Unstill Life

Arts no. 709; 11 February 1959.

The majority of documentaries seem artificial in comparison to numerous works of fiction. Boredom takes over when no human emotion is able to blend in with a landscape, even if it’s endowed with the greatest beauty. “Nature is a good director”, a text here full of easy literature tells us, which we have a hard time agreeing with: how dull are the many reportages on and under oceans and on the most backward regions of the globe!

But with The Devil’s Blast, it’s necessary for us to acknowledge the basis for this postulate for once. Haroun Tazieff, a passionate volcanologist, gives us a report of his descent into the eight or ten most remarkable craters chosen across five continents. Now, of all manifestations of nature, volcanos and their eruption are the ones that contain the most life. The fall of rain, the movement of snow, wind and oceans, by their routine, confine us to immobility. On the other hand, volcanoes rumble, spit, destroy and transform themselves with the only constant being improvisation, which governs the domain of the artist as well. Their hybrid form of a hollow mountain concealing another world underneath the real world has long fascinated, obsessed a Romantic like Richard Wilson, the painter of course, not the filmmaker. And in Stromboli, and even more so in Journey to Italy, Rossellini could even discover the essential foundations of an entire life through seismic manifestations.

Let’s not try to renounce, on the vain pretext that man hasn’t yet laid his hands on them, our admiration or, better, our emotion before the spectacle of lapilli or of the miniature craters of Pompeii, before these still-moving rock deserts and these enormous lava streams.

Isn’t that minimizing Tazieff’s contribution? I don’t think so, and one could even criticize him for not effacing himself before his subject. Looking for dramatic interest above all, he hasn’t been able to decide between an amateur filmmaker’s reportage and a professional’s essay. To be sure, the lens is damaged at one point by the eruptions and the colours are not of Technicolour surety; but why then these sociological angles, these reconstructions of the crew’s exploits, which makes the documentary lose some of the truth that an artificial clumsiness—that of an Alain Bombard, for example—could’ve shown with more eloquence?

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]