Michelangelo Frammartino, the director of Il Buco (“The Hole”), was born in Milan in Northern Italy. But his parents were Calabrian immigrants from Italy’s extreme south. He was born in 1967, six years after the events shown in Il Buco. The film connects Italy’s north and south. The openinq sequence shows Calabrian people watching a grainy TV image of the construction of a skyscraper in Milan.
Frammartino studied architecture but migrated into art. His first works were installations in galleries and museums in northern Italy. He worked for a few years making TV videos and commercials and, between 1995 and 2000, he made five short films – most of them accessories to his museum installations. His first feature-length movie was made released in 2004 Il Dono (“The Gift”), apparently a picture about an elderly farmer who befriends a woman thought by her family to be possessed by demon. It was six years later that Frammartino’s next movie, Le quattro Volte (“The Four Turns”) was released. Le quattro Volte is obliquely based on Pythagoras’ doctrine of the transmutation of souls through matter. The film involves a man who dies and, then, seems to reborn as a goat. The goat goes astray and perishes under a large tree. The tree is cut down for a village festival involving men climbing its trunk to reach for prizes. The tree is, then, cut into logs and transported to a kiln where it is burned into charcoal. The charcoal is driven by lorry to the town where the old man died and used to heat the homes there – the process is man to goat to tree to mineral (carbonized charcoal) and, in the final image, to smoke or vapor. While scouting locations for Le quattro Volte, Frammartino came upon the Bifurto Abyss in the Pollino Mountains near Cerchiara di Calabria, a village in southern Calabria. Most of Le quattro Volte was shot on Pollino Mountain and, although Frammartino thought he knew the mountain very well, he was surprised to learn that it contains an unexpected hidden interior landscape, the shaft of the cave.
It took Frammatino ten years to make Il Buco and the film’s production at the remote and mostly inaccessible Bifurto Abyss was extremely arduous. Il Buco has won many international awards including a Special Jury Award at Cannes. The movie exemplifies the Italian esthetic of “slow cinema”, a style of filmmaking that defines itself in opposition to American popular films.
Production Notes
The Bifurto abyss is 700 meters deep and was once thought to be the deepest cavern in Europe. (It is now counted as the third deepest cave in Europe.) The director of photography, Renato Berta, a Swiss cameraman was in his early seventies when the movie was shot and did not descend into the cavern. Rather, a fiber-optic cable was lowered into the abyss and he directed the camerawork remotely from the surface. The cave posed serious obstacles to filming. It takes five hours to lower a camera crew to the small lake near the bottom of the cavern and, often, the crew worked underground for twenty hours a day. Sometimes, five minutes of film might require fifteen hours of work. Frammartino entered the cave frequently with a team of seven experienced spelunkers, although he admits to having been initially terrified by the place. On one occasion, a thunderstorm dropped several inches of rain onto the mountain meadow above the cave and the abyss flooded. Frammartino and his crew were trapped for a few hours in a side fissure behind a forty-foot waterfall of water plunging into the cavern. The event was covered on Italy’s cable news channels as a frightening and dangerous catastrophe. Frammartino says that he never felt at risk and, in fact, regarded this experience as pleasant and soothing, a sort of respite from the intense filming schedule. (Insuring the production was another challenge; several insurance companies declined to underwrite coverage for the dangerous production.)
Filming involved operating electrical equipment in the 100% humidity prevailing in the cave. The movie is shot on a Sony Venice digital device. Analog equipment would not function in the difficult conditions in the Abyss. Camera equipment was lowered into the cave and remained underground during the six week shoot. Frammartino’s team of professional speologists moved the equipment after each day’s work to the place where the next shots would be made. Berta directed the camera from the surface via a monitor connected by fiber-optic cable. Frammartino remarks on the disconnect between what the people in the cave thought that the images looked like and how they appeared to Berta. Often Frammartino, who was underground, would think that an entire day’s work was wasted, only to learn from Berta upon emerging from the cavern that the footage was spectacular. Conversely, pictures that the crew in the cave thought were effective, often, turned out to be unusable. At the end of each day’s work, memory cards containing the digital images were hauled up to the surface by an elaborate system of winches and hoists. No additional lighting was used to illumine the cave. The pictures made underground rely exclusively on the light emitted by the carbide lamps worn by the spelunkers.
