Pompei: Below the Clouds Review

Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi is interested in liminal spaces. His acclaimed 2016 film Fire at Sea was an appraisal of the places that migrants occupy: neither here, nor there, living lives that are inherently transient. Notturno asked us to put faces to people ravaged by war. Yet, there is possibly no other place in the world where this impermanence is most felt than in Naples, where long-time residents live under the constant threat of volcanic eruption from Vesuvius, all while living amongst the same ruins of nearby Pompeii and the destruction of yesteryear. In recent years, city officials have tried to incentivize its people to leave the area in an abundance of caution. Few have obliged.

Rosi’s newest video essay, Pompei: Below the Clouds, probes the inherent tension of life on the precipice. The hyper-specificity of living in many European cities and towns is in overdrive here. A walk around the city subjects a visitor to state-of-the-art contemporary construction in sharp contrast to the endless supply of rubble, crumbling foundations as a result of World War II, and even more ancient violence, like that of the natural world. Locals exist under constant fear of the next big bout of volcanic activity, the type that makes California’s uncertain fault line future seem like child’s play by comparison.

Below the Clouds Beautifully Captures The Specificity of Naples’ Niche Existence

The film tracks this odd life by documenting a wide range of subjects, any one of which could’ve existed in its own, equally fascinating documentary. Rosi films an archaeologist rummaging through an archive of discarded sculptures and remains; a bookstore owner who dallies as something of a community tutor; Middle Eastern migrants temporarily stationed here before being forcibly returned to Ukraine; a Japanese delegation’s active dig at Pompeii, and the increasingly stretched-thin resources of Naples’ emergency services.

At the same time, Rosi interrogates the cinema itself as an archival object. Repeatedly, Rosi, who also shot the film in jaw-dropping beautiful digital black and white chiaroscuro, returns to an empty movie theater with a screen that is showing all manner of Pompeii and Vesuvius-related media. Journey to Italy, most prominently, but also previous documentaries that comment on the destruction of this nearly priomordial place.

Below the Clouds is a masterclass in image-making. Fabrizio Federico edits the film together as a game of cascading contrasts and comparisons. Calls to an emergency center are laid over aerial shots of the congested city, as residents clamor over even the slightest tremor. Could this be the earthquake that starts the next chain-reaction? But living this way also provides opportunities for requisite absurd humor, as when an old woman complains about the exact methods with which the firefighters seek to break down her locked door.

The poetry of Rosi’s images hit with a church bell’s vibrations.

In this way, Below the Clouds feels metonymic for the world-at-large. Are we not all carrying about our quotidian lives – making food, studying for tests, enjoying art – even as the seduction of climate pessimism reaches a fever pitch? Yet, Rosi’s approach is vast and esoteric, in ways that frequently put the film at risk of running into his own buzzsaw. The moderately long length of the film requires a constant attention which prevents it from reaching its emotional potential. But, the poetry of it all hits with a church bell’s vibrations, particularly through the impressive cogency of an archivist who muses on time as she catalogs a hall of busts and pieces of fractured slabs:

“In this room, time is overlapped, mixed, abandoned. It’s a good metaphor for time, and the history of mankind… this accumulation of history preserved here.” Below the Clouds is that rare kind of art documentary which has the power to collapse space and time. In any given shot, Rosi has us existing in the past, present and future at the exact same moment. Humanity distilled through the cinema, a natural place to confront the ghosts of the past.

Pompei: Below the Clouds opens in New York on March 6th before a nation-wide rollout on March 13th.