The Four Times
Le quattro volte/The Four Times
Italy, Germany, Switzerland, 2010, 35mm, 88'
directed by Michelangelo Frammartino
screenplay Michelangelo Frammartino
cinematography Andrea Locatelli
editing Benni Atria, Maurizio Grillo
cast Giuseppe Fuda, Bruno Timpano, Nazareno Timpano
producer Marta Donzelli, Gregorio Paonessa, Susanne Marian, Philippe Bober, Gabriella Manfrè, Elda Guidinetti, Andres Pfaeffli
production Vivo film srl, T +39 068 078 002, E info@vivofilm.it
world sales Coproduction Office, T +33 1 560 260 00, E info@coproductionoffice.eu
distribution Continental Film d.o.o., T +386 1 500 51 28, E manja.verbic@continentalfilm.si
This poetic version of the cyclical transmigration of nature and life, filmed in idyllic Calabria, is full of surprises: nearly every shot contains a concealed or evident, cosmic or down-to-earth revelation.
“This is not a cinema that comes from writing, but a cinema that comes from spaces and the presence of bodies,” says
Michelangelo Frammartino about his films. “The film without dialogue” has, after only his second feature, already become his trademark. The absence of both a conventional narrative and a dramaturgical structure based on dialogue allows the architecture graduate to open up the material and spiritual worlds that is given by his work’s audio-visual form and dimension. This time, the place is once again Calabria, the same as in his first feature entitled The Gift (Il dono, 2003). The Four Times again starts with a non-verbal situation, a meditation on the cycle of life and death of an old Calabrian man, but this time this is only one of “the four times”, or episodes, which give the film its title. The life cycles of a baby goat, a tree and coal are poetically bound together with the inevitable cycle of life and decay of the old man.
All human and non-human “characters” of Frammartino's film are embodied by non-professional actors (with the exception of the shepherd dog), the scenes are filmed on location of a small remote Calabrian village and all sounds are ambient. Such a semi-documentary approach allows us to follow the change of seasons, which only elliptically combine individual events in the anticipation of a common theme and also expose Frammartino’s film to a dialogue with the tradition of the ethnical documentary genre and Italian neorealism. Nevertheless, the director is not interested in documenting reality or in giving a politically engaged portrait of the socio-economic relations of some marginalised group.
Subtle situational humour of individual, apparently random and irrelevant occurrences, the succession of episodes and the editing of seemingly separate events are all combined together in associative synonyms, thus transforming apparently quotidian events into symbolic knots of a cosmic narrative. Indeed, the film structure merely reflects the cyclical structure of the natural course of things, which can only become evident in a fragment of the world, away from contemporary industrialised society. Anti-anthropomorphism in the construction of the film narrative acquires a parallel in its thematic direction: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
“The challenge of the film was to have a unique, invisible character. There are four protagonists, the goat herder, a baby goat, a tree and the coal; but actually, the true protagonist is a soul. We filmed bodies in order to extract this inner presence. It is a film of surfaces, but it was made with the determination and the conviction that the camera can capture an essence.” (Michelangelo Frammartino)
Michelangelo Frammartino
Born in 1968 in Milan (Italy), Michelangelo Frammartino studied architecture and then redirected his interest in space into creating photographic and filmic universes. Following a series of short films and video installations, his first feature film The Gift (Il dono, 2003) won him several awards. The same happened with his second feature film, The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte) from 2010.
Schedule:
- Saturday, 11. 6., 10.00, ART KINO ODEON
- Saturday, 11. 6., 21.00, Open-Air Cinema MANZIOLI
