Les rendez-vous du diable

«Known for years as the world's only volcanologist, the Belgian scientific explorer Haroun Tazieff has reported the results of his own research in this unique film.

This was conducted on 28 volcanoes in countries such as Japan, the island of Java, the Philippines, Mexico, Chile, Tanganyika and Italy. Thanks to his documentation, a true poetic hymn to discovery, we witness the eruption of Etna; the lava waterfalls of Stromboli, just a few metres from the camera, which reached a speed of around 40 kilometres per hour; we see San Salvador's Izalca, the youngest and always active volcano on the planet, a new volcano in the Azores that has covered an island with a ten-metre layer of ash and that four years ago, gave rise to a mountain between the Atlantic and the lighthouse that previously looked out to sea, the hidden craters of the Marapi in Java, and finally the ‘rite of fire’ set to the rhythm of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.

It took eleven years to make this monumental test of courage and patient application, which not only yields a compelling scientific document, but also reveals itself as a parable of human existence in a world that poses a potential threat to itself. Despite the tendency to dramatise the dangers of the endeavour (Tazieff is depicted as ‘the first man on earth to meet the devil on a fiery date’), the film has the merit of letting nature speak for itself. Tazieff and his editor have the gift of depicting the various contrasting geographical regions and their peoples with a few well-chosen, poignant images. At the foot of many of these volcanoes, unpredictable bringers of death on the land they themselves make fertile, towns and villages thrive. The resulting sense of perpetual insecurity and the simultaneous presence of death and rebirth are effectively expressed, as are the mood and temperament of the individual volcanoes. Their appearance, habits and differences contribute to a continuous visual involvement, often bordering on surrealism, that preludes the Wagnerian magnificence of the final quarter-hour. It is this element of extraordinariness that enriches the sheer adventure with a feeling of supererogation of human scientific competition; nothing is more powerful than the gigantic forces of nature filmed in action. Beauty mingles with horror, romantic grandeur with fear, and the viewer's mind is constantly reminded of the fact that just a few kilometres deep from the earth's seemingly safe surface, a real hell is stirring. And it is in this context that the subtle silhouette of the explorer himself, enthusiastically filming in the gorge of a possible eruption, acquires a moving, almost Flahertian touch». ("Monthly Film Bulletin", november 1961, in Le avventure della non fiction, ed. by Adriano Aprà, Mostra Internazionale del Nuovo Cinema, Pesaro 1997, pp. 282-283)

«Volcanoes are very simple, says Haroun Tazieff. At six metres, you don't feel anything. At four metres you get hot. At two metres, one burns. In Les rendez-vous du diable Tazieff prosaically approaches three metres from Lucifer, and then prosaically sets out to film him. This prose, the author of Le rappel à l'ordre would exclaim, is poetry. There is something of Monsieur Jourdain in Tazieff, but to the extent that there is something of Molière in Monsieur Jourdain, that is, to the extent that Tazieff is a gentleman without knowing it and makes good cinema equally without knowing it, out of instinctive nobility. Indeed, in Les rendez-vous du diable, the single shot in which we see, filmed by his friend Bichet, the Manfred-like silhouette of Haroun Tazieff frantically reloading his Paillard Bolex would be enough to miss nothing of the Michelangelo-style firework in front of him; the single shot, again filmed by his friend Bichet, in which Tazieff is seen bent under bursts of stones like a soldier under those of a machine gun, would be enough, in which Tazieff is seen running down the ash walls of Etna to get closer, even closer, ever closer to the one-eyed sleeping crater, these shots alone would be enough to make Les rendez-vous du diable the most beautiful film in the world. And this for two reasons. One in relation to Tazieff himself, the other to the cinema itself. First of all, let's talk a little about Haroun Tazieff. I like this great volcano-crazy traveller as much as I liked Valantin, the bird-man, who flew fast towards suicide in the Villacoublay meetings, like Jo Meiffert, the death cyclist, who pedals at 180 mph behind Grignard's old Talbot; like Mermoz and Guillaumet who stubbornly persisted for years in finding in the foothills of the Andes the passage to Santiago de Chile; sl, I like Haroun Tazieff as I like the great captains, the great conquerors, the Westerling, the Malraux, the Monfreid, in a word as I like Christopher Columbus when he realised that the Americas were far from the Indies; or even, since the advertising poster for Les rendez-vous du diable, subtitled Around the World in Eighty Volcanoes, invites us to make the comparison, I like Haroun Tazieff as much as I like Phileas Fogg and his stupid, daring, delirious, whatever one wants, but surprising and perfect bets, two words that, as the “Petit Larousse” teaches us, put together mean exactly: admirable. 

