Both Ianfranco Rossi have made a film that could be considered the last in a conceptual trilogy about ordinary life and spiritual life in Italy: the first was his 2013 Sacro Gra about Rome, for which Rossi won the Golden Lion at Venice; the next was Fire at Sea about the migration crisis as experienced in Lampedusa in Sicily. Now Below the Clouds is Below the Clouds, in bright black and white. It is another of his brilliantly composed docu-mosaic sets 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.” Rossi reports from Naples, a city unruffled by the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions for which it is famous, and by the great AD79 catastrophe that buried nearby Pompeii. We see archaeological digs that are still interpretive life-saving materials, and clips from Rossellini’s trip to Italy on the subject, playing in an eerily abandoned cinema (which seems to be Rossi’s one “fictional” fabrication, but which evokes scenes of real firefighters who grimly cleaned up the cancellation from the burnout cinema).
We see the long-suffering of emergency line call center workers who field calls from people all over Naples: some people just asking the time, some scaring women beaten by their husbands, some reporting arson and wildfires, some asking if there has been an earthquake.
We also see a grim expedition into the many hundreds of illegal tunnels dug beneath Naples by grave robbers and antiquities thieves – an entire room has been stripped of its frescoes, leaving behind bare walls, a grotesque monument to greed where art and beauty once stood. Meanwhile, a vast container ship has arrived in the port of Naples, bringing thousands of tons of Ukrainian grain (a relaxation of trade restrictions that Putin once offered as a kind of conciliatory gesture) and the Syrian workers on board are shown talking about their lives.
This film has a real quality to it at the end: it’s about war, violence, cynicism and the climate crisis. Perhaps that’s why Rossi has chosen to shoot in monochrome, giving the city an alien, timeless look. This is not the traditional sun-soaked Southern Italy, not the gritty place of life and love and wine: it’s as if the city is covered in clouds of gray ash—and Naples (and the world) is preparing for its own Pompeii fate. Rossi reveals these figures as a future archaeologist might excavate them: they are ghosts of the future. It’s an intensely disturbing, completely different film, and a brilliant final panel to his triptych.
