La soufrière

La Soufrière is, as Herzog explains, a documentary of an unavoidable catastrophe that didn’t happen. When Herzog learned in 1977 that the volcano, La Soufrière, on the small Caribbean island of Guadaloupe was about to explode and that one man had decided to stay behind, he assembled a small and daring crew and went to interview the man. Once on the evacuated island, Herzog wanders though the empty streets of Guadaloupe’s capital overrun by donkeys and starving dogs. He eventually makes his way, in a feat of either glaring stupidity or daring bravado, to the crater, but is forced to turn back by a plume of toxic fumes. When he does locate the “last man remaining” he finds that there are in fact several men, all homeless and all unafraid of the looming danger.