Frammartino made about 30 to 35 descents into the cave. Sound was recorded on a Dolby Atmos system. Recording in the cave was also extremely complex due to so-called “sound mirages” – that is, sound seeming to emanate in a paradoxical way from an area opposite where the sound was produced (a sort of echo effect). Experienced cavers report that often spelunkers have the distinct impression that there is someone with them, nearby, although this is a sort of hallucination. Frammartino experienced this on several occasions. Once he ascended out of the cave, making a three hour climb while continuously hearing a crew-member directly behind him. Dozens of times, he shouted “free, free, free” to signify that he had completed a pitch and that the climber behind him could, then, ascend the rope. Upon reaching the surface, Frammartino discovered to his amazement that he was alone – there was no one climbing behind him.
The first descent to the bottom of the Bifurto Abyss occurred in 1961 and was accomplished by a group of Piedmontese speologists, a spelunking “grotto’ as caving clubs are called, from Milan. Although the descent was a remarkable accomplishment, the cavers decided to not publicize their efforts. Researching this first exploration, Frammartino found a file containing a two page account of the descent, a number of old photographs, and a map of the cave – there was no publicity of any kind and the cavers didn’t discuss their efforts with anyone. (At the time of the first descent, the Abyss was the deepest cave then-discovered in Europe.)
Frammartino uses 1961 circa caving technology in the film. Modern cavers use LED lighting on their hard hats; Frammartino’s speleologists employ carbide lamps. Although the gear used to probe the cave’s depths is antique – the sort of carabiners, ropes, inflatable raft, and fiber ladders that existed at time of the initial descent. Frammartino has described the movie as a “period picture” in which he recreates both the technology of spelunking in 1961, but, also, the small town culture in Calabria in that period as well.
Frammartino: “Making a period piece is something in previous years that I didn’t think I would be able to do because I am interested in making cinema with a significant component of non-control. A period piece clearly requires you to have the right outfit and handle everything in a certain way to bring the film and audience to that diegetic time. Having to keep everything under control is something that scared me when I, on the contrary, wanted to set control aside.”
Installation esthetics
Frammartino’s initial art works were museum installations, for instance, a high-resolution image of a Calabrian town, projected on the ceiling of a museum’s gallery. He remains committed to this form of art and regards Il Buco as akin to his museum installations. Frammartino chose a cave that is not known for speleothems – that is stalactites, stalagmites, and the like. He calls the Bifurto Abyss a “naked cave. “The Bifurto is a naked cave, so we could say it is not beautiful – even though, to me, it’s extremely beautiful for that reason.”
Comparing Il Buco to his museum installations, Frammartino notes: “The collective experience of being in a dark room in front of a screen where truly feel the work other people are doing to when watching a film – and you share it and you perceive other people working along side you, the way your team members would during an exploration mission – is an experience that I consider fundamental. I don’t want that to be lost. This is the reason that I thought I would make a movie that would be a celebration of the theater experience and this way of enjoying cinema. I was well aware that the film would lose a lot on our devices, but for me, it was an act of love for movie theater enjoyment.” (Frammartino’s emphasis on “work” – the movie’s audience is “working”to contribute to the experience – is interesting in light of the comments made by window-washer in the TV footage at the beginning of the movie. As he washes windows, the man says, he observes other people working in the skyscraper and becomes so absorbed in their work that he forgets that he is also working. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek philsopher said: “Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.” In other words, those who behold the images on a screen in a dreamlike state are “working” and “helping to make something of the world.”)