Haroun Tazieff is thus one of those admirable men in whom sport shares the soul fifty-fifty with poetry. One must have seen Les rendez-vous du diable as one must have read Une saison en enfer, but also as one must have seen Ascari's Lancia skid on the Monaco asphalt and plunge into the sea. These men are admirable because, among the purest of adventure, they are the purest. The only ones in any case to truly put into practice Lenin's famous maxim, codified by Gorky, namely that ethics is the aesthetic of the future. They are artists in the unusual sense of the term, for if they do not know how far they have the right to go, they know much more: how far they have the duty. It is this that, right from the start, gives Les rendez-vous du diable a pace and tone so close to the great novels of Jules Verne. This is what it is all about: playing with fire just because it is a deadly game and because risking death is worth a Bossuet sermon, coming within two metres of the flames just for getting close, getting burnt just to try not to get burnt. Absurd and beautiful insofar as it desperately refuses analysis, just as Rimbaud's silence was absurd and beautiful, Drieu la Rochelle's death was absurd and beautiful, Abel's journey on foot from Oslo to Paris to show Cauchy the formula for solving 5th degree equations was absurd and beautiful, but Cauchy refused to receive him, and Abel came back to Norway where he spent the rest of his life proving that it was impossible to solve 5th degree equations with a formula. Actually, as I think about it, I find Haroun Tazieff's film beautiful because you can talk about it in an absurd way, thinking of a thousand other beautiful things. So, as I crossed paths with him for a quarter of a second with the big eyes of a little Indian girl in the Guatemalan jungle, as I skimmed over what the pioneers of the “Aéropostale” called the avenue of volcanoes, as I bent over the calcined bodies of Pompeii, I thought of this and more, as I did during the screening of Viaggio in Italia, Bitter Victory, and several other films of this order of magnitude. As I watched Tazieff and Bichet quickly build an igloo to live more nobly than Yves Ciampi in the rising wind, as they wept from the cold, I wept with emotion because I thought of Flaherty, and because when I think of Nanook I think of Murnau, just as when I think of Tabu I think at the same time of my Eskimo, that is, of Stromboli, and, to return to Flaherty, of Truffaut, who detests him, but whose first feature film, Rivette tells me, who has seen a rough cut of it, strangely resembles Flaherty's films. All these transmissions of thought make me very moved as images of Haroun Tazieff's childish technique scroll across the big screen of “Normandie”. Oh yes, dear readers of the “Cahiers”, don't think we don't heed your letters that sometimes reproach us for saying everything about the films we love: this time I weigh my words by saying that Les rendez-vous du diable is a very moving film. Childish technique, I said, or if you prefer, of an absolutely spontaneous purity, of a naive and barbaric charm, as was the filming technique at the “belle époque” of Félix Mesguich, and which fortunately frees us from that of all the Lost Continents and other such waltdisnasineries. At this point the second reason intervenes, which, as I said at the beginning, proves the beauty of Les rendez-vous du diable, and that is no longer a human reason, in relation to the kind of man that Haroun Tazieff is, but a reason as much as a cinematic one.

Indeed, I would gladly say that Les rendez-vous du diable is a beautiful film because it is a film. By filming himself in mortal peril in front of the lava jets, Tazieff as it were, proves cinema for the mere fact that, without film, the adventure would lose all interest, since no one except Tazieff would know that it unfolded as it did. What is beautiful, then, is this boundless desire for objectification, this dogged will that Tazieff shares with a Cartier-Bresson or with the Sucksdorff of the Det stora äventyret, this deep inner need that drives them to want to authenticate fiction at all costs through the realism of the photographic image. Let us now replace the word fiction with the word fantastic. We thus fall back on one of the key reflections made by André Bazin in the first chapter of Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?, reflections consecrated to the “Ontology of the photographic image”, and to which the analysis of any shot in Les rendez-vous du diable continually refers us. Haroun Tazieff does not know, but he proves that Bazin knew that “the camera alone possessed the key to this universe in which supreme beauty is identified at the same time with nature and with chance”.

If Haroun Tazieff proved only that nature is a great filmmaker, his films would be worth no more than those of Joris Ivens. What, on the contrary, is prodigious about Les rendez-vous du diable is that it shows the underwater gushing of an Azores volcano, endowed with such a terrifying richness of form that only Tintoretto would have dared to paint it: by showing us a river of lava twisting in a purple and gold ebullition, colors that only Ejzenstejn dared to use in the banquet scene of the Ivan Groznyj II: Bojarskij zagovor, by showing us, I said, all these prodigies of direction, Haroun Tazieff proves to us ipso facto that direction is a prodigious thing». (Jean-Luc Godard, "Il conquistatore solitario", in Il cinema è il cinema, ed. by Adriano Aprà, Garzanti, Milano 1981, pp. 135-139)

Travel Notes [Cinemambiente 1998]

Gute Reisende sind herzlos

Good travelers are heartless

Elias Canetti

From the travelogues of Hale's Tours to reportages on great exploits and exotic lands, from the road movie to the thousands of invented and untold stories of conquered spaces and lost or rediscovered identities, the theme of travel has accompanied the entire history of cinema, in all its genres and areas of production, the very metaphor of the new medium capable of restoring the movement of the world.

