Frederick Wiseman, the greatest of nonfiction filmmakers, died last month, at the age of ninety-six. So there’s a special poignancy — even a measure of consolation — in the arrival of a new work, from another source entirely, that exemplifies the intelligence and the rigor of Wiseman’s methods. “Pompei: Below the Clouds” is the eighth feature from the Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi, and it’s hardly the first of his films to generate such comparisons. Like Wiseman, Rosi has long eschewed voice-over narration, expository montages, direct-to-camera interviews, and other conventional formal strategies. This approach is frequently mistaken for a pose of journalistic neutrality or, worse, godlike omniscience, but it produces something livelier and far more human — an impassioned hyper-attentiveness. Also like Wiseman, Rosi serves as his own director of photography, and he explores an overarching subject — often a place or a series of places — with a roving curiosity whose energies are at once concentrated by the unwavering calm of the camera and dispersed by the briskness of the editing. (Unlike Wiseman, though, Rosi does not exclusively edit his own footage.)
In “Pompei: Below the Clouds,” which Rosi shot in black-and-white, with extraordinarily beautiful results, the camera moves on occasion, though only when it’s stationed on a vessel that is itself in motion — in this case, the Circumvesuviana, a network of trains running out of Naples and around Mt. Vesuvius. Narratively, too, Rosi rides the rails; he and the film’s editor, Fabrizio Federico, whisk us from one strand to the next, trusting us to discern the subtle, almost musical rhythm that emerges. Here is a room filled with statues and artifacts, rescued from the ruins of Pompeii. And here is a staggering glimpse of an excavation site, revealing a hollowed-out city beneath a city, where a team of Japanese archeologists devote themselves to the slow process of recovery. Down into the earth we go, into one of numerous secret tunnels carved out by tomb raiders greedy for subterranean plunder. But then up we rise again, to a majestic overhead view of Naples, with the gulf to the south and, in the distance, the looming dual peaks of Vesuvius. The mountain is a continual reminder of the famous eruption of 79 A.D. — which buried Pompeii and other settlements in ash — and also an implicit threat of disasters to come. (The title pointedly uses the spelling “Pompei,” referring not to the ancient city but to a modern one in the Naples metropolitan area.)
Rosi is fascinated — though not, it seems, overly perturbed — by the anxious bustle of life in a tectonic war zone. He regularly drops in on an emergency-call center, where workers patiently respond to all manner of residents’ queries, some as trivial as a child’s prank call, others as harrowing as a cry for help from a woman suffering domestic abuse. Most typically, though, we hear panicked concerns about earthquakes, which occur with alarming frequency. (Or perhaps not so alarming: in surely the film’s most unrepentantly Italian moment, a woman laments that a tremor struck while she was cooking a ragù.) On such inherently unstable ground, the composure of each individual shot feels all the more deliberate. This has often been Rosi’s way; he offers a contemplative ballast, a decisive counterweight to conditions of agitation and flux. In “Sacro GRA” (2013), he held steady on different locations along a heavily trafficked highway that encircles Rome. He set his camera more freely adrift in the Oscar-nominated “Fire at Sea” (2016), though every movement carried immense gravity and purpose. The film’s focus was Lampedusa, a small island that has become a major port of call for migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and you could sense Rosi’s determination to capture an overwhelming crisis without himself becoming unmoored.
