Gianfranco Rosi has made a movie that could be thought of as the last of a conceptual trilogy about normal life and spiritual life in Italy: the first was his Sacro GRA from 2013 about Rome, for which Rosi won the Venice Golden Lion; the next was Fire at Sea about the migration crisis as experienced in Lampedusa in Sicily. Now there is Below the Clouds, in luminous black-and-white. It’s another of his brilliantly composed docu-mosaic assemblages of scenes and tableaux, shot from fixed camera positions without any camera narration.
The title is taken from Jean Cocteau: “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.” Rosi reports from Naples, a city uneasily preoccupied with the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions for which it is famed, and with the great catastrophe of AD79 that buried nearby Pompeii. We see the archaeological digs that are still disinterring vital material – and clips from Rossellini’s Journey to Italy on the subject, playing in an eerily deserted cinema (which would appear to be Rosi’s one “fictional” contrivance, but which chimes with genuine scenes of firefighters grimly clearing charred debris from a burnt-out cinema).
We see long-suffering emergency line call centre workers taking calls from people all over Naples: some people just asking the time, some terrified women who are being beaten by their husbands, some reporting arsonists and wildfires, some asking if there has been an earthquake.
We also see a grim expedition into the many hundreds of illicit tunnels dug underneath Naples by tomb robbers and antiquity thieves – an entire room has been looted of its frescoes, leaving behind bare walls, a grotesque monument to greed where art and beauty used to be. Meanwhile, in Naples’s port, a vast container ship has arrived bringing thousands of tonnes of Ukrainian grain (the relaxation of trade restrictions once offered by Putin as a kind of emollient gesture) and Syrian workers on the ship are shown talking about their lives.
There is a real end-of-days quality to this film: it is about war, violence, cynicism and the climate crisis. Perhaps that is why Rosi has chosen to shoot in monochrome, giving the city an alien, unearthly look. This is not the traditional sun-drenched southern Italy, not the raucous place of life and love and wine: it is as if the city has been covered in clouds of grey ash – and Naples (and the whole world) is preparing its own Pompeii destiny. Rosi is revealing these figures the way a future archeologist might dig them out: they are the ghosts of the future. It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.
• Below the Clouds screened at the Venice film festival.
