ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: TEACH ME SOMETHING
John: Bubbling up from the Earth and bursting forth in a torrent of rock and fire, it’s the Zone Film Challenge. The prompt this week is our first foray into documentary filmmaking, Teach Me Something. Watch a documentary about something you know nothing about. And I don’t know much about volcanoes, I know a little about them but I didn’t know as much about them as I thought I did.
Alex: Yeah, I know some stuff about volcanoes. I know what pumice and magma are.
John: I know ash is good for the soil so people tend to settle near them.
Alex: If you asked me to name a volcano I’d say uhhh….Mt. Vesuvius, Mt. St. Helens, Yellowstone? That’s a geyser I guess.
John: There’s a supervolcano underneath Yellowstone so that’s why you have the whole geyser system but that’s a whole other discussion.
Alex: Clearly, I don’t know much about volcanoes but that’s why we selected this documentary, to learn more about them.
John: Yes, we selected Werner Herzog’s and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer’s Into the Inferno. Oppenheimer is the de facto host for this documentary and it’s not nearly as much about volcanoes as the title might have you believe. It’s a pretty breezy watch, it has a pleasant wide focus to it that I found appealing.
Alex: For a Herzog project, it’s lighthearted, he’s breezy in it. It jumps from different locations that have volcanoes or were influenced by volcanic events either in the soil or socially. The way Herzog linked together how communities look to volcanoes as divine or as sources of strength or power to was a fascinating recurring element. It happened in Vanuatu, Iceland, North Korea.
John: It’s a good throughline that keeps things from getting too broad and unfocused, it comes back again and again to how people look at volcanoes as these sort of deities.
Alex:
Volcanoes, like the megalodon and the northernmost part of Michigan, are something I’ve always been mildly interested in but I never pressed that interest. This prompt offered me the chance to correct that blind spot. What I found as Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer, the volcanologist co-director traveled from volcanic site to volcanic site was a recurring phenomenon, that no matter where you were, the volcano was a terrestrial deity. They possess enormous spiritual power, spiritual power that is reinforced by their physical power. Herzog and Oppenheimer visit Vanuatu, Indonesia, Iceland, Ethiopia, and North Korea outlining how each country has been physically remade by volcanic activity and socially molded by legends surrounding the volcano. And then look at me, the secular American willfully ignorant of a force that possesses this ultimate power to destroy and remake the world.
Indigenous populations on Vanuatu’s Ambrym island have the most direct connection with the volcanoes on the island being regarded as portals for demons and other spirits. The island’s volcanic nature means that eruptions are a constant consideration and the continuation of ritual shows a healthy deference to nature. Directly south of Ambrym Island is Tanna. Larger and more exposed to western influence than Ambrym, Tanna is also home to the John Frum religious movement. This cargo cult believes that a messianic figure, often depicted as an American GI named John Frum, will one day return to Tanna bringing with him the supplies and firepower of the Western world. At present, followers believe Frum’s spirit to reside inside Tanna’ Mount Yasur, an active volcano. Inferno’s framing for this movement seems to understand it as interested in consumer goods betraying a liberatory aspect of the movement that existed in early legends.
The grafting of ancient, land-oriented volcano legends to modern, materialist legend sees further exploration during the film’s anchor segment, a rare glimpse into North Korea’s Paektu Mountain. This site is of historical and religious importance to the Korean people though it is the site’s recent history that is most relevant to Inferno. Owing to North Korea’s official state atheism, the Kim family has recontextualized the cultural history and religious importance of Paektu Mountain to reassert their own power. In the Workers’ Party history, Paektu was where family patriarch Kim Il-Sung organized Communist forces against the occupying Japanese and serves as the Republic’s recorded birthplace for Kim Jong-Il. It is a boast to be born on Paektu Mountain but it was Kim Jong-Il who gained his power from the mountain. Even in a state where atheism is embraced and enforced, Mount Paektu is allowed a measure of power over the state.
