Jay Rohr
Gianfranco Rosi is a documentarian with a unique gaze. It’s an ability to collect fragments of the world and compose them into thought-provoking cinema. This talent has earned him numerous awards over the years. In addition to the prestigious Golden Lion, he’s been given the Prix Arte, Golden Bear, and Academy Award nomination.
His latest work Pompeii: Below the Clouds is a masterful composition that takes audiences into a dreamlike impressionistic display of suspended time. The black-and-white film captures the past, present, and implications of the future, not only for Naples, Italy where it’s centered, but perhaps the whole of humanity. And like all great documentaries, Pompeii is an assembly of facts that asks the audience to draw their own conclusions.
Recently, Rosi gave us a few minutes of his time. We discussed his film as well as an overarching philosophy when it comes to his work. Below is an abridged transcript, with the entirety of the available on YouTube below. The unabridged conversation features Rosi elaborating on this project plus past endeavors, not to mention some interesting occurrences while shooting.
Film Obsessive: When it comes to your film, Pompeii, Blow the Clouds, what do you hope that people are going to get out of watching this film?
Gianfranco Rosi: I don’t like to put statement, or things in my work. I like to present many situations. I like to say like almost a constellation situation where the viewer somehow had to make their own connection, and they have to participate directly.
For me, it’s always about showing the complexity of things, the complexity of life. So, in a way, I don’t want to have one answer. If a certain number of people are seeing my film, let’s say 1,000 people are watching my film, I would like to have 1,000 different answers of what the film is about. For me, it’s always about creating a space, a dialogue between the footage, myself and the audience, to leave that space of interaction with the audience.
But then maybe, at the end of the film, I would like the viewer to ask maybe one question to themselves. Is still there hope for our so-called civilization? Or sooner or later, we will too submerge, like the Roman statues in the film, underwater in the final shot of the film.
That makes me wonder, though, did you have a certain intention when you were putting this together? Or were you just trying to capture material and see where the story took you?
When I started the project, I don’t like to write a script. I think the script is the death of documentaries, the death of approaching reality. Reality keeps changing in front of us. For me, what is important is to immerse in this long journey into a place. And I work as a one-person crew, so I can have the freedom and the space to move.
I wanted to show in this film the complexity of the city like Naples, a city that somehow reflects history, the past, the present. But what mostly I wanted to do is creating a film that constantly gives the idea of suspended time. And so everything somehow moves towards that direction in the film. I wanted to make a film about time.
Then everything started with shooting in black and white, decided that black and white was not just an aesthetic choice, but a narrative choice, because somehow black and white invites the imagination, it asks the eye to see in a different way things. And that was a choice that I did from the beginning.
I used archival in a space that used to be a cinema before. So that it’s a cinema that is completely destroyed, doesn’t exist anymore, but somehow I wanted that to become like a form of a collective memory, where the past could come alive again through the screen, through this dusty light that is there, that is not really a projection, but just the light of the sun and the dust that is in that cinema. And in this abandoned theater, you know, for me, it becomes like an archaeological site, where the past, with the image, with the memory of the image that was collecting, that’s an existing screen becomes part of the present again.
You have a lot of different, very interesting locations throughout this film. Did you ever have any trouble getting access to some of these places, like the historical dig sites or where the sculptures are?
Yes, one of the most difficult things in the field, which never happened to me, Naples is an archaeological site. Everywhere you move, it’s an archaeological from Pompeii to Colonno to the villas to the tomb robbers to the prosecutor to the fire department. So, for the first time in all my work, which usually I work very free and I have no need of permit, my producer, Donatella Palero, had to do an incredible outstanding job of getting the permit.
You know, also to film in Pompeii was so difficult because in Pompeii they’re used to working with a big channel, BBC, CNN, going there to do to film. And they stay there like 2 weeks and they pay a fee. For me, I had to have access for the entire time that I was there, which was 3 1/2 year. I had to have access with a certain light, with a certain condition, with a certain thing. Because when I film, I need to film with clouds, with rain, with all this element of weather, I cannot predict. So I have to have a free access whenever the conditional right, so that was not easy to get it, so it became like a very difficult things to bargain somehow, and then finally my producer was successful to have a deal that I could have entered in Pompeii anytime.
Besides the headache of having permits, considering the fact that you’ve won multiple prestigious awards for the work that you’ve done, has that helped make getting projects going any easier over the years?
Probably yes, it did, although I was very lucky for me for my first film, and I don’t like to put the division between documentary and fiction. For me, it’s always a work of cinema, and I like to use the language of cinema in all my work, from Boatman to Below Sea Level to Sicario [El Sicario, Room 164] to Sacro GRA to Fire at Sea, Notturno. And I took sometime five years, four years, three years because I was working, putting my own money in order to make that film, time and things. Then after I won the Golden Lion with Sacro GRA, things became easier.
What have you got in the pipeline for the future?
It’s a film that I wrote three years ago, and I got immediately the funding to do it, but this is a very extreme, especially now, dangerous location. So, in these days, when I was in New York, try to avoid to go in that place and be probably my last journey, my last film, because it’s a very, very dangerous place to be now. It’s not easy to get the permit to do, so I cannot tell you what is about the film, but the moment I get the permit to do it, then it will be public. I cannot say what is going to be the film because otherwise it will be difficult for me to get that permit.
(while saying goodbyes Gianfranco interjected)
We didn’t talk about the music. It’s so important for me. I never work with score in my work, and all my films, they have no music, they have no theme. But in this film, I had the necessity to create this idea of present, past, future, suspended time, the history and all that element, I needed to create a certain slab of sound that was not really the idea of music score, but more like a soundscape.
I have a very long and important relationship with Daniel Bloomberg. I always love the way he experiments with music. So he knew all my film, and I knew that he was the only one able to do what I was asking, which was somehow for me not having a traditional score but something that could create a texture, a fabric of sound where instrument became unrecognizable.
To a musician, to say, I want the instrument unrecognizable is quite a hazard, but he understood immediately. All the sound, the music that we have on the film is being recorded in the water. And so there’s this sax, this improvisation of sax things that is all we recorded where I shot the last scene of the film underwater where the statues are.
So for me, the score that Daniel created, it helps the film to have that sense of suspension or that sense of present and past, all those elements, he was really able to do it in his score. He did really incredible work that I wanted to acknowledge and to thank him because he gave the film what the film was missing.
