“Was that an earthquake?” Italy’s great psychogeographer deals with Vesuvius’s seldom-seen Naples tourists | films

A uniform gray plaster blocked out the London sunshine on the day I spoke to Gianfranco Rossi, but this skilled Italian director feels right at home. “When Jean Cocteau visited Naples, he wrote a letter to his mother in which he said: ‘Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.’” I think this is a beautiful picture. He gives a gracious nod to the gray blanket outside the window. “I’m sure there’s one cloud over London today that came straight from southern Italy.”

Rossi, 62, has earned his reputation as one of Europe’s most important documentary filmmakers with highly original and poetic images of Italian places. His 2013 film Sacro GRA – the first documentary to win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival – follows a diverse group of characters who live or work on the ring road that circles Rome. Fire at Sea, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale three years later, was a study of the inhabitants of the island of Lampedusa and the people who arrived there on dangerously overcrowded boats at the height of the refugee crisis. It elevated Rosie into the circle of elite directors to win top prizes at two of Europe’s three major film festivals.

Double quote Some people are terrified, fearing for their loved ones – others seem to yearn for disaster

His latest film, set in Naples, Pompeii: Under the Clouds, completes the trilogy. But it also seems like a deliberate end to the slew of films and TV series that made the regional capital of Campania the equivalent of Berlin in the 1920s or London in the 1960s. “I started this film with very little awareness of Naples,” says Rossi, who spent his childhood in Eritrea and Turkey and studied film in New York. “I was a tourist in a city that everyone loved, but I also tried to photograph a Naples that wasn’t immediately there.”

Street teacher Titi with his students under the clouds. Photo: Venice Film Festival

Shot in black and white, Rossi’s film makes Naples look very different from the gritty but lively, sun-soaked city seen in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the crime series Gomorrah or Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God. No pizza, no mafia, and no Maradona murals. Instead, it’s as if we’ve been plunged into a frontier settlement on an alien planet, threatened by the unpredictable rumblings of the Campanian volcanic arc, which includes nearby Mount Vesuvius and the phlegraine fields.

The extraterrestrial atmosphere is heightened by a saxophone soundtrack by Oscar-winning British composer Daniel Blomberg (The Brutalist), who made his instrument sound otherworldly by playing it back through an underwater speaker and re-recording it with a microphone placed on a sandy Naples beach. And there’s the fact that much of Rossi’s film takes place in the Naples fire brigade’s control room, which residents call when they feel the ground shaking beneath their feet.

Some feel terrified and afraid for their loved ones. Others seem to yearn for disaster, in a way that makes “Under the Clouds” reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s documentary “La Soufrière,” about a volcanic eruption in Guadeloupe, on which the entire film is based but which never actually happens. “Was that an earthquake?” one caller asks impatiently. “Will there be another one?”

“Vesuvius has become a legendary figure for me”… Rosie. Photography: Stephanie Luce – Reuters

“Vesuvius became for me a mythical figure, a god,” says Rosi, who spent four years in the city at the foot of the volcano to shoot his film. “It’s like Shiva – a destroyer but also a regenerator. The volcano destroyed Pompeii, destroying 3,000 years of history, but it also preserved it in the ashes.”

Rossi’s working methods bring him closer to the British psychogeographers of the turn of the millennium – to the books of Ian Sinclair and the films of Patrick Keeler. But the psychology that Under the Clouds attempts to excavate is not subterranean — it exists in the minds of the people who work in the city.

There is Titi, the “street teacher” who patiently teaches his students algebra, English grammar, and human geography from his antique shop; Maria, the curator of the National Archaeological Museum who guards the unearthed heads and busts with maternal pride; a group of Japanese archaeologists who spent 20 years diligently excavating Villa Augustia; The captain of a Syrian ship docked in the port with a shipment of Ukrainian grain on board.

Maria takes care of the museum’s sculptures. Photo: Venice Film Festival

Their photography has a dramatic quality, partly an intended effect of the monochrome photography and still-panel composition, and perhaps partly due to the natural local mood – un dramma napoletano is an Italian proverb for someone who makes a mountain out of a molehill. But Rosie insists that none of these encounters were staged. “There is not a single fictional moment in my film,” he says. “But I love when people think that, because I always try to straddle that fine line between documentary and fiction without actually imagining it.”

As in his previous films, Rossi strings his characters together until their preoccupations begin to mesh with one another. Fire at Sea was a film about ways of seeing or not seeing: the poor eyesight of its central character, schoolboy Samuel, is mirrored in European authorities turning a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis unfolding on their shores. At the same time, the recurring themes in Under the Clouds are also political: poverty, violence, and war. Teacher Titi tells his students about Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables as firefighters rush to put out a fire started by disaffected youth. A woman calls the emergency hotline from her bathroom, with an angry drunk husband on the other side of the closed door.

“There is this kind of contradiction that I noticed throughout the four years I lived in Naples,” Rosi recalls. “There is a constant feeling of tragedy, but there is also a feeling that the tragedy has already passed and that we lived through it without realizing what was happening. It is a state of mind.”

Japanese archaeologists working at the site of Villa Augustia. Photo: Venice Film Festival

Despite the pervasive sense of doom, it is a state of mind that also arouses sympathy. “When I was editing the film, I asked myself what all these people I’ve met over the years have in common. What they all have in common is a sense of dedication, of giving of themselves to others.”

In the Roman Empire, a Japanese archaeologist tells a group of tourists at one point in the film, the port of Naples was crucial because it spread grain from places of abundance to places of shortage, thus preventing wars. Rossi heads up to the captain of the Syrian ship and tells his wife that his ship was about to be bombed in Odessa, and yes, of course he will be back there again.

“All the characters in the film have this quality, a kind of secular devotion. I think that’s where civilization begins.”

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