Les Dieux du feu

An opera film without a voice-over, a tribute to the steel production and the blast furnaces. Storck provides the steel works with both a grandiose and an infernal image; the film is a hymn to labour and to man’s mastery. Storck films this industrial netherworld as a choreography for titans. In each shot, tension and alertness is tangible: the smallest inadvertence can cause catastrophe. The composition of the film leans on the contrast between the reddish workshops and the control rooms, which are cold laboratories wrapped in bluish light. The work is presented as a ceremony: as warriors of the fire, the workers put on their cuirasses, the molten steel is ablaze in infernal furnaces, the machines subjugate the steel and shape it, rolling mills are put into operation. The entire production process is dramatised, and what should have been a detailed plan of steel manufacture becomes the description of a battle and a victory. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)