There is a distinct pleasure watching what seems to be formless chaos slowly resolving into order. This is a dark room effect: observing an image developing in a pool of chemicals, a metaphor that is made manifest in some scenes in Gianfranco Roso's Pompeii: Under the Clouds (2025). This effect is also given a thematic dimension by Roso's persistent use of haze, clouds steamy fumes gushing from volcanic vents -- imagery that also operates as a primordial chaos gradually resolving into coherence. What first seems inchoate is slowly revealed as highly structured -- every picture in the movie resonates with other images, echoing them or rhyming or opposing earlier shots in a sort of dialectical montage. The film is as highly determined as a lyric poem in which each word matches and illumines every other word. It's not easy to articulate what Pompeii: Under the Clouds means because its strategy is to suggest a system of correspondences that are visual and not literary. For instance, one of the themes of the movie involves ruins and damaged sculpture, tons of wrecked marble figures that apparently have been dug out of Naples' dirt. In the basement of a museum displaying spectacular marble figures intact in its galleries, there are hoarded piles of stone heads, legs, feet, and torsos, all sorted into macabre-looking troves. Someone says that the piles membra disjecta look like ex-votos and, indeed, we have earlier seen a church with prostrate worshippers inching like worms across the terrazzo floors under displays of votive objects -- piles of knees, elbows, heads and breasts in plaster form offered to the Saints in the hope of healing. In an early sequence, after witnessing a fumarole agitated with ropes of mud cast into the air (only partially glimpsed), we see two horse-carts mysteriously drawn by their animals across chest-deep water in the Bay. (What are the horses doing in the water?) Later, we see the horses and carts clip-clopping against an ancient Roman road -- the sound of the hooves is very loud. In other shots, we see the two horse carts trotting around a race-track or otherwise marching down narrow lanes. There is no clue as to what these horses mean or why they punctuate the action, but this visual theme imparts an aura of modest surrealism to the film. A Ukrainian freighter is off-loading corn at a big grain elevator in the harbor. The Syrian crew works to scrape all the corn out of the vast, stadium-sized hold. In a few days, they will return to Ukraine (Odessa) where they will be bombed again. The slowly emptying cargo hold looks like, and rhymes with, the ruins excavated by archaeologists around the city -- these are big dark pits where workers scrape and shovel the earth (just like the Syrians empty the bin of the ship.) Ultimately, the viewer concludes that there is nothing in the movie that isn't connected in some overt, or occult, way to other images and motifs. (The movie is shot in black and white and runs 115 minutes).
The film establishes a number of nodes or locations from which the system of correspondences emanate. There is the basement of the museum filled with broken statuary, visited periodically by white robed technicians (their garments mirror the white marble of the sculptures) who illumine the objects with flashlights -- the best way to display them someone says. Flashlights are used by several firefighters and a prosecutor who creep along subterranean catacombs, tunnels made by assiduous tomb-robbers. Flashlights also illumine a great underground labyrinth where a tour guide, speaking in English, shows buried artifacts and architecture embedded in the walls made of sedimented and compressed volcanic ash. Above the claustrophobic tunnels, the prosecutors in helicopters survey the crowded city looking for evidence of looting and tomb-robbing. The Syrians are emptying their huge ship, creating neat pyramidal heaps of corn that mimic the appearance and shape of Vesuvius. Meanwhile, students from Tokyo University are deep in pits excavating an ancient villa. An old man named Titti,runs an antiquarian bookstore and seems to tutor students after school. Each afternoon a dozen or so kids, some of them very young and others teenagers gather at tables in his back room. We see one boy curiously pawing Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. At the end of the movie, Titti is reading that book, very close to the end of the massive tome, something that surprises and impresses a teenage boy who seems to be collecting Neapolitan recipes. Fires break out in the city and have to be fought by the municipal fire fighters. The fire fighters operate a call center. There is an earthquake and dozens of people call terrified that Vesuvius is about to erupt again. Some people call for the firemen to rescue cats or because they are suffering pain or because they can't lift a sibling who has fallen and can't get up. One guy always calls at 11:10 am to verify the time. These mini-operas conducted by phone call are comical at first, but the desperation grows. Hoodlums set a whole neighborhood and the adjacent trees afire. At the end of the movie, a woman pleads for help as her husband beats her with her children shrieking in the background. The woman will not leave her husband, she says, because the "children love their poppa." The harrowing call is too much for the call center worker who waits for the carabinieri to arrive and, then, walks off-camera. The mysterious horses trot along the street. The volcano is hidden in clouds. Rain falls and the Syrian sailors look out across the wet city. In Pompeii's ruins, tourists wander around with umbrellas and streams flow along the gutters of the ancient roads. An empty commuter train rattles along a track, slipping through a cut in the rock that is like one of the villa excavations in the town. This shot mirrors images of the train similarly empty setting out for its run early, in the darkness before dawn.
Naples, under the volcano, seems poised at the brink of perpetual ruin, And it is already ruined, a city of artifacts, crumbling walls, and obliterating mists. The city seems ringed by menacing volcanic vents and mud geysers. It is undercut by the tunnels of tomb robbers and the ground is full of voids that plaster can fill to embody the corpses that were once entombed in the pyroclastic flows. An abandoned movie theater, crumbling before our eyes, shows a documentary about Pompeii and scenes from Voyage to Italy, Rossellini's film about the breakup of a marriage starring Ingrid Bergman and George Saunders -- we are shown the scene in the movie in which the plaster casts of a couple embracing in death are uncovered. The theater is empty. In the final part of the movie, it has fallen apart completely and images are no longer projected. The film's epigraph is: Vesuvius produces all the clouds in the world, words by Jean Cocteau.
