Frederick Wiseman, the greatest of nonfiction filmmakers, died last month, at the age of ninety-six. So there’s a special poignancy—even a measure of consolation—in the arrival of a new work, from another source entirely, that exemplifies the intelligence and the rigor of Wiseman’s methods. “Pompei: Below the Clouds” is the eighth feature from the Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi, and it’s hardly the first of his films to generate such comparisons. Like Wiseman, Rosi has long eschewed voice-over narration, expository montages, direct-to-camera interviews, and other conventional formal strategies. This approach is frequently mistaken for a pose of journalistic neutrality or, worse, godlike omniscience, but it produces something livelier and far more human—an impassioned hyper-attentiveness. Also like Wiseman, Rosi serves as his own director of photography, and he explores an overarching subject—often a place or a series of places—with a roving curiosity whose energies are at once concentrated by the unwavering calm of the camera and dispersed by the briskness of the editing. (Unlike Wiseman, though, Rosi does not exclusively edit his own footage.)

In “Pompei: Below the Clouds,” which Rosi shot in black-and-white, with extraordinarily beautiful results, the camera moves on occasion, though only when it’s stationed on a vessel that is itself in motion—in this case, the Circumvesuviana, a network of trains running out of Naples and around Mt. Vesuvius. Narratively, too, Rosi rides the rails; he and the film’s editor, Fabrizio Federico, whisk us from one strand to the next, trusting us to discern the subtle, almost musical rhythm that emerges. Here is a room filled with statues and artifacts, rescued from the ruins of Pompeii. And here is a staggering glimpse of an excavation site, revealing a hollowed-out city beneath a city, where a team of Japanese archeologists devote themselves to the slow process of recovery. Down into the earth we go, into one of numerous secret tunnels carved out by tomb raiders greedy for subterranean plunder. But then up we rise again, to a majestic overhead view of Naples, with the gulf to the south and, in the distance, the looming dual peaks of Vesuvius. The mountain is a continual reminder of the famous eruption of 79 A.D.—which buried Pompeii and other settlements in ash—and also an implicit threat of disasters to come. (The title pointedly uses the spelling “Pompei,” referring not to the ancient city but to a modern one in the Naples metropolitan area.)

Rosi is fascinated—though not, it seems, overly perturbed—by the anxious bustle of life in a tectonic war zone. He regularly drops in on an emergency-call center, where workers patiently respond to all manner of residents’ queries, some as trivial as a child’s prank call, others as harrowing as a cry for help from a woman suffering domestic abuse. Most typically, though, we hear panicked concerns about earthquakes, which occur with alarming frequency. (Or perhaps not so alarming: in surely the film’s most unrepentantly Italian moment, a woman laments that a tremor struck while she was cooking a ragù.) On such inherently unstable ground, the composure of each individual shot feels all the more deliberate. This has often been Rosi’s way; he offers a contemplative ballast, a decisive counterweight to conditions of agitation and flux. In “Sacro GRA” (2013), he held steady on different locations along a heavily trafficked highway that encircles Rome. He set his camera more freely adrift in the Oscar-nominated “Fire at Sea” (2016), though every movement carried immense gravity and purpose. The film’s focus was Lampedusa, a small island that has become a major port of call for migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and you could sense Rosi’s determination to capture an overwhelming crisis without himself becoming unmoored.

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.

Herzog, for his part, remains firmly interested in both nature and man. His camera is enthralled by the animals that occasionally steal into the frame: a venomous spider, covered by its equally dangerous young, gets a frightening cameo. But what absorbs him most is the intense kinship that the San feel with the elephants, to the point where, at a bonfire dance, a kind of cross-species migration of souls seems to take place. “I asked him if the spirit of an elephant had entered him,” Herzog says of one tracker, who responds in the affirmative. Boyes, too, exalts the elephants like a man possessed. When he speaks of them, you can see in his eyes the gleam of an obsession—not as wild or insatiable as the one that gripped and ultimately doomed Timothy Treadwell, the bear enthusiast at the heart of Herzog’s masterly “Grizzly Man” (2005), but one that marks Boyes, nonetheless, as the truest of believers. He suspects, much as the San do, that the fates of all creatures great and small are bound on an intricate continuum. If or when the elephants die, our own benighted species will surely not be far behind. ♦