Lorber Shepherding Frammartino’s ‘Le Quattro Volte’

It might be a little early to make the following declaration, but I’d almost stick my hand in a burning mound of charcoal when I say that Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte, might be the year’s best documentary film. Ultimately there is a story arch and a little manipulation, so perhaps I should call Lorber Films’ latest pick-up more of a “docu-essay” that at times uses rehearsals to best convey village life and the circle of life. Having just shown at Telluride and getting ready for TIFF and NYFF, alternatively going by the less romantic title of The Four Times, a deal has apparently been in the works well before I wrote this item — as the doc is already tagged with a March 30th at New York’s Film Forum.

While I’m not sure about Richard Lorber relating this to “neorealist Italian cinema”, I’d agree with him calling it “transcendental visionary filmmaking”. Just a simple bird’s eye view pan on a small intersection in a village, or matching a couple of close-up shots of a newborn goat almost comes across as groundbreaking. 

Here is Frammartino describing his oeuvre in his own words: The Four Times works in the non-defined field between documentary and fiction, and can be understood in three different ways: as a science fiction film (without special effects), as an ethnographic documentary on some parts of the Calabrian Apennine, or as an essay about the human soul. The four episodes tell the stories of four “leading characters”: an old shepherd in the last days of his life; the birth and first few weeks of a goat kid till its first pasturing under the olive trees; the life of an old fir tree in the course of the seasons; and the transformation of the old fir into charcoal. All four episodes are set on the Ionian side of the Calabrian peninsula and are intertwined with each other in such a way as to make up one single story: the story of one soul that moves through four successive lives.