The film’s spectacle contrasts with the grainy black-and-white images on the village TV set that we see at the start of the film. The TV shows the Italian north and the Pirelli Tower, a skyscraper under construction. In 1961, the Piedmont area of Italy, the north was undergoing an economic boom that attracted many immigrants from the much poorer and rural south, particularly Calabria. (Ermanno Olmi’s great Il Fidanzati, “The Betrothed”, shows the effects of immigration in 1963 – although in this picture, a Milanese couple are separated when the man moves south to take a job in Sicily.)
In effect, Frammartino’s ambition is to turn the movie theater into an installation that simulates the experience of working in the darkness almost a kilometer under the earth. Frammartino’s work, I think, bears some resemblance to the more daunting aspects of several films by Apichapatong Weerasethakul, the Thai director who also produces museum installation pieces. (Another analog is Chantal Akerman’s installation pieces, most notably the remarkable D’Est – From the East that premiered at the Walker Art Center in 1993; the installation in three rooms showed long, uninterrupted tracking shots made in Ukraine and Russia. I didn’t understand the piece when I saw it, but have never forgotten the film’s imagery.)
In an interview, Frammartino said: “I think of cinema like a site-specific installation. There’s the placement of the screen, there’s the placement of the audience, and there’s the darkness that comes forth.”
Representation
Frammartino distinguishes between “presence” and “representation”.
“It was also very important to me that the image of this film was closer to ‘presence’ than ‘representation.’ I didn’t want the group (of spelunkers) to ‘represent’ the 1961 group that made the mission, even though I dressed them the same way. I wanted this group to behave the way cave explorers do when faced by a cave. The difference – between an image that represents and an image that presents – is very important to me. What we did was actually go on our own mission, ourselves to shoot this film. I wasn’t about telling another story. It was our story.”
Geography
Il Buco is shot in Pollino National Park, a sprawling district in southern Italy encircling the Pollino Range, part of the southern Appenines with peaks rising as high as 7400 feet. (Mount Pollino is on the border between the provinces of Basilicata and Calabria.) This is a wild area dotted with ancient villages, some of them inhabited by people who speak only Albanian. (The dialects spoken in this region are alien to northern Italians; for instance, a Roman would not be able to understand the dialect spoken in Il Buco). Le quattro Volte was shot in the highlands around Alessandria del Carreto, also in the Pollino district – the mayor of that town first showed Frammartino the Bifurto Abyss. The village featured in Il Buco is Cerchiara de Calabri, an very ancient town founded by the Greeks around 500 BC. The town currently has 2447 inhabitants. It is best known for S. Maria delli Armi, a church built against a cliff mined into cells that once housed 10th century Byzantine monks. There is a well-established pilgrim hostel in the Church and the company of spelunkers spends the night there before traveling to the site of the abyss high in the mountains.
What Il Buco is not
Il Buco is not an adventure film. Although cave exploration is very hazardous, none of the dangers intrinsic to this endeavor are dramatized: no one slips or falls or suffers any injury; there are no close calls in the movie. This is a bit peculiar because, during filming, there were mishaps including an instance in which the crew with Frammartino were trapped in the cave by flooding. But nothing like this is shown. Furthermore, Il Buco is not a study of character, that is grace under pressure, or courage or, even, endurance although cave exploration involves these qualities. There are no feats of strength or particular displays of skill – everyone seems quietly and unobtrusively competent. The cavers are anonymous; we rarely see them in a shot close enough to distinguish their features and the men and women comprising the team are not differentiated from one another. (The human figures are dwarfed by nature; they are like the little creatures wearing pot-shaped hats that you see in the corner of landscape engravings by Brueghel – that is, generic figures who mostly exist to establish scale.) There is no dialogue between the cavers. Notably, they communicate like the old cowherd – that is, they use a non-verbal system of whistles and yelps to signal to one another. (The old man calls his cattle using barks and yips; this is an old Calabrian way of herding livestock and, of course, returns in the last utterances heard in the movie. Watch Il Buco with a domestic animal, for instance, a dog at your side, and you will be surprised to see how the animal responds to the old man’s calls.) There are no romantic or comical interactions between the spelunkers. No one seems competitive and there is no conflict in the film.
