Awesome doctor about Life near Mount Vesubio

Gianfranco Rosi makes documentaries like nobody else, which can explain why he has received the main awards in the main festivals: Berlin’s golden bear for Fire in the seaThe golden lion of Venice for Serious sacrum – They are generally reserved for fiction works.

Filmed for several years, sometimes in remote places, his films are aesthetically immersive experiences that immerse us in a strange world that is, in fact, ours. Whether with the chronicle of the road that surrounds Rome, the war areas in the Middle East, a community outside the network in California or African migrants who arrive in Lampedusa, their films play as exquisite ethnographic studies of our planet that were made by an alien species. Everything we see in them can be familiar, but everything seems different and new.

The director returns to Italy with his last work, Under the clouds (Sotto Le Nuvole), for which he spent three years documenting life at the foot of Mount Vesubio. The famous and still very active volcano was, of course, the site of a massive eruption in the 79 DC that annihilated the city of Pompeya, whose buildings and bodies were preserved under the ashes for centuries, until they were excavated as prefected relics intact of antiquity.

The surprisingly filmed film of Rosi visits the precious ruins of Pompeii, but also ventures into the clandestine tunnels under them, dug by tomb thieves that sell antiques in the black market. Then jump high in the sky, floating on the Gulf of Naples in a helicopter to reveal an in danger if you see once again exploded. Then, Rosi is kidnapped in a 911 call center while residents fear the worst after a small earthquake, then jumps outside to film local young people who set fire to the streets.

As the magma that is constantly boiling under the volcano, Under the clouds It reveals a place that always seems to the edge of the disaster. And yet, people have managed to adapt.

In a scene, we follow Japanese archaeologists who carefully dig the human remains in one of the Pompeii sites. Near, firefighters investigate the entrance to another desecrated grave. In another place, cautious teenagers study after school with an intellectual who ages The misérablestransmitting knowledge to the next generation. As an insightful historian puts it poetically while wandering through a storage area loaded with invaluable Roman raids and statues: “Time destroys everything, but it also retains everything.”

There are no direct interviews in the Rosi movie, or any voiceover or comments. The images, full of glorious in black and white by the director himself, and the edition, by the regular cutter Fabrizio Federico (Martin Eden), They are what the story tells us. Juxtapositions and reasons abound, which allows the spectator to make connections between contemporary Italy and the Roman Empire, between what happens below the Vesubio and the events that take place around the rest of the world.

A huge oil company arrives from Odessa to distribute the grain, which pours in silos like the ashes that rained on Pompeii. A crew uses brooms to push that grain from the walls of the ship’s helmet, as well as the excavators that use brushes to dust off the relics in the excavation sites. A Japanese professor gives lectures on ancient wars on food and resources, while Syrian sailors talk about war in Ukraine, as well as the one that destroyed his homeland. A news presenter talks about the “baby gangs sowing panic among citizens” of Naples, while tourists observe panic faces of Pompeya’s residents while they met their destinations.

Time stops and jumps through the times in Under the cloudsthat reveals how much our world has been transformed during the millennia, while remains the same. As a filmmaker, Rosi acts as a guide and conservationist, making films that can one day be discovered as statues under the ground, unearthed by future archaeologists who try to understand how we live.

Of the many memorable images in the last divine work of the director, which perhaps stands out more is a crumbled theater where file images are projected on the screen, including the famous Pompeii sequence by Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy. The cinema, apparently, has also become a ruin, a relic of another era that, like any ancient art, speaks of both the past and the present.