There must be a certain level of anxiety that comes with living in Naples, in the shadow of Vesuvius. It’s not just that it’s an active volcano that can blow its top at any minute, but also that it’s done so time and again throughout history, and that the most famous eruption — the one that destroyed the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 CE and preserved them in ash — is now a world-famous tourist attraction. Visitors can flee from the homes and bodies of ancient ancestors who died in terror, suffocating on ash and toxic gases, but it could happen to you and yours tomorrow.Filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi skillfully captures that unease in Below The Clouds, shooting in elegant black and white that gives the film a dreamlike quality (he even opens with an epigraph by surrealist Jean Cocteau). The director darts between various people and places in the Southern Italian metropolis, capturing a wide swathe of civic institutions and experiences.The city’s particularities surface in the process. The local carabinieri investigate illegal tunnels used for breaking into ancient tombs. The fire department monitors seismic activity emanating from the volcano. An after-school language tutor instructs students in French by comparing it with the Neapolitan dialect. Painterly images are interspersed like pillow shots: commuter trains rambling down their tracks, ocean waves contrasted with lava flows, Greco-Roman statues languishing at the bottom of the sea. Naples emerges as something of a microcosmic metaphor for cataclysm knocking on the door of the rest of the world. At no time is this more apparent (and sometimes comedic) than when locals call the fire department after an earthquake tremor — a sign that Vesuvius may erupt. The callers range from hysterical (“What death do they want us to die?” says one woman) to the amusingly miffed (an annoyed man complains, “I was cooking a nice ragù”). Rarely has Marx’s famous saying about history weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living” felt so literal. At certain moments, the knocking becomes more urgent. The director nods to his recent films, Fire at Sea (2016) and Notturno (2020), addressing the European migrant crisis and conflict in the Middle East, respectively, in a scene involving a Syrian-staffed freighter transporting grain to and from Odessa in Ukraine, under bombardment from Russia. The crew watch news reports about other ships getting bombed, yet are unperturbed: “We Syrians are used to war and bombs.” History feels particularly heavy in scenes that takes us into the catacomb-like storage of one of the city’s museums. Audiences peer into rooms full of statues and ancient artifacts, some shelved and sorted, others thrown into a massive pile of stone heads and bodies from dozens of eras: Greek, Roman, Bourbon, modern. The unusual or particularly important ones get photographed, such as a statue of Lakshmi (“the Indian Venus,” a researcher remarks) found at Pompeii that proves an ancient link to Eastern cultures. These scenes, in which historical art merges with Rosi’s sublime visuals, serve as a sort of memento mori for all the civilizations and rulers left in the dust. They remind us that borders and nations are contemporary inventions: Naples, after all, is older than Italy, a nation state only formed in 1861. Pompeii is older than Naples. And Vesuvius, older than any country, will outlive us all. Below The Clouds screens at the New York Film Festival (144 West 65th Street, Lincoln Square, Manhattan) on October 5 and 6.