Pompei: Below the Clouds: documentary tribute to Naples is filled with sepulchral melancholy
Vesuvius tremors, tomb raiders and patient Neapolitan Fire Brigade workers all have a part to play in Gianfranco Rosi’s poetic meditation on the fragile nature of Naples.
Gianfranco Rosi’s film might have been called Below the Crowds, since it so often concerns what it calls the ‘disembowelling’ of Naples, the tunnelling by thieves into buried archaeological sites to steal Roman and Etruscan treasures. We’ve seen these brigands portrayed semi-romantically in such compelling dramas as Fellini’s Il Bidone (1955) and Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera (2023), but though this visually arresting documentary shows the perfidious consequences of their greed – one underground villa stripped of its entire 12 walls of unique frescoes – the real-life vandals are absent.
Not that the film takes us so often below ground as that emphasis suggests. A concern for antiquity is one of many strands Rosi explored in three years of investigation and shooting in Naples. First, there’s the clouds themselves, in the sky and billowing from the earth. A line of Cocteau’s, “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world,” acts as the film’s epigraph.
Emissions of smoke expand in cauliflowery glory from the pores of Vesuvius and the caldera of the Phlegraean Fields before thinning to drifting wisps. They evoke the deliberate vagueness with which the film presents itself. You’re expected to work stuff out for yourself. What seems at first like an antique store or a bookshop turns out to be an after-school club run by a retired teacher. Scenes of a grain ship docking and workers painstakingly unloading its cargo gain a new dimension when we learn that the crew are Syrian exiles who have collected their cargo from Odessa under Russian bombardment.
Rosi’s patiently observant, multi-viewpoint approach to his subject is similar to that which made his Rome-set Sacro GRA (2013), which won the Venice Golden Lion, and his Lampedusa-set Fire at Sea (2016), winner of the Berlin Golden Bear, so satisfying. Together, they form a triptych of sociological revelation. If anything, Below the Clouds feels even more instinctively fluid. Although Rosi has a multicultural background – born in Eritrea and grew up in Italy and Turkey – this film feels more ‘at home’ with its locale than did Notturno (2020), his survey of lives and habitats being rebuilt in war zones across the Middle East.
Like the tomb raiders, Rosi likes to burrow into things. His use of the Circumvesuviana, the network of train lines that links the suburbs and heritage sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum to the city, offers a rapid portraiture of back lots and fleeting windows in endless twisting tracking shots.
But what best brings the citizens of Naples to light is the voices we hear calling the fire brigade switchboard, whose operators are indulgent when people express their fears about the latest tremors, even with the one elderly man who calls regularly to find out the time. The mordant humour lacing these scenes also enlivens those featuring the white-coated curators of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Their torchlit examination of piles of heads, sandalled feet and other sculptural fragments, littered – for unclear reasons – like junk across the floor of their store, comes with a kind of weary, rueful love and acceptance that this is how it is.
Rosi uses an old abandoned movie theatre, which we see both in ruins and spruced up a little, to project (for contrast) other films about Naples, not least the scene in Rossellini’s Journey to Italy (1954) where Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders are shown how the bodies of people caught in the AD79 eruption of Vesuvius created natural casts under the hardened ashes, from which their death-struck figures re-emerge as newly poured plaster likenesses.
There are also scenes of a Japanese team of archaeologists at work on the gentlest kind of dig. That happens by daylight, but it’s best not to imagine too much of this film that way. It has a sepulchral melancholy to it, gifted by Rosi’s own beautiful, high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, and his fondness for the city lit up at night. It is even a touch funereal. That one might be living on the brink of some terrible catastrophe seems not far from sleepless Neapolitan minds, and these days, given the seeming chaos of world politics, maybe it should be closer to ours too.