Below the Clouds

Between Vesuvius and the Gulf of Naples, the earth trembles from time to time as the fumaroles of the Phlegraean (burning) Fields pollute the air. The ruins that lie beneath – Pompeii, Herculaneum, the buried Roman villas – speak of a future buried by the passage of time. From these traces of history and memories of the underworld, a lesser-known Naples emerges in black and white images that are filled with a subdued vitality. Gianfranco Rosi spent three years living and filming beneath the Vesuvius’ horizon, marking traces of the past, excavating time, the remains of everyday lives. Observing the clouds and smoke that loom over the Phlegraean fields, he embraces the coincidentality of encounters, places, and given situations. His shots are formed as stories come to life. Between the sea, sky and volcano, a new archive of the true and the possible is revealed.

Naples is usually filmed in bright Mediterranean colors and light. But Rosi chose to show it in black and white. Cocteau once wrote that Vesuvius produces all the clouds in this world. These clouds led Rosi to the title and aesthetics of this film. Under the clouds, the light changes its nature: shadows disappear and everything turns up in a new form. Black and white force us to look at the presented places, bodies and gestures in a different way, in search of the deeper truth that they hide in their immanent image.

All of Rosi’s films (such as Fire at Sea) are situated in a specific locality, but reflect the unyielding currents of global politics. Below the Clouds shows how the wars in Syria and Ukraine are carving unexpected traces into the texture of the city. Documenting places of transition and connection, however fragile, Rosi asks important questions and imagines a space in which intersecting tracts become meeting points and strongholds of the film form. In doing so, he treats the margin as the area of ​​contact and interaction, a possible passage.

The Naples valley is a place that constantly moves between surface and depth: ruins, underground excavations, clouds, fumaroles, tremors of the earth. But it is also shaped by the everyday glances exchanged between people: children, archaeologists, teachers, firefighters, sailors. The territory functions as a transit zone between what is and what could be. Below the Clouds offers a glimpse into a world that hides rather than reveals, and whose inhabitants levitate between past and present, between light and shadow.