His films about Rome’s ringroad and the islanders and refugees of Lampedusa have won awards. Now Gianfranco Rosi is completing his trilogy, capturing a Naples ‘that is not immediately there’
A uniform grey nimbostratus has blocked the rays of the London sun the day I speak to Gianfranco Rosi, but this consummately Italian film-maker is feeling 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.’ And I think that’s a beautiful image.” He gives a gracious nod to the blanket of grey outside the window. “I am sure there is one cloud over London today that has come straight from southern Italy.”
Rosi, 62, has earned his reputation as one of Europe’s most important documentary-makers with highly original and poetic portraits of Italian places. His 2013 film Sacro GRA – the first documentary to win the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival – followed a motley cast of characters who live or work on the ringroad that circles Rome. Fire at Sea, which scooped 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 perilously crowded boats at the height of the refugee crisis. It elevated Rosi to an elite circle of directors to have won the top prize at two of Europe’s three main film festivals.
His latest film, Naples-set Pompeii: Below the Clouds, completes the trilogy. But it also feels a deliberate bookend to the slew of films and TV series that have established the regional capital of Campania as the 2020s’ equivalent to 20s Berlin or 60s London. “I started this film with very little awareness of Naples,” says Rosi, who spent his childhood in Eritrea and Turkey and studied film in New York. “I was a tourist in a city that everybody loves, but I tried also to capture a Naples that is not immediately there.”
Shot in black and white, Rosi’s film makes Naples look entirely different to the gritty-but-lively, sun-flooded metropolis seen in Ferrante-adaptation My Brilliant Friend, crime series Gomorrah or Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God. No pizza, no mafia, no Maradona murals. Instead, it’s as if we are plonked into a frontier settlement on some alien planet, menaced by the unpredictable grumblings of the Campanian volcanic arc, which includes nearby Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields.
The extraterrestrial atmosphere is heightened courtesy of a saxophone soundtrack by Oscar-winning British composer Daniel Blumberg (The Brutalist), who made his instrument sound otherworldly by playing it back through an underwater speaker and re-recording it with a microphone positioned on Naples’ sandy beach. And there’s the fact that a large part of Rosi’s film takes place in the control room of the Naples fire brigade, which the residents call when they feel the floor shake beneath their feet.
Some are terrified, fearing for their loved ones. Others seem to long for a catastrophe.
Source: theguardian.com