Between the gulf of Naples and Vesuvius, a journey through space, time and memory, between what Naples has been and what it could be, like a kind of giant time-travel machine. Gianfranco Rosi talks at a round table with the Italian press about his documentary Below the Clouds [+lire aussi :
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interview : Gianfranco Rosi
fiche film], in competition for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Referring to the title of the film, Rosi explains: “When I read Jean Cocteau’s phrase, ‘Vesuvius creates all the clouds of the world’, I imagined these clouds that travel and become a very strong narrative element, they tell the story of Naples, which this way becomes a universal city”. In reality, the city is seen very little. “The original choice was to shoot in the Vesuvian villages, in the underground of the MANN, the National Archeological Museum of Naples, which hosts the treasures that come from the Phlegraean Fields, Pompei, Ercolano: 2,500 years of history. I wanted to film the other Naples, that of Vesuvius seen from the opposite side. The lesser known, the one more connected to the sense of the past, with another dialect, other culinary habits.

But why the choice to shoot in black and white? “I wanted the sense of modesty to help me to get out of that Naples that’s part of our imaginary, and the black and white was a narrative rather than an aesthetic choice. We almost wanted to create a contemporary archive of images, the present that becomes archive at the very moment at which it unfolds”.

Was it therefore necessary to find a new way of observing reality? “If you want to shoot in black and white, you have to learn to look in black and white, which means capturing all the shades of grey. The clouds were a kind of protection for me, they allow you to shoot at 360 degrees because you never have shadows, you don’t have too much light, they help you find the right distance from what you are telling. With black and white, the presence of the clouds is even more important, it’s the only way to have an extremely contrasted result, with the shades of grey that are the story itself. My assistant Alberto took me to the most hidden and unexpected places, and we sometimes waited for weeks for the right light, with the presence of the clouds.

Three years to complete the film, which were necessary to collect all the stories; the editing work must also have been complicated. “You never know what will happen when you start shooting, there is always this very strong tension. Since you don’t have a screenplay, nothing written, all is always very improvised and reality often surpasses any expectations. For all my previous films, I started editing at the end of shooting. With this film, I had to edit with Fabrizio Federico during shooting, as soon as I had enough material. The film has therefore experienced this constant rewriting in parallel to the shooting. This helped synthetise and create connections and match cuts between one story and another. Everytime I shoot a new film, it is a challenge to find a new language, to experiment with different approaches that create a new story form.”

Why did you feel the need to insert the street teacher? What did he have in common with the other characters in the documentary? Rois answers that that, too, was a casual encounter. “Torre Annunziata is a place with shops suspended in the 1950s and 1960s. Teacher Titti gives collective lessons in his antic shop, which absolutely no longer sells anything, but he offers the kids from this difficult neighbourhood his time, his knowledge and his patience. What all the characters that appear in the film have in common is devotion. A secular devotion that consists in giving oneself to someone, in doing something for others. Civilisation starts from there. And teacher Titti is a wonderful example of that”.

Finally, we ask the director about the silent places in the film and the music created by Oscar-winner Daniel Blumberg. “For me, silence is crucial, it’s the link between one story and another. Talking about the silence was one of the challenges of the film. I also isolated it through sounds. Daniel recorded some saxophones in London and we reproduced and re-recorded them underwater in Baia, where I shot the final scene of the film”.