Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte: The Must See Docu at this Year’s Cannes?

Among the films that I’m expecting to see selected for a place on the Croisette this year is what can be called an “ethnographic” docu-fiction account. Reading up on the filmmaker’s approach, you’d think that the film was helmed by a mainland Chinese filmmaker or a Latin American director, but Italian born Frammartino simply located himself in his own familiar surroundings, more specifically the place that foreigners would know as the “toe” portion of the boot shaped Italy.  

From what I grasp from the synopsis, the project, which was invited to Cannes’ 2007 Atelier de la Cinefondation, is a cycle of life document with various filmmaking approaches employed from Frammartino. The filmmaker mentions that Le quattro volte visits “the theme of reincarnation allowed me to remove the film’s focus from man, who has traditionally always been at the center of cinematic attention. Doing this would reveal the presumptuousness of humans in believing that they are a privileged species and that their needs should somehow supersede those of all others. This is of course a matter of culture. Consequently though, it is also a matter for cinema. The names of camera shots, for example, are measured according to how much of the human body they include. The purpose then, is to find a new equilibrium between humans and other living beings by looking back, and perhaps sometimes forward, in pursuit of the fabric that unites us all. Sound itself is generally speaking the film’s main character.”

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.