In her essay “On n’enchaîne pas les volcans” (“One does not chain down volcanoes”), poet and essayist Annie Le Brun invokes the Marquis de Sade’s fascination for volcanoes as a crucial philosophical motif. “Never before,” she tells us, “had the feeling of catastrophe been so splendidly formulated, including in its erotic implications, through this grandiose polarity: between desire and the forces of nature.” Volcanoes do not appear merely as images or ideas. Their forms emerge from the movements of matter and the depths of the imagination. Indeed, one of Sade’s characters—the famous chemist Almani—paused in admiration before the breast of Etna as it expelled its flames: “I desired to be this famous volcano.” If volcanoes are possessed by burning telluric energy, they also possess bodies and minds. They provide scabrous explosions, scatological resonances—their calamity is scandalous. The films in this program explore a few facets of these terrifying, sensual eruptions. At times, the camera captures the spectacular event. At other moments, images quiver with the tension of anticipation, devotion, latency, silence, and the risk of annihilation. What are these images’ relationships to the sensible world? What has the reality of contemporary crises robbed from our imaginative potential, from our capacity to invent distorted perspectives?

Special thanks to: Raffaella Morra, Emmanuel Lefrant, André Habib, Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt and the Institut pour la Coordination et la Propagation des Cinémas Exploratoires (ICPCE)