By contrast, North Americans are positively ambivalent about volcanoes. Not to suppose my anecdotal ignorance on the topic is the norm for the average Americans but it’s no wild claim to say that volcanoes are not at the forefront of the American collective consciousness. Into the Inferno’s brief mention of Mt. St. Helens’ 1980 eruption is about all the focus the United States receives. This aside is indicative of the American’s total lack of humility towards the nature that surrounds them and this insolence bleeds into even the most well-meaning of citizens (me). It’s staggering foolishness too, not because it is unexpected, but because the United States is home to the most volcanoes in the world and as a result, some of the most dangerous.
Yellowstone Caldera, the supervolcano bubbling under Yellowstone National Park is the most infamous of these, receiving regular coverage in newspapers, on History Channel, and being a regular feature on alarmist apocalyptic YouTube channels. According to a 2018 U.S. Geological Survey on Volcano Threat Assessment, Hawaii’s Kileau, Oregon’s Mount Hood, California’s Mount Shasta, and yes, Washington’s Mt. St. Helens all pose a very high risk of eruption. It’s not that we should fear volcanoes but rather we should place a significant value upon them as they are one of the very few things on Earth that are truly above human concern and management. Once we embrace this, we can better admire and respect them as equalizers and not blithely ignore them as Americans tend to do with all potential threats to modern living.
John:
The west has a kitschy fascination with North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom grabs our attention for its anachronism as the last pseudo-Stalinist Cult of Personality masquerading as a state, its hyperbole in both boasting of its accomplishments and threatening to smite its enemies, its isolation in a world gone global.
Videos of DPRK defectors watching cartoons or eating chicken wings for the first time amass millions of views for western content aggregators. Hell, one piece of documentary filmmaking smuggled out of there after a visit under false pretenses was enough to convince us that VICE was cool for like a decade.
So then, in the midst of a rare open (by its own standards) period, North Korea welcomed in one of our great documentarians. What did Werner Herzog have to say about this place that takes up so little real estate and lives rent free in our collective imagination?
As it turns out. Very little. The man with the camera decides to let the camera do the talking and the film benefits from it. Herzog’s creeping discomfort bleeds through into every frame of the North Korea portion of Into the Inferno. The great documentarian, so used to capturing real, naturalistic human behavior, has entered a place where there is no such thing. No real life can take place. The will of the state is absolute. In the sunken eyes and cheeks of the everyday citizens he encounters and the nimble fingers of a young pianist who will never make a dime from her talents Herzog finds more dread and horror than a million words about the inhumanity of the Kim regime could ever convey.
His decision to stress the primacy of his own perspective is such a breath of fresh air in the modern documentary landscape, long weighed down under a mountain of celebrity soundbites. I don’t need some wizened state department retiree explaining how artificial it all is. How it’s just a show. Herzog’s camera communicates that, and it doesn’t try to sell me a memoir that’s like a third stories about Madeleine Albright abusing interns.
Out of a sense that I may be onto something and a second more basic, sense that I wanted to watch more of the Zog Man’s documentaries I threw on Echoes of a Sombre Empire, his documentary on Jean-Bedel Bokassa’s reign of terror over the Central African Republic. I thought it might give me a second example of Herzog training his camera on the artifice of a dictator’s cult of personality.
I didn’t quite get that unfortunately. What I did get is a strange, grim kind of respect for how much work must go into maintaining the illusory reality of the Kim regime. How hard the people must work to organize those parades, stadium shows, demonstrations of state power and magnanimity. Bokassa couldn’t even keep it up for the day of the legendary boondoggle that was his coronation. In file footage it looks cheap and chintzy. Gaudy and gilded. Like the banquet hall at the Bangui Trump Taj Mahal.
Into the Inferno’s North Korea segment feels vestigial for a movie ostensibly about volcanoes. But it’s undoubtedly striking. Maybe Herzog figured he’d just never get a chance to shoot there again and so he’d better make the most of it. Maybe the obvious discomfort stems from a man who’s spent his life trying to train his camera on the truth running up against someone, a whole army of someone’s, who are working just as hard to keep him as far from that truth as possible.
NEXT WEEK: A CONTROVERSIAL BOOK ADAPTATION, WE SWEAR
