Il Buco

 When I watch TV, my dog sits on the couch and drowses.  Dogs generally don't care much forTV and ignore it -- in this and other respects they are superior to humans.  (Their eyes aren't adapted to see color on a screen and the sound must be distorted in some way to cause them to pay no attention to it.)  I was surprised, therefore, when my dog perked up her ears and, even, scrutinized the TV set during the Italian film Il Buco.  In the movie, an old shepherd calls to his cattle (and donkey) by making a raspy barking sound and, then , following that noise with three or four higher-pitched yips.  Apparently, that call is precisely engineered for animal ears because my old dog immediately went on the alert and, indeed, looked around the room nervously for the source of the sound.  This incident encapsulates, in an elliptical way, the strange, oblique fascination exercised by Michelangelo Frammartino's 2021 film.

Il Buco (it means I think the mouth of a cave as well as a human mouth) doesn't have much a plot.  Rather, the film is a poetic exploration of a situation.  In 1961, a group of spelunkers from northern Italy, a "Grotto" as caving clubs are called from Milan  and its suburbs, traveled to the far southernmost tip of Italy in Calabria to explore a very deep and dangerous cavern.  The film presents this expedition in a fairly straightforward if highly lyrical manner.  The cave exploration is intercut with a simple and reticent plot (more of a theme almost musically developed) about the death of an elderly shepherd in the mountains near the cave's dark and ruinous-looking sinkhole shaft.  The two aspects of the film -- cave exploration and death in the woods -- don't intersect.  In fact, I can't recall any shots that link the two themes in the movie except that the old man's perch, high on the mountain,from which he overlooks his cattle, seems to also provide a vista onto the pit-opening to the cave. Both thematic movements, as it were, proceed in simple chronological form:  after a sort of prelude establishing the Calabrian landscape and a local village, we see the old man watching his cattle, eating with fellow shepherds at stable-like cabin beside a steep barren hillside, and, then, after a day or two suffering some kind of paralyzing illness, perhaps, a cerebral hemorrhage from which he ultimately dies.  A doctor is summoned to the remote stable were he rests supine and motionless.  No one can do anything and he succumbs.  His comrades wrap him in a blanket and carry him through the mist toward the village far below in a mountain valley.  The cave explorers arrive at a train station next to the sea and the rotating beacon of a lighthouse.  They travel in a sort of green bus-like military vehicle, a kind of army surplus lorry, up to the village, a pueblo of white houses packed into a crevasse between two mountains with a church and tiny, fissure-like alleys that, after dark, look like passages in a cave.  The cave explorers (about ten of them) spend the night in the town, sleeping in the church's sacristy among strange reliquary objects and images of prostrate saints (one of them is possibly Jesus dismounted from his cross).  The cavers, then, proceed up the mountain road, through a gorgeous landscape to the mouth of the cave.  (Along the way, they pass a mountain stream in which women are washing laundry -- it seems to be a very primitive enclave in Italy.)  They pitch tents next to the abyss, climb down into the cave, and, after several nights, reach its bottom, a nondescript hole 687 meters below the surface.  The spelunkers are mapping the cave and we see the product of their work, a big diagram of the abyss ending in a small pouch shaped cavity almost 2000 feet below the surface.  Mist obscures the screen when the film scans the mountains.  Some final titles explain that the cave was mapped in 1961 to be the third deepest in the world.  The movie is dedicated to the Milanese cave explorers.

