La Soufrière

Werner Herzog's La Soufrière (1977) , subtitled, "waiting for an unavoidable catastrophe" (that never happened) is a perfect example of the non-representability of catastrophe - in his case because it doesn't occur. Herzog, never happier than when he does the voiceover of assorted marginalised, doomed characters, produced this elegiac and hopelessly romantic documentary attempting to capture the threatened cataclysmic explosion of volcano and ended up arguing that the real catastrophe was that the catastrophe he was looking for, and which would have led to his death, never happened.