer, whose writings inspired Into The Inferno.
For this film the pair visited six volcanoes around the world, filming not just the formations themselves but also the societies around them and their complex volcano-inspired belief systems. We see how former cannibal tribes in Indonesia respond with offerings and songs. We hear the Norse legends of Iceland’s volcanic origins, inscribed in the 13th-century Codex Regius. And weirdest of all, we see how the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has co-opted the ancient legends of Korea’s seismic origins: its most famous volcano is now “the sacred mountain of the revolution”, omnipresent in the state’s propaganda and art.
There’s lots of lava. Herzog shoves his cameras down the earth’s throat amid lashing serpent-tongues of magma. These brightly glowing but deadly rivers are a sinister sister-liquid to the ebony lakes of spilled Kuwaiti oil in Herzog’s post-apocalyptic tone poem Lessons Of Darkness (1992). Herzog is entranced by cataclysm, engulfment by lava and ash, by endings. But, for him, volcanoes also signify beginnings: our terrestrial origins, the first ash in “ashes to ashes”, and often the last, too. Origin and terminus: they recur throughout Herzog’s work, whether the first cave paintings (Cave Of Forgotten Dreams, 2010) or the last days of a death row inmate’s life (2011’s Into The Abyss).
Alpha and omega resurface in Lo And Behold, his sketchbook-like look at aspects of the internet, including its Big Bang-like origins and conceivable apocalyptic consequences. Here, the internet is another of Herzog’s feverish Darwinian universes: no less cosmic in its enormity and implications than nature or time; both slave and master to us; and ultimately unfathomable. It’s another savage kingdom in which Herzog can seek ecstasy and the sublime among the entrancing horrors and delights.
Into The Inferno is available on Netflix from Friday; Lo And Behold is in cinemas from Friday
