For the most part, the documentaries that have made Gianfranco Rosi’s reputation have a firm basis in geography. Sacro GRA (2013) explored life in Rome as circumscribed by the city’s major beltway. Fire at Sea (2016) considered the refugee crisis by focusing on life on the island of Lampedusa, a nexus of Italian and indeed European asylum immigration. Rosi left Italy to make Notturno (2020), a film about life along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, and Syria, an area plagued with the presence of Daesh terrorists. And now, with Below the Clouds, Rosi has made his most complex, most poetic film, based in and around Naples, a city that exists in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius. The film, shot in crisp, precise black-and-white, opens with smoke billowing from the active volcano, and Rosi has made a documentary that is in its own way like that smoke. Rather than adopting the firm architecture of argumentation, Below the Clouds moves out in all directions, like a sort of essayistic vapor.
This is a film that insinuates. While there are certain major conceptual throughlines in Below the Clouds, they intersect and metaphorize each other in wholly unexpected ways. Given the proximity of Vesuvius, Rosi shows how contemporary life in Naples is literally built on the ashes of Pompeii. He shows us major archaeological digs, along with subterranean storehouses of museum artifacts, some of which include the casts made of the victims of the eruption in 79 A.D. But the film also shows the darker underbelly of this historicity by taking us through secret tunnels dug by tomb robbers and looters of antiquities. We watch as police explore these spaces looking to assess the damage, while a senior inspector speaks mournfully of the sheer level of destruction caused by black-market greed. Rosi seems to share his attitude, as it is not about the loss of the priceless objects themselves, but of Italian and Western civilization, the erasure of patrimony.
This is also a film of comparisons. The police researching the plunder of the tombs are juxtaposed with members of Naples’ fire department, as they field various emergency calls and work to preserve the artifacts of contemporary life. We see that they are first responders to the area’s constant panic regarding earthquakes and eruptions. Various frightened citizens call the department, sometimes because they need actual, real-time assistance, but other times just to have someone tell them with some authority that a 3.5 earthquake, while serious, is not the Big One. Rosi shows Naples as a city gripped by the inevitability of another Pompeii, the sense that the earth has spoken and they are all living on borrowed time.
But other relationships Rosi draws are even more oblique. He cuts between the traversing of the robbed tunnels and the movement of the city’s train system. He focuses on the texture of rock and ash in the dig sites, then likens it to the hull of a ship transporting grain from Odessa, and the Syrian sailors charged with brushing this wheat dust off the sides of the hold. Even the Roman statuary is poised against the rougher ruins of Pompeii, as if to demonstrate the difference in human representation when it involves representation and human thought, and when it is just the literal remains of a body captured at the moment of death. The curator who oversees the statuary speaks philosophically, making a bit too explicit what Below the Clouds conveys so perfectly through sound and image. “In this room, time is overlapped, mixed, abandoned… time destroys everything, and preserves everything.”
And sometimes Below the Clouds emphasizes the extent to which it can be difficult to tell the difference. In one of the film’s only overtly staged elements, Rosi shows us clips from documentaries about Pompeii, along with scenes from Rossellini’s Journey to Italy and Leone’s The Last Days of Pompeii. But he “projects” them in a condemned movie theater, with torn, wet seats, fallen pillars, and a dusty, disused projection booth. By way of contrast, we also drop in on a small bookstore run by an old man called Titti. He appears to run a volunteer afterschool study hall program, where he helps kids with their homework. If we truly are in the twilight of physical media, Rosi shows that the old temples of culture will persist, provided they can adapt for newer, different needs. And, taken as a whole, Below the Clouds is a timely meditation on a city that lives on the remains of one civilization, and may itself be facing extinction from any number of directions: volcanic eruption, climate change, political turmoil. If Pompeii and Naples have anything to show us, it’s that even if our days are numbered, something new will take our place.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 6.
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