A uniform grey nimbostratus has blocked the rays of the London sun the day I speak to Gianfranco Rosi, but this consummately Italian film-maker is feeling right at home. “When Jean Cocteau visited Naples, he wrote a letter to his mother in which he said, ‘Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.’ And I think that’s a beautiful image.” He gives a gracious nod to the blanket of grey outside the window. “I am sure there is one cloud over London today that has come straight from southern Italy.”
Rosi, 62, has earned his reputation as one of Europe’s most important documentary-makers with highly original and poetic portraits of Italian places. His 2013 film Sacro GRA – the first documentary to win the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival – followed a motley cast of characters who live or work on the ringroad that circles Rome. Fire at Sea, which scooped the Golden Bear at the Berlinale three years later, was a study of the inhabitants of the island of Lampedusa and the people who arrived there on perilously crowded boats at the height of the refugee crisis. It elevated Rosi to an elite circle of directors to have won the top prize at two of Europe’s three main film festivals.
His latest film, Naples-set Pompeii: Below the Clouds, completes the trilogy. But it also feels a deliberate bookend to the slew of films and TV series that have established the regional capital of Campania as the 2020s’ equivalent to 20s Berlin or 60s London. “I started this film with very little awareness of Naples,” says Rosi, who spent his childhood in Eritrea and Turkey and studied film in New York. “I was a tourist in a city that everybody loves, but I tried also to capture a Naples that is not immediately there.”
Shot in black and white, Rosi’s film makes Naples look entirely different to the gritty-but-lively, sun-flooded metropolis seen in Ferrante-adaptation My Brilliant Friend, crime series Gomorrah or Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God. No pizza, no mafia, no Maradona murals. Instead, it’s as if we are plonked into a frontier settlement on some alien planet, menaced by the unpredictable grumblings of the Campanian volcanic arc, which includes nearby Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields.
The extraterrestrial atmosphere is heightened courtesy of a saxophone soundtrack by Oscar-winning British composer Daniel Blumberg (The Brutalist), who made his instrument sound otherworldly by playing it back through an underwater speaker and re-recording it with a microphone positioned on Naples’ sandy beach. And there’s the fact that a large part of Rosi’s film takes place in the control room of the Naples fire brigade, which the residents call when they feel the floor shake beneath their feet.
Some are terrified, fearing for their loved ones. Others seem to long for a catastrophe, in a way that makes Below the Clouds reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s documentary La Soufrière, about a volcanic eruption on Guadeloupe that the entire film builds up to but never actually happens. “Was that an earthquake?” one caller asks, impatiently. “Will there be another one?”
“Vesuvius became like a mythical figure to me, a deity,” says Rosi, who spent four years in the city at the foot of the volcano to make his film. “It’s like Shiva – a destroyer but also a regenerator. The volcano destroyed Pompeii, destroyed 3,000 years of history, but also preserved it under the ashes.”
Rosi’s working methods make him akin to the British psychogeographers of the millennial turn – to the books of Iain Sinclair and the films of Patrick Keiller. But the psychological state that Below the Clouds tries to excavate is not subterranean – it’s in the minds of the people who work in the city.
There is Titti, a “street teacher” instructing his pupils in algebra, English grammar and human geography with a stern patience from his antiques shop; Maria, a conservator at the National Archeological museum who guards the excavated heads and busts with a maternal pride; a group of Japanese archeologists who have spent 20 years diligently digging in the Villa Augustea; a Syrian ship captain who has docked at the port with a cargo of Ukrainian grain.
Their portrayal has a dramatic quality, partly an intended effect of the monochrome photography and the static tableau composition, perhaps partly due to the natural local temperament – un dramma napoletano is an Italian saying for someone making a mountain out of a molehill. But Rosi insists none of the encounters are staged: “There’s not a single fictionalised moment in my film,” he says. “But I love when people think that, because I always try to break that thin line between documentary and fiction without actually fictionalising.”
As in his previous films, Rosi strings his characters together until their preoccupations start to rhyme with each other. Fire at Sea was a film about ways of seeing, or not seeing: the impaired sight of its central character, schoolboy Samuele, is mirrored in European authorities turning a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis unfolding on its shores. The recurring themes of Below the Clouds, meanwhile, are just as political: poverty, violence and war. Titti the teacher tells his students about Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables while the firefighters rush to put out a blaze started by disaffected youths. A woman calls the emergency hotline from her bathroom, with a drunkenly raging husband on the other side of the locked door.
“There is this kind of oxymoron I perceived throughout the four years I lived in Naples,” Rosi recalls. “There’s a constant sense of a tragedy, but also a sense that the tragedy has already passed and we lived through it without realising what was happening. It’s a state of mind.”
Despite the all-pervading sense of doom, it’s a state of mind that also brings forth empathy. “When I was editing the film, I asked myself what all these people I had met over the years had in common. And what they all share is a sense of devotion, of giving themselves to others.”
In the Roman empire, a Japanese archeologist tells a group of tourists at one point in the film, the port of Naples was crucial because it spread grain from places of abundance to those with shortages, thus preventing wars. Rosi cuts to the Syrian ship captain telling his wife that, yes, his vessel was nearly bombed in Odesa and, yes, of course he will go back there again.
“All the characters in the film have this quality, a kind of secular devotion. I believe that that is where civilisation starts.”
