In Calabria, at the toe of Italy's boot, an old shepherd is dying. He sits coughing amidst his goats in the majestic forested mountains. A feisty dog helps him herd his goats; the animals wear tinkling bells and, before sunset, he marches his flock through a shadowy defile to a hill-town atop a nearby crag. (The hill-town is ancient and seems more like an encrustation of boulders and rock spires along the ridge than anything made by human hands.) The shepherd drinks dust swept up in the village's old, cavernous church as medicine. After consuming this substance with a flask of water, he goes to the church, where the cleaning lady gives him another dose -- she tears a piece of glossy paper from a illustrated magazine, folding it around the dust. (We see innumerable dust motes dancing in a beam of light cast down on the church floor.) The next day, the old man goes out to the pasture again with his dog and the goats and, while defecating, I think, (an ant explores the wrinkles in his face), he loses the folded paper containing his medicine -- we see the scrap of magazine showing a woman's eyes surrealistically lying on a anthill swarming with insects. That night, the old man finds that his medicine has gone missing. He goes into the village, a place with alleys steep as ladders, and knocks on the door of the church but no one answers. In the morning, a Lenten procession is scheduled. A red truck appears with men wearing the breastplates and tunics of Roman centurions. The goats are confined in pen next to the road and across from the old man's ancient home -- this is where the truck is parked. A minute or two later, the religious procession including a man carrying a heavy cross appears and the faithful march down the steep road, harassed by the sheep dog and observed by the wary, but curious, goats. The procession vanishes -- a straggler dressed as one of Mary's is menaced by the dog and has to distract the animal to get around it. Then, the parked truck's brakes fail and, rolling backward unattended, it crashes into the pen confining the goats. The goats escape and, since the town is empty, explore the village. A number of goats climb into the old man's house where they clamber onto his table and surround the bed where he is gasping for breath. He dies and a procession carries his corpse in a casket to crypt. The casket is shoved into the dark niche and sealed and the screen is dark. Then, there's a horrible cry (it scared me so much that I almost fell out of my chair) and we see a goat giving birth to a white kid. The little goat staggers onto its feat and sucks at the mother's teats. When the herd of adult goats are herded up to the mountain pastures, about a dozen kids remain in the pen where they play a game of "king of the hill" nudging one another off a concrete block. Later, the shepherd ties the mouths of the kids shut (why?) and herds them into the mountains with the adult animals. A strange trench bars the way uphill, an incision in the slope, and the baby goat that we saw born can't follow the other animals. We watch the little kid bleating plaintively. At last, the baby goat wanders along the hillside and comes to an imposing tree. The goat looks over the vast and empty landscape, entirely forlorn and crying out loudly. Later, we see the little kid sitting among the roots of the tree, apparently weakened and dying. The landscape turns white with winter. After a montage of shots showing the tree in various seasons, some men come and cut down the tree. The massive trunk is trimmed and dragged by a couple hundred villagers to a larger town where it is used in some kind of festival. The big pole is set up in a town square with its leafy crown still intact. A man shinnies up the tree to seize some kind of prize and everyone cheers. Then, the pole falls over again. The tree trunk is hewn into logs and these are loaded on the red truck that we saw earlier when the goat pen was broken down. Some laborers swathed in smoke are making charcoal for fuel. They build with twigs and staves of wood a curious round structure, something like an elegant yurt. The dome contains stacks of logs and is covered with mud. Then, fire is dropped through a hole at the top of the dome. The mud plastered over the yurt is pierced and smoke pours out of dozens of holes in the structure while men clamber around on the dome-shaped kiln. (This is the enigmatic image with which the movie commenced, an activity that we only now learn is the process for making charcoal.) The men remove dry bone-like wood fragments from the kiln and heap them up. The red truck makes its way past the old shepherd's house (it now has different colored windows). Burlap sacks of charcoal are delivered to the townsfolk -- this is the smaller village which has more goats than people. We see the austere geometry of the flat or angular roofs and, then, after a minute or two, smoke emerges from one of the chimneys -- the people are burning the charcoal in their hearths.
Michelangelo Frammartino made this film beginning around 2007 and it was released to great acclaim in 2010. The picture is radiantly beautiful, but disquieting. The episode involving the lost kid is very moving and, indeed, disturbing. Frammartino positions his camera at a location remote from the action and shoots things from an Olympian vantage, sometimes, using very long takes. At the center of the film is an eight-minute sequence in continuous take in which the centurions arrive for the procession, the march to Calvary ensues, menaced by the sheep dog, and, then, the runaway truck smashes open the goat pen so that the animals (there must be sixty or more) flood into the deserted town. This is a bravura piece of mise en scene and involves many complex elements choreographed to occur in sequence. The landscapes are luminous -- sometimes, we see the shadows of clouds dragged over them. There are several close-ups of the old man and a single shot in which the camera moves with the herd of goats marching out into the mountain pastures -- the village is built on a high ridge and the goats actually are herded down off the mountain to their pastures. There is no audible dialogue -- Italian audiences in Rome and Milan and, even, Naples wouldn't understand the dialect in any event. Similarly, there is no music -- the soundtrack is bleating goats, wind in trees, the sounds of birds calling. The film is austere, but compelling. It is also somewhat mysterious -- both intentionally and, I think, by accident. (The elegant alchemy required to turn wood into charcoal is beautifully visualized and, at first, we have no idea what is going on -- the film's opening shots of smoke pouring out of the mud-slathered clay dome of the kiln are profoundly strange and disorienting; this is intentional. However, there are other details that I can't understand: why does the new shepherd tie shut the mouths of the kids? And the old man has a big pot in which hard objects are kept. Someone or something keeps disarranging the pot and knocking off its lid so that the things kept inside are spilled across the table. The old man puts a rock on the lid to keep it shut, but this also fails and, so, the shepherd pitches the rock out of the window of his house. (I think this rock is used as a "stop" under the tires of the red truck, but, somehow, fails so that the vehicle rolls backward and frees the goats -- at least, this is my surmise.) The four "turns' signify Pythagorean doctrine that all things are comprised of human will and reason, animal energy, vegetable abundance, all founded on a substrate of the mineral. Pythagoras argued for metempsychosis or thereincarnation of souls in which there is a continual transmutation of the human into the animal into the vegetable and, then, mineral. There is a Darwinian and scientific basis for Frammartino's vision -- the old man becomes a goat and, then, a tree and, at last, carbon. Of course, carbon is the basis for all living creatures and so the final scenes showing carbonized wood, hard and flinty as bones, suggests the elemental material from which all life is made. Furthermore, the devolution of the shepherd into charcoal is a mirror of the evolution of carbon that passes through different forms to produce sentient beings and, at last, the human intelligence that comprehends and can recognize the pattern of metempsychosis in the world. Pythagoras said that he heard a dead friend's voice in the bark of a dog. Further, Pythagoras maintained that within the charcoal there is the potential for human sentience. Each animal and tree is also a human soul and also a structure of interlocked carbon atoms. In other words, the four phases are not separate but each "turning" encompasses all of the others as well. This is abstract and doesn't do justice to the vibrant, even, raucous energy in the film. And the scene in which the delicate baby goat dies in the embrace of the big tree is very hard to shake -- the screen gradually fades to black but the little goat's white fur shines with a supernatural radiance in the darkness. (Frammartino's recent film, Il Buco, recapitulates some of the themes in Le Quattro Volte using the same techniques -- another old shepherd dies while cave explorers dive into the depths of a cavern, at that time, the deepest hole in the world. Il Buco is also a splendid movie.)
No comments:
Post a Comment