The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte) dir. Michaelangelo Frammartino

 

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 gives the audience an opportunity to question the relationship between humans and non-humans.  It places nature culture ideology at the forefront and shows how the relationships are tightly interwoven and dependent upon each other. Frammartino’s use of mise-en-scene within the film helps to guide the audience to look at the world through a different gaze.

The film opens with the charcoal mounds and will come full circle concluding with the charcoal again.  The audience watches as smoke and ash escape the mound and become one with the surroundings. Frammartino describes his film as ‘the journey of a soul’ (McMahon 2015, p108). From the charcoal becoming one with the environment, we open to a new scene, this is the first connection of the journey of a soul.  We leave the dirty piles of charcoal and move to an idyllic country scene of goats high on a hill.  We hear the distant sound of goat bells and a dog barking, we hear a man’s voice and we notice the goat herder.  Throughout the film, we are never given a name to the old man or any human animals that appear in it, no more than we are given a name to the dog or any of the goats.

Pick and Narraway state that film studies have tended to ignore the place of non-humans with cinema imagery, and that by doing so may ‘reduce cinema’s communicative potential ‘(2013, p. 7). An example of this is the scene when on the return home at the end of the day the man stops to rest, and we watch as the dog returns to him. It could be read with an anthropocentric gaze that the dog has returned to the old man, his master as it is a faithful companion. Or you could read the scene with a non-anthropocentric gaze, that the dog returns to the old man to round him up as it would with any stray animal.

Frammartino uses several similar or repeating scenes throughout the film to help to bring the circle or the ‘journey of the soul’ together.  Laura McMahon drawing on the work of Jane Bennett describes Frammartino’s films as having a horizontal aesthetic (2015, p109), McMahon further explains that Bennett doesn’t aim to ‘flatten differences between species but rather examine ‘the affinities across those differences’ (ibid).  There are several non-human animals within this film.  There are the goats and the dog, but also snails and ants, There is one scene in which the old man is relieving himself in the fields but when he gets up, he has failed to notice that he has dropped his blessed dust, the dust that we had seen earlier in the film floating in the air in the church. This dust reminds the audience of the earlier charcoal ash, which brings those two sections of the film together.  We watch as ants carry off this lost dust which will ultimately bring the story of the old man to a conclusion.  The dust that the old man relied on for his very survival will also have a use for the ants, thus illustrating an affinity between the species.

 The birth of a goat begins the next story, the use of the goat binds this story to the previous.  Pick and Narraway mention that film studies have tended to treat non-humans as mere backdrops to the story, or worse as simply raw material (2013, p. 7).  With this story, we have moved out of the town itself to the outskirts, a move away from humankind, in both a spatial sense and in the narrative sense.   

To me, Frammartino is using this scene to emphasise that we, all of us are simply dust.  As a direct reference to the funeral service in the Books of Common Prayer, ‘Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes’. To further emphasise the, point the film opens with charcoal mounds,.  

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