What do the generic human explorers do in this film? They go into a place, they walk around in it carefully observing their surroundings, and, then, make a map. There seems no urgency to the cave exploration. Most of the time, the spelunkers are simply looking around. The notion of entering a place, calmly looking at it, and returning with a map suggests some kind of philosophical enterprise. We should carefully note what is there to be seen and prepare some kind of report about what we have encountered.
Philosophical Argument
Il Buco embodies a philosophical argument (or propositions) about the world. Philosophy interrogates the way that we organize or conceptualize reality. To think is to impose a structure on the propositions (arrangements of facts) that make up the world. For instance, the mind often constructs the world as a series of oppositions – that is, the high and the low, light and dark, culture and nature, the tower and the cave. (There are Freudian psycho-sexual implications to this latter dialectic, but the film is uninterested in them – the lead speleologist in the film is a young woman but this is far more evident from still photographs taken of the production than the movie itself in which the cavers are generally filmed in long shots; I think it is this woman who creeps into the final pouch-like chamber of the abyss and, then, with her hands makes a gesturing signaling that this is all there is. But, unless, you know her gender from publicity information, Frammartino makes nothing of this fact.) Frammartino’s movie seems concerned with the empirical world as it is organized conceptually into these oppositions. To cite Heraclitus again: the work of the mind is “distinguish each thing according to its nature and show how it is.”
A fundamental aspect of this philosophical enterprise is understand where things are located and how the world is put together. In Il Buco, Pollino Mountain rises above the sea. From the cowherd’s vantage, when the weather is clear, we can look down upon the Ionian Sea, to the east of the Calabrian coast. The cowherd’s vantage, a “belvedere” as it is called in TV footage of the tower, reaches from mountain to sea and, in fact, encompasses the little lighthouse that we see flashing above the train station when the Milanese spelunkers arrive in this landscape in the deep South of Italy. The movie contains one of the most spectacular of all shot/reverse-shot edits: the lighthouse is shown above the train station as the cave explorers emerge onto the platform. Then, there is a reverse shot from miles away in which we see the slopes of the mountains and the tiny revolving dot of light that is the lighthouse. Between the sea and the mountain meadow in which the abyss is located, there is a village located in a dramatic cleft in the mountain range. The cleft canyon and village seems to be midway between the ocean and the peaks. It is at this half-way point that the cave explorers spend the night. We see the cleft in the mountains both from below as a dramatic fissure in the ridge and from above as a pale canyon cutting through the massif. The way up to the village involves driving along a dry stream bed; the landscape is inscribed with the marks of flowing water just as the cave seems hollowed out by streams funneling into it. In the meadow, there are several ponds that arc around the abyss like parenthesis marks. The military vehicle climbing into the hills drives by women washing clothes who are at the base of the funnel from which water pours down out of the mountains although in this season the river is mostly dry. Frammartino carefully establishes the milieu and the relations that exist between the parts of the landscape.
(An exception to the precise, map-like delineation of space is the cowherd’s cabin, shown in repeated shots as occupying a hillside with the rear of the building apparently next to a rocky cliff. But when the cabin is shown in reverse shot, it seems to be isolated, standing apart in a level meadow. Where is the cliff? For some reason, the shot/reverse shot geometry involving the cabin is rendered uncanny – in one shot, the cabin is pressed against the stone cliff (perhaps by the use of a telephoto lens); in the reverse shot, there is no sign of the cliff at all and the cabin is isolated on the meadow. I don’t have an explanation for why Frammartino implements this effect – however, it may be because the cabin is where the old man lies, as if in state, comatose and, therefore, uncanny. Perhaps, Frammartino desires to create a slight impression that the cowherd’s cabin isn’t really a part of this world, that it is somehow oddly distinct and possibly supernatural.)
One aspect of human understanding is our faculty for making comparisons. The film presents a system of similes that clarifies our grasp of the world as presented to us. Similes (or metaphors) are instructive comparisons that are an aid to thought – as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss said in another context: Similes are “good to think with.”