Il Buco is transcendentally beautiful and the landscapes that it depicts, including the wet shafts and abysses in the cave, are remarkable.  It's possible for a film to be extremely beautiful without being expressive and, in fact, Frammartino goes to great lengths to film actions and landscapes so as to abstract from them any drama.  The images, particularly of the cave exploration, are deliberately prosaic and inexpressive.  Frammartino positions his camera so far away from the action, even when he is confined by the cave, as to make the faces and, even, the deeds of the explorers unintelligible. His cave adventurers are anonymous figures in hard hats equipped with flaring carbide lamps -- the lamps have an open flame -- and the men look like personages in a Brueghel engraving, small identical figures in pot-shaped hats.  There is no attempt to characterize or personalize the cave explorers who remain ciphers throughout the movie.  There are, I think, four or five close-ups of the old man, the shepherd of the hills, who dies in the stable.  He is handsome and photogenic, an old wrinkled and heavily weathered codger -- a sort of standard movie version of an Italian peasant, although undoubtedly authentic in this film.  Frammartino films in long takes and, almost always, uses the same formulaic shots -- we always see the meadow with the abyss from the same exact angle, an aerial perspective with tiny cattle grazing the meadow and, even, smaller people traipsing back and forth to the sinkhole.  Similarly, the village is always filmed from a fixed vantage establishing shot.  The old man surveys the valley where the cattle are grazing from a strange eyrie, standing up against a steep hillside next to a wooded lane where his burro is tethered below him.  Frammartino's habitual use of the same camera angles for his establishing shots is complicated by the fact that he shows these places in different weather and under different conditions of light, often at dawn in the fog, or in the gloaming at sunset.  The dramatic changes in sunlight and natural conditions imparts a sense of inevitability and solemnity to the spectacular landscape photography.  The shots in the cave have a similar formulaic quality -- they differ according to how far or near the carbide head-lamps are located.  Sometimes, the cave is completely black except for a tiny sliver of faintly orangish light.  Other times, we can see the cave's horrifying shafts and its tight passageways with almost clinical clarity.  Frammartino's mise-en-scene meticulously assembles details and, then, carefully deploys them -- for instance, we see a red speck on the meadow near the sinkhole; this turns out to be red inflatable boat that is used to paddle across a deep stygian pool at the bottom of one the cavern's shafts.  Sometimes, the very remote, indifferent, and Olympian imagery is quite moving -- for instance, when the old man finally dies, we see someone emerge from the distant stable to speak to a shadowy figure sitting outsider.  The man coming from the inside of the stable moves with a sense of purpose that suggests ominous urgency and the fellow outside hurries after him into the structure.  Meanwhile, a fat and contented pig roots in the dirt next to the cabin.  The viewer knows exactly what has happened, albeit from clues that are so reticent and subtle that they can't really be described.

The movie begins with the people in the village gathered outside of a tavern in one of the town's tiny slot-canyon-like streets.  The people are watching a TV show featuring Europe's tallest building, a skyscraper in Milan that is 24 or 26 stories tall.  The black and white images on the screen show an exterior elevator lifting window-cleaners up the side of the building and the images survey the sleek, sophisticated businessmen and -women in the glass tower.  The upward motion in the film's overture is paralleled, of course, with the downward descent into the abyss in the body of the movie.  There are peculiar visual rhymes -- the old man lying on a pallet in the stable as he dies rhymes with the weird corpse-like wooden effigies in the sacristy of the village church and these images, in turn, correlate to shots of the cave-explorers exhausted and sleeping in their pup tents.  (In one case, a big horse sticks his nose into one of the tents).  These sorts of matching images compel the viewer to interpret the film in lyrical or poetic terms.  The big map of the cave that the camera scans in the last image seems to mirror the shape of Italy -- it's a long narrow and vertical appendage as drawn and seems to suggest that Milan is at the top of the drawing (where the sun shines) and that the gloomy subterranean chamber at the bottom of the cave represents, backwqard poverty-stricken Calabria.  (My presumption is that the people who made this film would deny these meanings although they are pretty clear from the visual imagery and the leg and boot-like shape of the abyss.)  The film literally ends in a cul-de-sac, a kind of dead end, and this matches the fate of the old shepherd who also come a dead-end.  Further, the film suggests that a dying man is a sort of abyss -- the picture cuts from the statuesque, even sculptural mouth of the cave, to an extreme close-up of the old peasant's mouth.  Death is a sort of black hole that we can, perhaps, explore but not exactly understand.  The use of shots taken at different times of day from the same vantage suggests powerfully a fully imagined landscape, a real place that we can navigate, although the component parts of the landscape don't ever quite add up --  for instance, the stable is pushed up against a steep, cliff-like hill, but reverse shots of the place don't seem to match:  there seems to be more space behind the building than we see when the shot shows us the place from its front.  Similarly, the images of the meadow showing an odd pattern of patch-like bare spots doesn't really correlate to what we can see of the abyss.  At the heart of this landscape, there's a strange disconnectedness that seems intentionally -- it 's as if there are spaces between the mosaic of shots that can't quite be filled in.  

The only close-ups in the cave show us scraps of an illustrated magazine, Epoca, that are lit on fire and cast into the abyss -- we see, for instance, a half-burned page featuring John Kennedy lying on a muddy shelf of flowstone deep in the cave.  (The photography in the cave is probably an incredible technical feat considering the conditions of light and space in which the footage was shot.) At the end of the movie, when mist engulfs the shot, we hear the old man's barks and yips, the sounds that so fascinated my dog at the beginning of the movie.