The brief itinerary proposed here allows us to observe some areas of the prolific relationship between the camera and the environment constituted by the travel film. These are works and materials that concern different dimensions of travel – some probably permanently disappeared – in which constant, however, is the exercise of looking at a reality, a place, a culture, an “elsewhere” reached through physical movement. Colonial conquest, exploration, scientific discovery, family vacation, as well as ritual and soul-searching, are the main passages of this reconnaissance, which reveals first and foremost the importance of the possibility of creating images, which document but also represent a determining factor shaping travel itself.

The components of violence and cultural imposition of Western voyages of conquest in the first decades of the century are, for example, shown in the work of recovery and reworking of original materials carried out by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, who with the power of images alone manage to construct a lucid discourse on the role of the camera as an expression of a will to appropriation and domination. It is the same colonialist gaze analyzed by Peter Kubelka in his African journey in the 1960s, following a group of whites engaged in a safari.

The reliance on cinema as a possibility to record the real, to bear witness to natural events and human endeavors appears evident in the works of volcanologist Haroun Tazieff, who filmed apocalyptic scenarios and spectacular eruptions, or in the conspicuous documentation left by Alberto Maria De Agostini during his wanderings in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, or again in the images of early mountaineering expeditions to the great peaks, not without political implications in some cases, such as the document on the ascent of Nanga Parbat in 1938, which becomes an example of Nazi propaganda. The exploration of the environment as a human challenge, a ground for confrontation with the force and sometimes the hostility of nature, is still visible in the first filmed documentations of Antarctic expeditions, in which the narrative and spectacular vocation of cinema peeps out even where one would presume total adherence to realistic subject matter.

What becomes immediately clear in this chapter of the history of travel is that there is no truly achieved goal and conquered space, if not properly documented, no expedition and enterprise that can renounce being filmed and thus make its own contribution to the construction of an imaginary made of heroes and great adventures, of immense spaces real and unknown. Immersed in the silence of their innocence, and in the seduction of their genesis – possible in many cases despite difficult environmental conditions and thanks to daring actions – such images enchant today as they did then. The crossing of a last sailing ship filmed by Henrich Hauser, in which neither places of departure nor points of arrival are shown, becomes the emblem of the experience in itself of movement, a hymn to the deepest sense of travel. Of which the deviations from the desired outcomes, the failures, renunciations, tragedies or simply the impossibility of creating the longed-for image (the summit as well as the return) must also be collected. But the fascination with travel to distant and extreme lands can also become an explicit advertising tool, as happened with the African and Asian cruises organized by Citroën between the 1920s and 1930s, in which human enterprise and produced image turn out to be totally inseparable.

Another type of relationship with the environment is that traceable in home movies shot during family vacations: Gustav Deutsch rereads anonymous materials from the 1950s and 1960s, offering an interesting catalog on the amateur gaze in its attempt to capture places – in this case those deputed to tourism – and preserve memories.

Travel as an encounter with “other” worlds and cultures, rapprochement and self-discovery, is the theme finally of some works in which the dialogue with the environment is constructed on the basis of the awareness that movement is not the prerogative of the person holding the camera. Ulrike Koch's documentation of the migration of nomadic Tibetan herders to the great salt lakes of the Himalayan plateau, a tribute to a sacred dimension of travel; Bill Viola's contemplation of natural landscapes and animal presences, Chris Marker's reflections from the “two extreme poles of survival” – Japan and Africa – or even the crossed gaze proposed in another work by Deutsch (who juxtaposes his images of an Austrian in Morocco with those of a Moroccan in Austria), suggest modes of travel based on dialogue, confrontation, meditation: observing the movement of nature and its inhabitants, with respect and hesitation, leads to a movement of consciousness, a production of thought, an activation of memories. The relationship with a place is no longer established through topographical and cultural appropriation, but through an appreciation of differences, the maintenance of a subjectivity and a historical understanding. Travel as discovery and adventure belongs perhaps only more to mythology and nostalgia, just as the very conditions of image production and consumption turn out to be profoundly transformed with respect to the eras evoked here. The cognitive potentialities of travel, and therefore of the images borrowed from it, are then entrusted, rather than to a movement in space guided by a ravenous gaze in search of the pure and the uncontaminated, to an ability to stand in any different place, to let this otherness speak and be absorbed, also tracing its historical motivations and welcoming the dimension of memory that that place can give off in those who try to approach it.