The Brooklyn Rail

Fire, water, air. And then, time—a synonym for “truth” and “possibility.” The Gulf of Naples is an enchanted place where the past meets the present through the colliding elements: the lava of the volcano, the waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea, the ever-shifting clouds. Three years after his celebrated film In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis, acclaimed director Gianfranco Rosi returns with Below the Clouds, his cinematic exploration of Naples. At the center of the documentary, history and present converge in different slices of life and time: ​​archaeologists and artists, firefighters and scientists. Different stories, one film. Below the Clouds, which premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize, was subsequently screened at the New York Film Festival.

The documentary illuminates the Gulf of Naples through a narrative composed of shadows and contrasts, emphasized by Rosi’s stunning black-and-white cinematography. This aesthetic choice is deliberate, as black-and-white has the power to transform reality into something else entirely—much like the work of photographers such as Vivian Maier, Elliott Erwitt, and Robert Doisneau. Rosi himself commented on this decision in Venice, stating, “Black-and-white was the first idea for the film, a necessity. There was no script. We had to mitigate the sun of Naples.” The result is a Naples viewers have never seen before, far from the usual stereotypes of the city: crime, urban decay, or pizza and food. Everything is softer, almost muted, creating a suspended and ethereal atmosphere. Rosi observes this unique place through the stories and voices of its people. Speaking about the film, he explained that he “lived for three years on the horizon of Vesuvius, digging into time.”

Below the Clouds is a still, objective, placid, and patient work. Rosi rewrites the Neapolitan aesthetic by stripping away color, allowing his camera to capture the nuances of its human geography. Like all of Rosi’s movies, Below the Clouds isn’t merely a documentary, it emphasizes the image as a narrative structure, allowing the visual elements to speak for themselves and exalt in their poetic nature.

At 114 minutes, Below the Clouds expands and extends, tracing the life, death, and miracles of a profoundly beautiful human tapestry. The territory is populated by locals, tourists, devotees, saints, and sinners. On one side are the “tombaroli,” grave robbers who are greedy for memory, and, on the other, the firefighters—sleepless, stoic, and patient sentinels who answer hundreds of emergency calls. This is a land that trembles continuously, shaken by constant quakes. From the Phlegraean Fields to Pozzuoli, Rosi takes the viewer into the heavy and restless breath of a land resilient and resistant to the past, a place where everything changes without changing. Ancient sites like Pompeii and Herculaneum—open-air tombs and magical, tragic places—serve as a measure of the magnitude of time in the film.

Through Fabrizio Federico’s cross-cutting, various stories intertwine: Syrian ships arrive from bombed-out Odessa, unloading Ukrainian grain in Torre Annunziata; Titti, a street teacher, reads Les Misérables to his students, explaining how terrible war is; a group of Japanese archaeologists dig through the plundered remains of the magnificent Villa Augustea in Somma Vesuviana; and scholars with flashlights guard statues hidden in the belly of the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, navigating an army of forgotten stone. The scattered, decontextualized marble heads and bodies are a perfect allegory for the evisceration of a Naples that no longer exists, although the pain and the beauty of the past are still present in the contemporary city. The people become characters, like figures in a Nativity scene.

“After deciding which place to tell a story about, the encounters came, always unpredictable,” the director explained during the Venice press conference. “All these different stories in the film match and belong to one another, even without any connection. Perhaps what links them is the devotion of the people, the willingness to give themselves to others. I saw this in Naples every day, in every situation.” The film is a composition of notes, with spaces punctuated by silence, time, and nature. The music was composed by British artist Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for The Brutalist (2024). However, the soundtrack avoids conventional music, approaching sound as a landscape element. Rosi commented on his collaboration with Blumberg: “We tried to create islands of sound that would transform the scenes and make them a little more abstract, suspended within the rest of the film. All that sound and the musical element become a soundscape, not a normal soundtrack.”

As time passes, revealing the city’s spiritual and transcendental side, the real protagonist of Below the Clouds appears to be the legendary Circumvesuviana railway that “crosses the landscape.” Old, clattering trains screech along rusty tracks for eighty-six miles, connecting the entire Gulf of Naples. It’s a journey within a journey, like an endless ride on the New York City subway’s D line, from Coney Island to the Bronx and back. Aboard the dirty, noisy carriages, we find everyone from pirates and sailors to criminals and the innocent, lost and found.

In the background, as seen in his 2013 film Sacro GRA, Rosi’s filmmaking connects to photographic art: clouds come to life, chasing each other between the sky and the sea, and illuminated windows at night transform the landscape from above into a giant pinball machine. The director’s camera captures and recounts an explosive authenticity, a mix of fatalism and irony. From Rosi’s perspective, the Gulf of Naples is the link between East and West—a kind of time machine where the Roman, Bourbon, and modern eras converge. Yet, merciless time, captured in the film’s fixed shots, both destroys and preserves. This human metaphor brings the audience back to the root of things, grasping their mystery, and ultimately allowing them to see the invisible.

A place of souls, statues, and objects, Naples is where the Pompeian metaphor resembles that of an abandoned old cinema projecting Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia. Pompeii and an old movie theater: two places to safeguard, two places destroyed, yet still full of art and life. It’s the director’s homage to Rossellini, a moment to be seized, and the art of cinema to be protected—just as the Tokyo archaeologists protect the bones of a thousand-year-old dog and a firefighter in Fuorigrotta does his best. In Rosi’s powerful artistic interpretation, the Gulf of Naples becomes the entrance to eternity, situated between the earth, the sea, and the sky. Meanwhile, century after century, “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.”