Below the Clouds review – a ghostly yet luminous cinematic mosaic of Naples crowns a superb trio

Venice film festivalThere is a real end-of-days quality to Gianfranco Rosi’s utterly distinctive documentary of war, violence, cynicism and the climate crisis in an uneasy cityGianfranco 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). Continue reading...

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