Director: Gianfranco Rosi
Here at The Lost Highway Hotel, any new film from Gianfranco Rosi is kind of a big deal. The Italian documentarian has honed a style over the years, from making delicate enquiries on seemingly dangerous fringes of society (Below Sea Level; El Sicario, Room 164) to an increasingly spartan observational quietude, which reached a zenith with 2020’s study of violence in potentia Notturno. If that film was based in the apprehension of human explosions of chaos, Pompei: Below the Clouds manifests a reckoning with nature itself; Naples in the shadow of Vesuvius.
Shot in achingly beautiful monochrome (credited to Rosi himself), he presents Jean Cocteau’s own prior marvels at the volcano as screened before a deserted and dilapidated cinema screening room, and it is with some sadness that Pompei: Below the Clouds skips a theatrical run in the UK, landing direct-to-streaming via its own distributor MUBI. It’s a disservice to a two-hour showcase of sumptuous images, collected and arranged with scale in mind.
While the potential for eruption creates a shadow from the mountain all of its own, Rosi’s film isn’t limited to some kind of artistic geologiical survey. His is a sprawling portrait of Naples from various vantages, be they public transport, shopfronts or the cavernous interiors of labyrinthine museums where recovered artefacts are catalogued and contained in darkened supply rooms like weapons of mass destruction.
Actual caverns appear in short order thereafter as we follow a fire brigade team as they descend into the earth. A paucity of oxygen curtails the expedition which – in black and white and with such limited light sources – is effectively claustrophobic. The following scenes provide some context that officials are investigation a vast network of subterranean tunnels that stretch below the city, that have evidence of recent human activity, suggestive of a literal societal underground, looters of artefacts like those found in Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, perhaps.
It speaks to a general fear of eruption from beneath that still troubles the region. When a minor earthquake strikes, people call the fire department to check if it’s Vesuvius. Others call to enquire what the time is, as though shocked out of the present.
The city’s history is all over Below the Clouds, an ongoing study; archaeology as therapy or the reconciliation of an immovable genetic trauma. Rosi has us patiently observe this ongoing process, stone-by-stone, a trowel of dirt at a time, and the scope of this search within the earth for understanding sits in the matrix of the picture. In galleries, masterful statues of the adonises of legend connect to the cruder mummified remains of those who were caught in the lava flows that overran the city so many centuries ago. Still lives of a different kind. While slow-developing photographs of such relics show us images of the past materialising in Rosi’s present.
There’s a great deal to admire here and, as previously in Rosi’s work, the hushed sonisphere stirs up a widespread sense of contemplative reverence. Between that and the handsomeness of the images, one almost glosses over the relative repetition and ponderousness of some of the connective tissue as Below the Clouds stretches out to near two hours. While it feels more thematically consistent than something like Viktor Kossakovsky’s similarly minded doc Architecton, the sprawl is occasionally undisciplined, even mystifying. The weightlifting Syrians, for instance, seem mainly to provide a comparative ambivalence to the dangers felt by the locals, considering they’ve recently arrived from Ukraine.
I’d still like to see Rosi better represented in the UK – a boxset perhaps? Anyone? – and the recurring images here of a desolate cinema feel glumly prescient, telling of a different kind of apocalypse in the making should we not properly tender the importance of the theatrical release for experiences of transcendent bliss. For now this is another pensive tableau from Rosi, as elliptical as it is hyper-specific in its investigation of a niche and precarious microclimate. A further appreciation of worlds within worlds.
The Lost Highway Hotel 