The word “buco” or abyss summons to mind a “mouth” – that is, the buccal cavity. The cave is a mouth opening into the earth that absorbs the explorers, flaming bits of magazine paper, and their soccer ball. The correlation between “mouth” and cave is made explicit in a shot that shows the doctor in the village shining a light into a child’s mouth or ear – the orifices are illuminated by the doctor’s light like the cave is lit by carbide lamps of the spelunkers. The town, after dark, is a maze of ancient stone walls, overhanging roofs, and tiny vertical alleys. When we see the children with the spelunker’s helmets making their way through the village, we observe that this place is akin to the cave. The human body is similarly a kind of cave – it has a mouth and consists of a long and winding tube. We speak of someone exploring the bowels of the earth in a cave. The abyss with its organic glistening forms, its wet recesses and puddle-lagoons and mud, equates to the inside of a human body. The explorers are penetrating into the living body of the earth. Similarly, the cowherd’s cottage is also filmed as a kind of tunnel, a chamber next to a corridor that leads to the bright meadows outside the dwelling. As the flaming paper ripped from Epoch illumines the lower chambers in the cave with flickering orange radiance so does the brazier with open flame around which the shepherds are gathered in the cabin provide fitful illumination for the shack. When the cowherd’s body is removed, a door is shut closing off the cabin and making it dark inside. (We notice one of the other shepherds kissing the dead man just as the door is gently closed –a closing door signifies the end of things, just as the small chamber at - 683 meters represents the bottom of the cave. When the door is closed by John Wayne in Ford’s The Searchers, we know the movie is at an end.)
Is Italy also a kind of cave with a brightly lit north and a dark bottom in the south? Viewers will recognize the general form of the Italian peninsula in the shape of the cave drawn on the map that one of the spelunkers has made. (The speleologist inking the final chamber at the bottom of the map labeled “Bifurto” signifies the end of the exploration.) Italy ends with the heel and toe of its boot, a vertically configured shaft into the Mediterranean Sea. Similarly, the cave ends on the map at the bottom of its vertical shaft into the mountain.
Caves are openings into the Underworld, that is, the kingdom of the dead. In the Bifurto Abyss, there is even a watery fragment of the River Styx. The spelunkers have to cross a small pool of water in an inflatable raft to reach the deeper chambers in the cave. The old cowherd dies in the course of Il Buco. Figuratively, he enters into the realm of the Underworld signified by the cave. Sleep is the brother of Death. One of the few closeups of the spelunkers with camera placed sufficiently near to render their features shows two of the explorers sleeping. Their peaceful sleep mirrors the inert and motionless old man who seems to be in some kind of a coma. The old man in funereal repose upon his pallet-like bed reminds us of the body of the Saint, enclosed in a glass case in the sacristy of the old church in the village. Thus, there is a pictorial equation between the comatose old man, the sleeping spelunkers, and the inert wooden figures in the sacristy, including most notably, the half-naked saint in his glass casket. A shot shows several of the spelunkers reclining in the chapel’s sacristy with supine wooden effigies next to them.
There are, at least, two abysses in the film: the cave and the dying old man. The camera searches the dying man’s features for some glimmer of life. We wonder what is concealed within the motionless figure. Is he sentient in some respect? What depths is he probing? The comatose old man conceals depths that are inaccessible – no one can reach into the geology of his body (his face is a weathered landscape) to sound his depths.
Il Buco is structured like poetry. It is built on a series of correspondences. The film’s method is associative. Ordinarily, feature-length films are constructed around a plot or narrative; in the narrative, there is conflict that reveals character. But there is no conflict in Il Buco and the figures in the film are like the wooden effigies in the chapel – they are stylized figures who represent cave explorers (without names or backstories), villagers, peasant shepherds, and military men. In the absence of individuated characters and plot, the film’s meanings are produced by a series of associations or similes, that is, resemblances. This is an unusual way to structure a feature-length movie (Il Buco is 93 minutes long) and accounts for the picture’s philosophical and poetic features.
