Michelangelo Frammartino

IONCINEMA.com’s “IONCINEPHILE of the Month” puts the spotlight on an emerging filmmaker from the world of cinema. This month we are extremely pleased to feature a true craftsman. Winner in the Director’s Fortnight section (Cannes Film Festival sidebar), Le Quattro Volte (also known as The Four Times) is a poetic rendering of the cycle of life in one village in the region of Calabria (for those not familiar with the map of Italy this is the “toe” portion of the boot). With a background in architecture, pre-film work in video installations and one feature film under his belt (the award winning Il donna), in a docu-essay mode, Michelangelo Frammartino works from a pristine, beautifully rendered aesthetic. The multi-film festival award winner preemed in North America at the TIFF, NYFF and AFI Film fests and opens March 30th at the Film Forum via Lorber Films. We had the answers translated by a friend of the site fluent in the filmmaker’s native tongue. Don’t forget to check out Frammartino’s Top Ten Film of All Time list.

Eric Lavallee: During your childhood…what films were important to you?
Michelangelo Frammartino: In my childhood what mattered most to me were photographs and paintings, I used to stare at those still images and try to reproduce them in my drawings. My parents did not take me to the movies a lot, so my memory of films is related to television viewing. However, I remember very vividly a retrospective of Hitchcock films on the first channel, I was 7 or 8 year old, and I remember that his style was immediately recognizable: it was the first time I realized that behind a film there was an author.

Lavallee: During your formative years what films and filmmakers inspired you?
Frammartino: There are some authors who have given me the courage to begin because they took their first steps by self-producing their own films, therefore I thought I could follow the same steps, from a production stand-point, even though they made a different kind of cinema: Silvio Soldini, Nanni Moretti, Corso Salani. I feel a great debt to the aesthetic work of Paolo Rosa of Studio Azzurro, between cinema and video art. In the nineties, I loved films by Tsai Ming-Liang, Bela Tarr, Bruno Dumont, Sharunas Bartas, Otar Iosseliani. They made me think. Of course, Jean-Luc Godard has always been the symbol of the revolution in films…

Lavallee: At what point did you know you wanted to become a filmmaker?
Frammartino: In the nineties I felt the need to work on a fine line between images and architecture, I felt the need to drag images out of the dark hall of the cinema and place them on the walls of buildings, on the surface of streets and squares, I felt that it was my mission. Since 2001, instead, I felt the need to return to a more intimate, almost religious relationship with the images: the movie theatre as a sort of church.

Lavallee: Despite being a native of the region depicted in the film, I imagine your research/exploratory phase must have been a more eye-opening experience then when you were actually “in-production”. I was wondering if you could give us some insight into how you developed the project prior to filming?
Frammartino: The idea for this film came to me mysteriously, as a revelation at the end of a long journey through Calabria, my land. I tracked for a long time the shepherds on the pastures of the Ionian coast, I shot images of their animals, intrigued by the challenge of filming something uncontrollable: the beasts. I discovered the craft of charcoal burners in the Vibo Valentia province, who transform wood into mineral. And I had the experience of the feast of the tree of Alessandria del Carretto. Only at the end I realized that I was making a journey of reincarnation from man to beast to vegetable to mineral, in the land of the Pythagorean metempsychosis and of the believing in the soul, so popular of Calabria.

Lavallee: You employ a mostly stationary camera and the film contains almost no spoken dialogue – I was wondering what ideas did you have for the style of the film? What inspirations (other films, location, paintings etc…) did you draw upon for the look/style, aesthetics of the film?
Frammartino: Drawing is my design tool and my thinking method, I never use writing except in the final round, for mere reasons of production / organization. I tend to draw and think very wide scenes and sometimes very large group. If I have to mention a master of painting, well… I often think of the wonderful work of Bruegel. In the broad picture with a huge depth of field I feel the possibility of establishing a strong relationship with the audience, I like that the viewer can move freely through the screen and draw paths and unexpected connections, something that is not possible with a tighter editing or in shorter and narrower frames.

Lavallee: Since May of 2010, you’ve been living out of your suitcases traveling the world film festival with Quattro Volte… Do you find have audiences of different religions, regions or spiritual beliefs embraced your film differently? Did some think that the film was (in some instances) too “perfect”?
Frammartino: I would have expected the Eastern audience to connect better with the film, due to a possible “animist” interpretation of Le Quattro Volte. But I realized that there was no different approach from East to West, both in Tokyo and in New York I met an audience fascinated by the possible route proposed by the film. Instead I felt a different connection between South and North, it seemed to me that the curiosity towards the film was stronger in Northern countries. I do not know what you mean by perfect, I worked with a subject that was so raw and uncontrollable that the movie that came out seems to me a strange mixture between the desire to be perfect and the inability to be.

Lavallee: For your next film project, are you leaning towards the more traditional narrative or is the docu-essay something that you’d like to investigate once again?
Frammartino: I am definitely interested in continuing to put to a test my innate desire to control what I do. That is, I enjoy preparing traps that I have to overcome…

Lavallee: Can you discuss your collaboration with your Sound Editors.
Frammartino: With Benni Atria, Daniel Iribarren and Paolo Benvenuti, the goal was to make the sound of the film as important as the image. Often the sound editing was leading and suggesting solutions. We wanted to reverse the traditional Western hierarchy of the five senses in which the eye is usually on top of the pyramid.

Lavallee: Can you discuss your collaboration with Gabriella Maiolo.
Frammartino: With Gabriella Maiolo, costume designer for the film, I worked so that the selection of dresses was influenced by the phenomenon of cryptic camouflage of the animal world, in order to create a fusion between characters and context. For example, the clothes of the charcoal burners always match the colors that the charcoal hut displayed during that precise stage of shooting.