Salt and Fire

Filmed in Bolivia, Salt and Fire (2016) is another episode from from Werner Herzog’s catalogue of man-vs-nature stories. This time, Herzog’s fascination for Latin American nature is presented as a manner of critique to environmental studies that separate human interrelations from their “objective” measurements of natural disasters. A scientific delegation funded by the United Nations travels to Latin America to finish their studies of Uturunku, an active supervolcano whose eruption could cause a worldwide catastrophe. Upon arrival, the delegation is taken hostage by the CEO of an international company that has been declared responsible for producing the ecological disaster in Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flats in the world, whose growing toxicity will soon affect the surrounding villages.

A militia group led by a company easily bribes the government, police, and people in the airport to take their place when the international scientific delegation arrives. With fake documents, they convince the group that there was a change of plans and then take them hostage to an unknown location on the mountains.

As in Aguirre, Wrath of God, the plot of this Herzog movie develops around mystery and the unknown. Soon the dialogues are only between the leader of the scientific delegation Laura Sommerfeld (Veronica Ferres) and the CEO Matt Riley (Michael Shannon). Many days pass and the long conversations of Laura and Riley only confirm that there is something that we do not know. We see a lot of dysmorphic art distorting reality or exposing a different one. Typical of Herzog’s nihilist messages of his movies. Everything is in question.

Laura is taken to an island in the middle of the Salar de Uyuni and she is abandoned with two blind children called Huascar and Atahualpa. After a week, the few supplies Laura and the kids had on the island are at an end. Riley comes back and explains that everything was part of a plan, from the hostage-taking to the week with the two blind children in the island. The mystery is exposed. The salt flats were a man-made disaster (Laura already knew that), but Riley wanted Laura to understand that studies of nature with statistics and calculations could not reflect a deeper layer of the problem which is the human cost of the disaster.

Bolivian landscapes are the perfect set for Herzog's story. As in many of his movies, Latin American history, resources, culture, people and landscapes are the inspiration for fascinating plots for fictional stories. Herzog portrays the beautiful scenery of the Bolivian salt flats and Andean volcanos, but at the same time presents another reality in which those same elements could be equally disastrous. Latin America can be dangerous, its governments easily corrupted, its tourists easily kidnapped, but it can also be a beautiful place with incredible geological formations that are so magnificent that seem close to fantasy. We can see this dichotomy at the end of the movie. Riley is tormented about the noxious atmosphere his company has created around the salt flats which killed the mother of Huascar and Atahualpa (the same toxins caused their blindness), but then they take pictures that foreground the remarkable beauty that looks like it is taken from a surreal painting.

Though the extraordinary locations of the movie are real, Bolivia is not once mentioned throughout the movie. the salt flats and the volcano are the only places that are important. Other locations, like the airport where the group arrives or the village to which they are taken, remain anonymous. There is nothing to learn about Latin America in this movie. How can someone learn something from a fictional place with fictional history? Following the pattern of Herzog's previous films, this movie asks us to make our conclusions. Everything in this movie (locations, kidnapping, dialogues, images) exposes different manner to see reality, multiple intentions, theories and points of view.