Le Quattro Volte
by Brian Barth
Le Quattro Volte, dir. Michaelangelo Frammartino (2011)
When A. O. Scott says that a film “reinvents the very act of perception,” you listen.
Michaelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2011), is the most transfixing and profound narrative I have seen in years. The film structures itself around the four modes of transmigration (an ancient model of reincarnation); a soul wanders from man, to animal, to vegetable, to mineral. An old man trades his goats milk for dust swept up in a church in order to delay his death. Eventually he passes, and we follow his process of transmigration. For such a simple story (that has no dialogue whatsoever), it might seem odd to commend the writing, but any filmmaker that can weave a riveting story while forcing the viewer only to watch understands screenwriting in its truest form. The camera does all the talking.
The cinematography is disturbingly objective: think Robert Gardner without the narration. After the first cycle, you actually start to feel like a spirit, witnessing humanity as a species and people as animals. We scan around the old town up in the mountains; Andrea Locatelli’s camera is often perched on top of houses, hills, steeples. We’re not serenely floating as much as hovering, with a nagging feeling of menace; the next second we’re shocked by the most suffocatingly subjective camera–we are buried in the center of a pile of ash, sealed into a stone tomb or built into a wooden conflagration. In the final stage, we are released. We are smoke and ash. We sweep over the forest where his favorite tree was, we brush the field where his goats fed and we snake through his old mountain town.
What this film capitalizes on so successfully is the simple pleasure of watching. Much like the beginning of There Will Be Blood or Wall-E, it’s comforting when a director forces you to watch. It’s an act of confidence: “I know what I’m doing, just let me show you.” Its effect in Le Quattro Volte is that and more. There are only a few things in the film that place us in time; otherwise this story could have happened hundreds of years ago. In the terms of transmigration, it absolutely has. It’s happening all the time.
Coming up at The Harvard Film Archive
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Quel style!
We’ve blogged about Robert Gardner before, but in case you missed his appearance at Bard College and are from the Boston area, he’ll be at the Harvard Film Archive on Friday, December 4th, at 7 PM. He’ll be showing fragments from unfinished films and discussing films that could have been. Also, he seems punctual, so I wouldn’t want to be late.
On Sunday, December 6th, at 7 PM, Vlada Petric will be in the house. Petric will be showing films and discussing his career, which includes–like Gardner–teaching at Harvard. These are your last chances to get to the HFA before it shuts down until the end of January, so don’t miss them. I wish I didn’t have to.
Honesty of Experience
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Dead Birds, dir. Robert Gardner (1964)
I saw Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds this weekend, when Gardner received and honorary degree at Bard College. A panel preceding his award featured Stanley Cavell, Luc Sante, Ian Buruma, Susan Meiselas and Gardner himself. The panel (d)evolved into a celebration of Gardner the Man (he mentioned, casually, that he flies his own plane) and a defense of Gardner the high humanist, who operates with the utmost respect for the autonomy of his subjects, never interfering in the world he records. Gardner, everyone seemed to agree, was a prophet of the objective camera.