The Earth Trembles
by Jeff Reichert
New York Film Festival 2025:
Below the Clouds
Dir. Gianfranco Rosi, Italy, no distributor
Much like American national treasure Frederick Wiseman, Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi consciously eschews that collection of formal tics that has, largely for the worse, overrun international documentary practice in recent decades. His films generally avoid subjects speaking to-camera, whether in a formal interview setting or vox pop (his 1993 debut, Boatman, and the creepy, disquieting, single-subject El Sicario, Room 164, notable exceptions); nondiegetic music; flashy graphics and animation; rapid-fire montage; facile archival intrusions; voiceover narration. Like Wiseman, Rosi seems fully committed to working the fundamental units of cinema—the shot and the cut—to create meaning. Both filmmakers have a predilection for parking themselves in circumscribed spaces and patiently letting their movies reveal themselves before the lens. Their choices of boundary can be geographical, institutional, metaphorical, or all of these layered atop each other.
For Below the Clouds, Rosi spent three years in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, looking and listening, searching the neighborhoods of Naples for the appropriate scenarios in which to introduce his locked-off camera (he again serves himself well acting as his own cinematographer), here set to capture images in lustrous black-and-white. If a mammoth Wiseman location epic like, say, Belfast, Maine, gives one the feeling of a bricklayer laboring, piece by piece, to construct the filmic edifice, the result all spackled with meanings and stories for the viewer to consider, Rosi’s leaner, fleeter geography movies (Sacro GRA, Fire at Sea, and Below the Clouds) function more like roundelays—the filmmaker establishes a handful of disconnected scenarios and then cycles through them, returning to each with rhythmic regularity. Sometimes this cycling reveals progressions, but, also like Wiseman, Rosi is a filmmaker unconcerned with the traditional movements of narrative. Why bother with contrivance when you can put the stuff of actual life on screen?
Below the Clouds, though set in a relatively small area hunkered uneasily between the Phlegraean Fields to the West and towering Vesuvius to the East, is populated with incidents that invite the viewer to contemplate a broader, global apocalyptic moment. Present-day climate instabilities cannot be far from mind during Rosi’s scenes with an aged antiquarian rummaging through vaults filled with relics from Pompeii, the lost city that once rested about a dozen miles from modern Naples and which was destroyed by the Earth in an instant. A team of Japanese archaeologists from the University of Tokyo continue a decades-long excavation of what is believed to be the Villa Augustea, and their discourse on ages-old regional conflicts, cultural intermingling, and commerce touch the open wounds left by 21st-century neoliberal globalism. Humanity’s evergreen ability to prioritize profit above all, even to the point of erasing its own history, is evident in sequences following a local prosecutor and special investigator through the ancient tunnels running underneath the city where there has been plundering by tomb raiders (like the antiheroes of Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera). Rosi risks tipping away from metaphor into outright commentary via the inclusion of a handful of charismatic Syrian exiles who operate massive frigates transporting grain to Europe from war-torn Ukraine.
The world may be burning all around us, but what’s the use in worrying when you live in a city where an actual volcano could eradicate your home at any moment? Rosi’s visits to the Naples fire department’s emergency call center suggest the citizens of Naples feel this threat acutely. He returns to this crammed room repeatedly in Below the Clouds, capturing dispatchers as they field call after call from Napoli young and old demanding to know if they’d just felt a tremor, if there was a need to evacuate, worriedly asking if something even worse is about to happen. Veteran callers offer their own estimations of the seismic activity—that last one had to be at least a 4, no? The dispatchers handle these calls with a bemused humanity that stands in sharp contrast to scenes set in the deathly still headquarters of the Osservatorio Vesuviano, the oldest volcanology center in the world, in which banks of impersonal monitors track the local volcanos for any slight changes all day, every day. It has the feel of a mad scientist’s laboratory, or perhaps an ICU, where the patient being fretted over for signs of danger is an entire city.
Unlike his somnolent, murky Notturno, in which it was, at times, unclear where Rosi was and what he was looking for, there’s a pleasing clarity to Below the Clouds. His metaphors are compact and graspable; his sequences interlock better than they have since perhaps Sacro GRA. Though this tidiness can result in such scenes as one in the catacombs where the prosecutor, clearly well aware of what the man behind the camera is interested in hearing, declaims for a while on the tragedy of the city’s plundered cultural history, Rosi hasn’t sanded his work smooth. A curious and charming set of scenes involves an older man running an antique store that doubles as a study hall for local youth after school. This thread scans as a touch tangential, but somehow the man’s kindness with his wards comes to suggest there might be things the world would miss were humanity snuffed out. The filmmaker also makes space for a long, dire interlude in the call center where a frenzied woman remains on the line with a dispatcher as she hides in her home from a drunken abusive husband—it breaks the comedy of this grouping of scenes and introduces a more individualized strain of human violence into the mix.
Though Rosi’s synaptic, non-narrative nonfiction can provide a viewer ample rewards—most importantly freedom from the heavy hand of “story”—there are risks. The absence of traditional narrative momentum, that altogether familiar feeling of the rise and fall of action, can leave a film sputtering, stalled, or straining to justify its length. Rosi’s film, also like many of Wiseman’s, feels like it has several endings—at one point late in Below the Clouds, the antiquarian and an interlocutor discuss the concept of “suspended time,” a neat phrase which refers to the relics they’re examining, but which cannot help but evoke a feeling that anyone who has paid glancing attention to the world in the last half-decade will be familiar. What a note to end on! Yet, after cycling through all his scenarios, and offering us similar moments that suggest winding down or closure, Rosi returns us to the antiquarian, again talking about time, and then undertakes yet another rotation. Rosi’s magic as a filmmaker lies in his selection and ordering process—his ability to create complex webs of meaning through editing is what sets his films apart from the glut of tripod-bound landscape films that coast on vibes and the occasional remarkable image. But toward the close of Beyond the Clouds it feels as though he’s adding scenes to complete a symmetrical design that the real lives on display haven’t demanded.
Rosi does allow himself one contrivance in Below the Clouds: in several sequences he stations his camera in a broken-down cinema. The seats are overturned, moldings crumbling, refuse is everywhere—it’s clear this structure hasn’t been operational in quite some time. Yet, somehow, images suddenly flicker on the screen. Though we later see an old projector aglow, humming in operation, I can’t help but suspect some digital trickery helped bring the theater back to life—a perfectly acceptable bit of chicanery. Most notable of the snippets Rosi has curated is drawn from the climax of Voyage to Italy, perhaps the greatest film set in Naples, in which estranged husband and wife Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders tour a Pompeiian excavation site. They meet a researcher who calmly describes his most recent work: a plaster cast of two lovers, locked in their death embrace for 2000 years, which shatters the couple yet ultimately helps bring them back together. It’s one of the many scenes from that crucial film that conjures vast ideas and timespans via simple, emotional means. The formal choices in Below the Clouds work toward similar ends. Like Rossellini (an admitted influence), Rosi is a searcher who has chosen a highly artificial process—filmmaking—as a tool to break through artifice and allow us to surface what's been buried right in front of us, all along.