“A strong reminder that Rosi is one of our greatest documentarians.”

“Here we enter eternity”

Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi’s latest film Below the Clouds opens with a quote from Jean Cocteau: “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.” It is below the clouds of this eponymous volcano that he situates a tale of a city and of its history, layered in its ground from classical times until the present. It is a story about dancing on the volcano, about a life where danger is always lurking, but where maybe some dangers are imagined or made bigger than they truly are. It is also a place where life returns, from the ashes or from the hull of a ship. Shot in high contrast black and white, Rosi’s latest is a rumination on time preserved and a continuous past, given a face through several groups of people that he follows with his camera as they creep through man-made tunnels, guide the young to wisdom, or try to conjure up ghosts from the storage rooms of history.

Perhaps the most symbolic people caught by his lens are the crew members of a ship that has dropped anchor in Naples’ port, within its belly a representation of life: grain from Ukraine. We return to them from time to time, mostly focusing on the ship’s captain, but also witnessing the ship slowly being relieved of its load, which starts out as a mountain whose shape is not unlike that one outside. One mountain brings life, one mountain takes it away, which is something that we see through the eyes of those who excavate the area looking for what has remained from Vesuvius’ fateful and most famous eruption in 79 AD. We see the plaster shapes of the people who died two millennia ago, recreated as ghosts rising up from history (in one shot they are reflected in glass in such a way that they actually look like ghosts).

The banality of life is represented by people manning the emergency hotline of the local fire brigades as they handle calls, often from distraught citizens who have felt tremors (the area is still an active volcanic site after all) and who feel like the sky, or Vesuvius’ clouds, may be falling down. Their overblown fear is an interesting juxtaposition with the ship’s crew, all Syrian men, who will go back to Ukraine for their next load. The tremors that may lie ahead in their future will be a lot more dangerous than what the hotline operators have to deal with, as a radio report about a bombed ship underlines.

These phone calls do provide Below the Clouds with some levity; humanity is really at its funniest when displaying its simplicity. Some of the calls are silly, such as a man who always asks for the current time, while others are harrowing, such as the woman whose husband beats her to a pulp in front of their children. Here too life and death lie close together. These scenes are a slice of Neapolitan life; were the lives of those people who were eternalized in the first century AD all that different? What were they doing, and did they know that their dance floor was a volcano that could blow at any time? Like in another film at the festival, Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes, ancient history and current times are brought together in a film that shows ordinary lives instead of the extraordinary.

Throughout the film Rosi also returns to cinema, quite literally. In an old theater he projects several fragments of films about the area, documentaries about archeological digs or fiction films about, well, archeological digs (Rossellini’s Stromboli, in a scene where we see Ingrid Bergman witness how those plaster ghosts from the past are created). The cinema itself is abandoned, no longer in operation, and almost like an excavation site once we look in the projection room. Is Rosi playing the archeologist here? Or perhaps he is an educator, much like the old man who, every afternoon, hosts a group of children in his antiques shop to help them with their homework. The congruence of these segments with the rest of the stories the director follows, such as a researcher rummaging through large collections of statues and busts or a group of archeologists from Tokyo University, is a bit harder to grasp, but the old man is a source of knowledge for the children, who he perhaps can teach a bit of history while he reads ‘Les Miserables‘. “They’re a bit like you,” he tells a boy who asks what he is reading, poking a little goodhearted fun. Yet the connection with the rest of the film is tenuous, one of the few weak elements in Below the Clouds, the other being the fact that some of the conversations seem staged, a faux pas in a documentary that pretends to be the proverbial fly on the wall. But other than those minor criticisms, Below the Clouds is a strong reminder that Rosi is one of our greatest documentarians, a beautiful (and beautifully shot) connection between the past and the present, and where a mountain of grain not only means life, but also lets us track time like some inverted hourglass.