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La Soufrière: Waiting for an Inevitable Catastrophe
La Soufrière: Warten auf eine unausweichliche Katastrophe
In 1976, the announcement of the imminent eruption of La Soufrière, Guadeloupe’s main volcano, left Basse-Terre completely depopulated. Werner Herzog travels there with his team and two cameramen as the danger reaches its peak. The city he finds is ghostly, and the crater is inaccessible. But Herzog is there to meet a man who is said to have stayed behind. He meets three farmers. Like wandering souls on the eve of the apocalypse, they seem serene and display a fatalism of unshakeable wisdom.
Herzog’s penchant for extreme situations and characters is once again central to this film. And when disaster ultimately fails to materialize, he focuses on conversations with these men, black farmers who have been abandoned on French territory, continuing his anthropological quest to understand the suffering of people in their environment. In 2016, he returned to filming active volcanoes, this time from closer up, in the Netflix production Into the Inferno.
Bio Werner Herzog
Author, opera director, and filmmaker Werner Herzog (1942) is a pioneer of New German Cinema. His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. He is known for his unique filmmaking process, such as disregarding storyboards, emphasising improvisation, and placing the cast and crew in situations similar to those of the characters in his films. François Truffaut once called Herzog “the most important film director alive,” and American critic Roger Ebert said that Herzog “has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made …
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- This film was #78 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025