Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay that compares two very different films — The Fire Within and Fire of Love — with very similar (and volcanic) subject matter.
There are a number of instances across movie history where movies with ridiculously similar plots were released in the same year: Deep Impact and Armageddon in 1998; Dante’s Peak and Volcano in 1997; The Cave and The Descent in 2005. The list goes on and on.
Whether a case of great minds thinking alike or dumb luck, the synchronicities of film history offer interesting opportunities to compare and contrast. Case in point: The Fire Within and Fire of Love. Both films were released in 2022. Both films are documentaries about the careers of ill-fated vulcanologists and married couple Katia and Maurice Krafft.
One of the two films (Fire of Love) is the more well-known of the pair, in part due to its more populist approach to its subject matter and its (certainly related) Oscar nomination. But the other was directed by Werner Herzog. So it’s not really a fair fight, is it?
Even before The Fire Within, the German director’s interest in the Kraffts was clear. Herzog already engaged with the couple’s work in his 2016 documentary Into the Inferno. And if you’re familiar with Herzog’s work, his interest in the adventurism and aesthetic quest for capturing the sublime on film intrinsically resonates with the Kraffts’ photography of volcanic activity and lava flows.
The following video essay is less interested in comparing Fire of Love and The Fire Within because, again, one of them was directed by Werner Herzog. Instead, the essay is more concerned with how the comparison reveals what makes Herzog, well, Herzog. And, more to the point: how even with the same footage, execution, and intent can completely change the way a film feels.
Watch “When Two Filmmakers Make the Same Movie”
Who made this?
This video essay comparing Fire of Love and The Fire Within was created by Like Stories of Old, a video essay channel run by Tom van der Linden. You can follow van der Linden on Twitter here. And you can subscribe to his YouTube account here.
More videos like this
- Here’s Tom van der Linden unpacking Interstellar‘s message about how love transcends time
- And another, on A Hidden Life director Terrence Malick’s philosophical inclinations.
- And one more from Like Stories of Old: The Philosophy of Blade Runner 2049
- On the subject of world-building, here’s Tim Hickson of Hello Future Me with a look at the difference between hard and soft world-building.
- And finally, here’s Like Stories of Old with a look at whether or not Netflix’s remake of All Quiet on the Western Front is a good anti-war movie.
Related Topics: Fire of Love, The Queue, Werner Herzog
