Europa Europa Film Festival –Pompei: Below the Clouds (dir. Gianfranco Rosi)
Even if Mount Vesuvius doesn’t feature in every shot of Gianfranco Rosi’s Pompei: Below the Clouds, the memory of the catastrophic destruction that it brought down upon Pompei and its surrounding areas lingers across every frame. And when it is there, it is imposing if seemingly quite modest, often shrouded in fog looking out over Naples, a city we come to see is still preoccupied with its legacy.
We witness classic films portraying the devastation projected in decaying local cinemas. A Japanese excavation crew tending to an archaeological dig. Syrian shipworkers, themselves no stranger to flattened earth terror, who receive word that colleagues have died in Ukraine where their journey began and to where they must soon return. Historians plumbing the depths of buildings filled with discarded statues and artistic possessions. Even piles of grain in containment amassed like mountains. And most comically, city fire department hotline workers responding to calls from worried citizens in the aftermath of minor earth tremors; citizens concerned that this is going to be the one that repeats history and buries them all.
Unlike his previous feature, Notturno, which gained so much from its use of colour, Rosi captures this all in often elegantly shot black and white, although it is at its most arrested during its moody nighttime sequences or those shot in the basements and tunnels under the city as light captures on the curves of a bust statue or the cascading groundwater over rock. The sound design by Stefano Grosso fits perfectly, all human busywork, modest city soundscapes and a dark, infrequent score. Together, they amplify the way this city is, to quote one of its subjects, “suspended in time”. A city not quite able to emerge out of the destruction of its histories—both natural and human.
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