A human, an animal, a plant, and inanimate matter are the protagonists and form parts of the same life cycle in Michelangelo Frammartino’s meditation.
Michelangelo Frammartino is one of the important representatives of “slow cinema.” An architect by education, he came to film as an already established artist, and his work is not at all a documentary, even though it works with documentary material. The protagonists of Le quattro volte include an old shepherd, a baby goat, a tall tree, and charcoal remaining after the burning of logs. The film has no speech and no music, only sounds of the world: the clucking of hens, the bleating of goats, the ringing of bells, and the rustling of leaves.
Inspired by the Pythagorean idea of metempsychosis—the transmigration of the soul— Frammartino constructs the narrative as a chain of transformations in which one form of existence invisibly grows out of another. The camera’s long takes offer an opportunity to see and convey such connections. Renouncing the habitual hierarchy of the human and their environment, Frammartino presents a non-human perspective on death—instead of a tragic ending, it is seen as a transition of matter between different states of life.
The film received awards at Directors' Fortnight in Cannes and Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (CPH: DOX), among others.
The film will be screened in Italian.
The Four Times
Director: Michelangelo Frammartino
Italy, Germany, Switzerland, 2010. 88 min.
18+