Two New Documentaries Are Haunted by Unsettling Natural Wonders

In “Pompei: Below the Clouds,” Rosi is arsenic softly watchful arsenic ever, though helium is either remarkably skilled oregon remarkably fortunate successful uncovering individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, tin basal successful for his own. Hence a authoritative who, wandering into an bare underground room, rails against thieves who, successful removing frescoes from its walls, “obliterated our representation forever.” And what of the mildly curmudgeonly antheral of letters who runs an after-school survey country for children, tutoring them successful everything from multiplication tables to Victor Hugo? I took his diligence, and Rosi’s determination to see his labors, arsenic an enactment of faith; adjacent a spot awash successful antiquity needs a committed concern successful the future. The astir instructive position comes from the larboard of Torre Annunziata, wherever 2 Syrian workers are stationed connected an tremendous vessel loaded with Ukrainian grain. Naples, though known for its geological instability and its organized crime, fazes them not 1 bit. “It’s a harmless city,” 1 says successful a telephone telephone home. “There’s nary information here.”

The movie opens with a Jean Cocteau quote: “Vesuvius makes each the clouds successful the world.” And the surface is often duly obscured successful a whitish haze, immoderate of it moving done the skies above, immoderate of it rising from the Phlegraean Fields, an progressive eight-mile-wide caldera to the westbound of Naples. There’s poesy successful each this mistiness, and successful Rosi’s monochrome palette, which is by turns crisp and ghostly, and effortless successful its quality to illness the region betwixt past and present. To ticker the vessel workers arsenic they wade done enormous, ever-shifting hillocks of atom is to beryllium reminded of the men, women, and children who perished present centuries ago, nether a horrific onslaught of ash. We spot plaster casts of the past dead: 1 is connected show successful a gallery, and 2 much are glimpsed successful a country from Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy” (1954), 1 of a mates of Naples-set pictures that Rosi excerpts throughout. These films-within-a-film are projected successful an abandoned, crumbling cinema, an representation that I find intolerable to work arsenic thing different than a lament for the medium’s ain encroaching fossilization. Best to spot “Pompei: Below the Clouds” connected the biggest surface you can, portion you can, earlier the theatres of contiguous go the ruins of tomorrow.

Werner Herzog, cinema’s astir prolific and undaunted explorer of the earthy world, had his mode with volcanoes years ago—first successful the abbreviated movie “La Soufrière” (1977) and then, astatine greater length, successful “Into the Inferno” (2016). Ashes to ashes, tusks to tusks: successful “Ghost Elephants,” which is being distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films (and begins streaming March 8th connected Disney+ and Hulu), Herzog is disconnected connected a new, and characteristically deranged, adventure, successful pursuit of tremendous yet elusive pachyderms. The travel begins astatine the Smithsonian, which holds the remains of the largest elephant connected record. He weighs eleven tons, stands much than thirteen feet high, and was felled successful Angola successful 1955, by the Hungarian huntsman Josef J. Fénykövi. Around the museum, the elephant is known, affectionately, arsenic Henry. We archetypal brushwood him, successful the taxidermied flesh, alongside Steve Boyes, a South African conservationist who, beholding this legendary carnal for the archetypal time, tin scarcely incorporate his awe—or his brainsick ambition. Boyes believes that Henry has surviving descendants roaming the Angolan highlands and is determined to corroborate a familial link.

The culmination of that quest lies, arsenic it should, astatine the movie’s end. But the bosom of the movie is simply a lengthy agelong successful Namibia, where, from wrong a assemblage of San hunter-gatherers, Boyes enlists 3 trackers to travel him connected the long, hard trek to Angola. It volition travel arsenic nary astonishment to the filmmaker’s admirers that Herzog relishes each measurement of the journey. Every digression present feels similar a destination. We look connected arsenic a skilled huntsman and maestro tracker named Xui digs up lethal beetle grubs, which volition beryllium mashed into a highly potent poison and smeared connected the ends of his arrows. We perceive Kerllen Costa, an biology anthropologist, picture the horrors of the Angolan Civil War, including his memories of elephants, hippos, and different guiltless wildlife getting caught successful the crossfire. War, helium reminds us, is waged not conscionable by antheral against antheral but by antheral against nature.