Two New Documentaries Are Haunted by Unsettling Natural Wonders

In “Pompei: Below the Clouds,” Rosi is as quietly watchful as ever, though he is either remarkably skilled or remarkably fortunate in finding individuals whose voices of conscience, matched by action, can stand in for his own. Hence a prosecutor who, wandering into an empty underground room, rails against thieves who, in removing frescoes from its walls, “obliterated our memory forever.” And what of the gently curmudgeonly man of letters who runs an after-school study room for children, tutoring them in everything from multiplication tables to Victor Hugo? I took his diligence, and Rosi’s determination to include his labors, as an act of faith; even a place awash in antiquity needs a committed investment in the future. The most instructive perspective comes from the port of Torre Annunziata, where two Syrian workers are stationed on an enormous tank loaded with Ukrainian grain. Naples, though known for its geological instability and its organized crime, fazes them not one bit. “It’s a safe city,” one says in a phone call home. “There’s no danger here.”

The film opens with a Jean Cocteau quote: “Vesuvius makes all the clouds in the world.” And the screen is often duly obscured in a whitish haze, some of it moving through the skies above, some of it rising from the Phlegraean Fields, an active eight-mile-wide caldera to the west of Naples. There’s poetry in all this mistiness, and in Rosi’s monochrome palette, which is by turns crisp and ghostly, and effortless in its ability to collapse the distance between past and present. To watch the tank workers as they wade through enormous, ever-shifting hillocks of grain is to be reminded of the men, women, and children who perished here centuries ago, under a horrific onslaught of ash. We see plaster casts of the ancient dead: one is on display in a gallery, and two more are glimpsed in a scene from Roberto Rossellini’s “Journey to Italy” (1954), one of a couple of Naples-set pictures that Rosi excerpts throughout. These films-within-a-film are projected in an abandoned, crumbling cinema, an image that I find impossible to read as anything other than a lament for the medium’s own encroaching fossilization. Best to see “Pompei: Below the Clouds” on the biggest screen you can, while you can, before the theatres of today become the ruins of tomorrow.

Werner Herzog, cinema’s most prolific and undaunted explorer of the natural world, had his way with volcanoes years ago—first in the short film “La Soufrière” (1977) and then, at greater length, in “Into the Inferno” (2016). Ashes to ashes, tusks to tusks: in “Ghost Elephants,” which is being distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films (and begins streaming March 8th on Disney+ and Hulu), Herzog is off on a new, and characteristically deranged, adventure, in pursuit of enormous yet elusive pachyderms. The journey begins at the Smithsonian, which holds the remains of the largest elephant on record. He weighs eleven tons, stands more than thirteen feet high, and was felled in Angola in 1955, by the Hungarian hunter Josef J. Fénykövi. Around the museum, the elephant is known, affectionately, as Henry. We first encounter him, in the taxidermied flesh, alongside Steve Boyes, a South African conservationist who, beholding this legendary creature for the first time, can scarcely contain his awe—or his crazy ambition. Boyes believes that Henry has living descendants roaming the Angolan highlands and is determined to confirm a genetic link.

The culmination of that quest lies, as it should, at the movie’s end. But the heart of the film is a lengthy stretch in Namibia, where, from within a community of San hunter-gatherers, Boyes enlists three trackers to accompany him on the long, difficult trek to Angola. It will come as no surprise to the filmmaker’s admirers that Herzog relishes every step of the journey. Every digression here feels like a destination. We look on as a skilled hunter and master tracker named Xui digs up lethal beetle grubs, which will be mashed into a highly potent poison and smeared on the ends of his arrows. We hear Kerllen Costa, an environmental anthropologist, describe the horrors of the Angolan Civil War, including his memories of elephants, hippos, and other innocent wildlife getting caught in the crossfire. War, he reminds us, is waged not just by man against man but by man against nature.