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Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

Posted By: alexov85
Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)
DVD9 | Language neutral | PAL 16:9 | 720x576 | ~7015 kbps | AC3 | ~224 kbps | 2 ch | 5.06 GB
Art-house, Drama, Philosophy

An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes to find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.


Le Quattro Volte opens with a mesmerising shot of a smouldering woodpile. Carefully constructed by local artisans so as to burn evenly and leave behind a mountain of charcoal, the half-consumed woodpile is a vast black dome dotted with holes from which smoke billows before it is taken by the wind and shaped into an array of intricate patterns. The shot is arresting, but it also sets the film’s terms of engagement: there is a cycle to everything and this cycle is governed by immutable physical laws that create beauty as easily as they destroy it. While we may look for the hand of God in the swirls of smoke, all we ever see is the touch of man and the grinding cycle of a self-perpetuating cycle of creation and destruction. These terms set, the film moves on to the second of its vignettes.

The second vignette features an ageing goatherd. Coughing and wheezing in a way that makes it clear that his days are numbered, the old man spends his few remaining days in exactly the same way: sweeping up after goats, tending goats, walking goats up a hill and drinking a concoction made from holy water and dust taken from a church. This set of rituals form a system and the system imbues the old man’s life with meaning. When the old man loses his envelope of church-dust the system wobbles and the old man dies. Entropy claims him and the goats escape until a younger man takes over his duties and the system lurches back into motion.
As with the move from the first to the second vignette, the move from the second to the third vignette is navigated via a black screen. This time, when the picture returns, we are met with the jarring image of a goat giving birth. We then follow this small white kid as it learns to stand, learns to walk and learns the ways of the herd before getting lost in the wilderness as a result of falling into a ditch. As with the old man, the system breaks down and we move from the goat to the tree under which is huddles for warmth.

The fourth vignette shows the population of the local village as they ritualistically cut down the tree and drag it back to town. Stripping off the bark, the villagers ‘plant’ the tree in the market square as someone climbs to the top of it and ceremoniously reclaims a balloon. Its purpose served, the tree is dismantled, cut to pieces and delivered to a yard where local men use the trunks to assemble a woodpile that will soon be consumed and transformed into charcoal. The final shot of the film is of a small truck delivering charcoal to the village as smoke billows from a chimney pot from where it will re-enter the water cycle and aid in the creation of trees, goats, goatherds, woodpiles and charcoal.

This is undeniably a sophisticated and intriguing critical framework through which to explore the film’s images and themes but it is not the only way of approaching what is on the screen. Indeed, while Frammartino drives us from vignette to vignette and from image to image like so many goats, he does so without the use of any dialogue or exposition. This means that, in order for its meaning to ‘get across’, Le Quattro Volte is reliant upon Frammartino’s placement of images and the willingness of the audience to meet him half way by looking at the images on the screen and imposing the ‘correct’ critical framework upon the various interlocking systems he portrays. However, like the little goat that gets lost in the forest, it is all too easy for the directorial goatherd to lose some of his flock because, at the end of the day, not all of us see the same things when we look at the world.

Sigmund Freud opens his famous essay “Civilization and its Discontents” (1929) by recounting an exchange of letters with an unnamed correspondent who reacts to Freud’s assertion that religion is an illusion by claiming that Freud.
This feeling of being, as Freud puts it, “indissolubly bound up with and belonging to the whole of the world outside oneself” is clearly the same feeling that Frammartino is seeking to recreate by driving his audience through a series of interlinking systems. The point of Le Quattro Volte is that, for the goatherd, the goat, the tree and the woodpile, life has meaning because their lives (such as they are) take place within a system and each system itself has a place in another system. This system of systems, this interwoven lattice of meaning and place is like an ocean and this ocean of meaning is what Freud’s correspondent sees as the source of all religious thought and sentiment.
However, much like Freud himself, I see all of these systems and yet I do not see meaning. I do not see an oceanic sense of belonging in the change of the seasons or the death and rebirth of a goat. I see vast impersonal systems, but I do not see any divine spark. I see entropy. I see wastage. I see the cruelty of a small goat left to die from exposure. I see the madness of an old man drinking church dust in order to stay alive. I see a system of systems that creates beauty by chance only to then destroy it with complete indifference. The fact that two audience members can look at the vignettes that make up Le Quattro Volte and take away two completely different experiences is part of what makes this film so interesting. Le Quattro Volte is not merely a film about the pantheistic divinity of nature, it is also a film about our desperate need to see our lives as meaningful. Even when they are not. This tension is beautifully explored in a spectacular coup-de-theatre.


IMDB info 7.3/10 (611 votes)
Stars: Giuseppe Fuda, Bruno Timpano and Nazareno Timpano
Production land: Italy | Germany | Switzerland
Run time: ~86 min

Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)

Le quattro volte - by Michelangelo Frammartino (2010)