Transcendence versus Immanence
Everyone knows what transcendence means. When we rise above challenges or material obstacles, we are said to transcend them. Transcendence is not merely a matter of altitude or spatial elevation; overcoming obstacles or material things also results in qualitative changes. Matter may be somehow spiritualized and converted into some kind of ideal essence.
Immanence is a much more difficult concept to understand and articulate. It is seductive to imagine that immanence involves going beneath obstacles and material things – but this isn’t actual immanence, but rather some inverted form of transcendence. Instead of rising above things, we somehow penetrate into a space below them. On one level, the descent into the cave seems an enterprise involving immanence. But the idea of immanence involves, also, a qualitative difference between the things that exist in our world and what lies beneath them. Objects are rooted. They appear out of darkness trailing, not clouds of transcendent glory, but shadows. The project of immanence involves working one’s way through the darkness of the underground to encounter the origins of things, how it comes to be that the things we see in the sunlight exist with their foundations in bowels of the earth.
The Pirelli Tower, 127 meters tall, is a form of the Tower of Babel. Constructed between 1956 and 1958, the skyscraper is a symbol of transcendence. When it was completed, the tower was said to symbolize Italy’s re-emergence as a major economic power from the rubble of World War Two. The tower proclaims that Italy has transcended its Fascist past and become a modern democracy with a vibrant, productive economy. The Bifurto Abyss is in a part of Italy that has always been profoundly impoverished and, even, backward. The Abyss embodies immanence – that is, the ancient roots of rock and water on which the world is built.
Top and Bottom
What’s at the top of the Pirelli Tower? The film shows window-washing scaffolding inexorably climbing the glass walls of the skyscraper. Some music adorns the scaffolding final ascent. We expect the ride on this exterior elevator to end at some elevated outlook from which we will be able to see a majestic view of Milan and environs. In fact, this upper terminus with a splendid prospect over Milan is suggested by the transit past the Belvedere, an enclosed space affording a vantage point over the city. But the elevator-scaffolding glides past that uppermost floor and its upward motion ends beneath an unprepossessing metal grate that could just as well be in a sewer, a sort of catwalk where a man is glaring at the camera. The film’s world exists between an elevation of 127 meters above grade and 683 meters below ground. The upper limit seems to be capped by a steel catwalk; it’s unimpressive just as, I suppose, the top of Mount Everest is merely a small knoll of trampled snow dipped into the jet stream.
The cave’s bottom is likewise unprepossessing. It’s a wet cavity at the bottom of a stone sluice with nothing much to see.
Kafka
Die Schacht von Babel
Was baust do? Ich will einen Gang graben. Es muss ein Fortschritt geschehen. Zu hoch oben is mein Standort. Wir graben den Schacht von Babel.
The Pit of Babel
What are you building? I want to dig a shaft. Progress must be made. My standing is too high up. We’re digging the pit of Babel.
(From Kafka’s unpublished and uncollected writings 1922 - 1924.)
The Big Horns
Once, thirty years ago, I was hiking alone on a windswept ridge at 11,000 feet in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. There were no trees on the exposed rock on the mountain, except for a few wind-sculpted pines huddled together in little crevasses trenched into the top of the domed flanks of the ridge. I came to a fissure that intrigued me; the rock was crumbling, cracked by the elements into a sort of cup-shaped funnel. At the bottom of the funnel, there was a crooked slot that was dark with shadow. I slid down the tilted sides of the funnel to the lip of the black, elliptical opening. When I kicked a stone into the pit, the rock fell and fell and fell and never hit bottom. Then, I sensed that the mountain was somehow exhaling through the hole and I could feel a gust of air, warmer than the cool wind blowing along this summit. The air smelled wet and foul. Suddenly, I felt very afraid and scrambled away from the edge of the pit, my feet dislodging gravel from the crumbling sides of the trench, debris that also was sucked into the hole and fell without any sound of the stones striking bottom.
Later, I learned that a Grotto (caving club) at the University of Wyoming had explored many of the caves on the ridge that I had been hiking. Some of the shafts were three-hundred feet deep.
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