Montage

The humanist man is a construct that divides human and non-human. It is the conviction that humans exist ‘either outside of nature or above it’ (Gilebbi, 2019 p. 357).  Gilebbi suggests that The Great Beauty (2013) is an allegory of the crisis of the Humanist Man by implying that Jep is searching for a posthumanist subjectivity (2019, p. 356).  Jep is searching for his place in the world that surrounds him. He is distanced from the ecosphere, this is shown by placing Jep up high above the city at the party, at his house, etc. And when he walks through the city he watches as others such as the nun who is collecting the oranges, appear to become one with her environment, as she almost vanishes into the tree. About 1 hour and 35 minutes into the film Jep asks Arturo to ‘make me vanish too’ and Arturo replies, ‘it’s just a trick’. The giraffe scene harks back to the zoetrope, an optical toy of the late 19th century, and a precursor to film and film cameras. The zoetrope gave the ...

  I watched this film for the first time many years ago, pre my studies and I will say back then I really didn't appreciate it.  I found the goats humorous, who wouldn't? But I didn't understand what Frammartino was saying, and that was all my fault, not his.   This is a sublime piece of filmmaking.  It tells the story of the four circles of life. Human, non-human, organic and mineral.  It places humankind, not at the centre of the story, but rather just one of the parts of the story. And that is how we are in life, we are not the centre of the story, we are simply just one of the parts of the story.  But with all of our intelligence we somehow don't realise this, well some of us don't, a good percentage sadly.  It is mostly set and filmed in the south of Italy in a little village called Caulonia.  Le Quattro Volte (2010) is a non-anthropocentric film, The director, Michelangelo Frammartino, by not placing humankind at the centre of his film...