Cinematic recurrences and metempsychotic cycles are virtually one and the same in Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte, a bewildering quasi-doc that made quite a lot of noise at both last year's Cannes and New York Film Festivals. And though nary a word is spoken by the residents of Calabria, the hilly region which Frammartino takes for his setting, the film offers plenty of communicative noise and movement from every human, animal, vegetable, and mineral that appears in the director's exquisite compositions. All four of those "realms" are here documented with equal weight and the Pythagorean meditation that comes as a result is at once dryly comic and delicately grave, earthly and metaphysical, academic and simplistic.
Suggesting at once Werner Herzog's non-fiction work and Jacques Tati's democratic cinema, Le Quattro Volte begins at a somewhat atypical starting point in the pantheon of European cinema. An elderly shepherd tends to his flock in the hills before returning to the small village where he lives. He wheezes, coughs and hocks but does not speak to anyone, not even the lady who trades him a pouch of dust from the church floor for a bottle of goat's milk. In this simplistic trade, Frammartino's belief in the spiritual equality of all things is conveyed clearly. Sadly, it is all for naught: The shepherd leaves his pouch of "magic" dust, which has roots in Calabria lore, while defecating on a hillside and dies the next day, as his goats are freed by an aggressive dog, the only "professional" Frammartino used in his casting.
From the black infinity of the old man's burial we are suddenly thrust into the daylight as a baby goat slides out of its mother and begins to writhe and cry while still covered in its mother's fluids. It learns how to walk, consorts with other baby and adult goats and is prepared for the herd by a faceless man -- the same man, in fact, who ignores the cries of the young goat while in the forest, thus leaving the weak kid to fend for itself. The baby finds an immense fir and cuddles up to it, right before Frammartino cuts to the same fir, caked in snow months later. The goat, as well as the focus of the film, has transmigrated and we watch as the fir is stripped bare, used as part of the communal "Pita" festivities, chopped up and then used in an ancient charcoal-making process still practiced to this day in Calabria.
Fitfully elliptical, La Quattro Volte begins and ends with a shot of the hut in which the charcoal is made or, more pointedly, in which vegetables such as wood and straw are converted into a pure mineral. Cycles and repetition are in constant flux, both visually and aurally, which makes the film exude a profound sense of motion even in its most static frames. In its now-fabled crane shot of the village, we watch the humans as they go about their Good Friday celebrations, donning Spartan uniforms and carrying a large cross, but we are equally aware of the goats in their pen, the dog who guards them, and that truck on the incline which comes crucially into play as the film makes its first transition from elderly man to newborn goat.
If Frammartino's film is admittedly quite academic, it's also strikingly elemental and brilliantly paced. Here, we are not sent into the gently phantasmagorical otherworlds of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives but rather asked to contemplate the essence of life as a metaphysical process without assumption or pretension. Not surprisingly then, the film itself conveys a sense of transition, as the observational images we are given begin to take on narrative and spiritual importance through Frammartino's direction, not to mention Benni Atria and Maurizio Grillo's succinct editing. As this enigmatic whatsit drifts along, the cycles of life mask the cycles of the beyond, thus touching the dream of cinema to convey at once singularity and omnipresence, the feeling of something and the tone of everything, the act of storytelling and the process of documentation.
AKA The Four Times
Suggesting at once Werner Herzog's non-fiction work and Jacques Tati's democratic cinema, Le Quattro Volte begins at a somewhat atypical starting point in the pantheon of European cinema. An elderly shepherd tends to his flock in the hills before returning to the small village where he lives. He wheezes, coughs and hocks but does not speak to anyone, not even the lady who trades him a pouch of dust from the church floor for a bottle of goat's milk. In this simplistic trade, Frammartino's belief in the spiritual equality of all things is conveyed clearly. Sadly, it is all for naught: The shepherd leaves his pouch of "magic" dust, which has roots in Calabria lore, while defecating on a hillside and dies the next day, as his goats are freed by an aggressive dog, the only "professional" Frammartino used in his casting.
From the black infinity of the old man's burial we are suddenly thrust into the daylight as a baby goat slides out of its mother and begins to writhe and cry while still covered in its mother's fluids. It learns how to walk, consorts with other baby and adult goats and is prepared for the herd by a faceless man -- the same man, in fact, who ignores the cries of the young goat while in the forest, thus leaving the weak kid to fend for itself. The baby finds an immense fir and cuddles up to it, right before Frammartino cuts to the same fir, caked in snow months later. The goat, as well as the focus of the film, has transmigrated and we watch as the fir is stripped bare, used as part of the communal "Pita" festivities, chopped up and then used in an ancient charcoal-making process still practiced to this day in Calabria.
Fitfully elliptical, La Quattro Volte begins and ends with a shot of the hut in which the charcoal is made or, more pointedly, in which vegetables such as wood and straw are converted into a pure mineral. Cycles and repetition are in constant flux, both visually and aurally, which makes the film exude a profound sense of motion even in its most static frames. In its now-fabled crane shot of the village, we watch the humans as they go about their Good Friday celebrations, donning Spartan uniforms and carrying a large cross, but we are equally aware of the goats in their pen, the dog who guards them, and that truck on the incline which comes crucially into play as the film makes its first transition from elderly man to newborn goat.
If Frammartino's film is admittedly quite academic, it's also strikingly elemental and brilliantly paced. Here, we are not sent into the gently phantasmagorical otherworlds of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives but rather asked to contemplate the essence of life as a metaphysical process without assumption or pretension. Not surprisingly then, the film itself conveys a sense of transition, as the observational images we are given begin to take on narrative and spiritual importance through Frammartino's direction, not to mention Benni Atria and Maurizio Grillo's succinct editing. As this enigmatic whatsit drifts along, the cycles of life mask the cycles of the beyond, thus touching the dream of cinema to convey at once singularity and omnipresence, the feeling of something and the tone of everything, the act of storytelling and the process of documentation.
AKA The Four Times
