Vier Leben

Le Quattro Volte is the essence of fine film making, of film making as art that does not need to rely on technological camouflage to tell an engrossing human story. Who needs violence, car chases, explosions, and overwhelming special effects when there are films like this to be seen? If you have ever spent just a single day allowing yourself to be totally absorbed into a small, isolated town (this one just happens to be in the hills of southern Italy), this film will evoke visceral feelings from deep within you of recollection, pathos, and respect for tradition and simple human dignity. With practically no dialog, it is a visual tone poem that speaks volumes about the nature, pace, toils, loneliness, and devotion to ritual of small, traditional communities everywhere.

I saw this film in Norway where it recently came out in the cinemas.

The title refers to the four seasons and the story follows a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. There is a symmetry in the film, and each part focuses on the fate of one individual (a farmer, a goat and a tree, for instance).

The film makes effective use of the beautiful landscape of Calabria, and the old, ramshackle village. The setting is perhaps in itself the main character of the film. Humans are often viewed from above, and we are in a sense getting the "God" treatment.

There is barely any plot or a story to speak of, yet we go through stages of life that are eternal and inevitable - and we are reminded again and again that all things must pass.

There are life-like documentary aspects to this feature. The film is shot in available light with amateur actors and animals that will endear you. The result is breathtaking and inspiring. The sound scape is also rich: it helps create an emotional journey through every chapter of the film.

I can highly recommend this to anyone interested in unusual films with no dialogue or discernible plot, but anyone also will no doubt be captivated by it's gorgeous setting, it's humble characters or the feeling of watching life pass, unfiltered.

I wanted to hate this film for one reason or the other. In the first 15 minutes or so I was angry at myself for watching it, but luckily I kept watching. Le quattro volte is simply about the cycle of life seen in close-mid shots and distant, long static shots of an idyllic provincial hamlet somewhere in the Italian mountains in the Calabria region. It is silent, mysterious and even awkward in moments but eventually the persistent poeticism and patience of the filmmaker taps into you, taps something eternal. It is exquisitely photographed by Andrea Locatelli and directed by Michelangelo Frammartino with such unyielding subtlety that even after the film has ended and the fugue wears off, you may be tempted to shrug it off as a nice little film that you will forget about in a days time, but the persistence of this film stays with you.

My score is more accurately a 7.8/10

Although most of what we know about the Greek philosopher Pythagoras derives from sources written four hundred years after his death, he is regarded to have been a believer in the doctrine known as the transmigration of souls, the idea that the soul of man can reincarnate in different forms: as man, animal, vegetable, or mineral depending on one's karma. Referred to in Indian tradition as samsara, the idea of transmigration has recently been depicted in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, where Boonmee's son is reborn as a monkey ghost and one of Boonmee's past lives is as an erotic talking catfish.

The doctrine that all things are part of the divine whether a tree, a lump of charcoal, an animal, or a human being is also dramatized in Le Quattro Volte, written and directed by Michelangelo Frammartino. Set in a small village in Calabria in Southern Italy where Pythagoras is said to have lived, Le Quattro Volte is a quietly meditative film that is divided into four sections separated by a blank screen. There is no narration or dialogue other than the dialogue of nature: the bleating of goats, the sheep bells, and the rush of wind blowing through the trees. Frammartino offers no clues or connections to the viewer as to what each segment represents. It is a film, he warns, in which "the viewer must do all the work." As the film opens, an old man (Giuseppe Fuda), emerges out of the smoke rising from a charcoal kiln, tending to his goats in a pastoral setting that may not have changed for hundreds of years. The goat herder has a persistent cough that he tends to by exchanging goat's milk for dust on the floor of the local church and mixing it with a glass of water. When he realizes that his medicine has disappeared, he goes back to the church late at night but it is closed. Without his elixir, he dies the following morning in his bed surrounded by a herd of goats that made their way into his bedroom, one standing on the top of his table.

Taking a page from Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan, the scene shifts suddenly from the darkness of the old man's tomb to the birth of a live goat with its fluid being licked by its mother, a sequence that suggests the continuation of life. We follow the young kid as it grows steadily from taking its first steps to playing with other young goats. His development is interrupted, however, by a ten-minute sequence showing revelers taking part in a passion play celebrating Good Friday. Hilariously the old man's dog, after being chased off by villagers after annoying them with constant barking, retaliates by unblocking the wheels of their truck parked on a hillside causing it to roll down the hill, freeing a herd of goats enclosed in a pen.

As the goats are led through the forest, the baby goat becomes separated from the herd and wanders in the heavy brush until he lies down at the foot of a tall pine tree. With that, the film moves into another stage that shows the process of cutting down and stripping the tall tree. To complete the cycle, the tree is then made into a hut where wood and straw are converted into charcoal to provide heat for the winter, suggesting the oft-repeated phrase from The Book of Common Prayer, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Lacking in what is generally considered to be drama or character identification,Le Quattro Volte can be slow going and abstract, a film that rarely engages the emotions, yet it has a serene and contemplative beauty that allows its message of the impermanence of life to become manifest. As Eric Benet put it in his well-known song Dust in the Wind, "Don't hang on. Nothing lasts forever, but the earth and sky, it's there always and all your money won't another minute buy. Dust. . . all we are is dust in the wind. Dust in the wind…Time for the healing to begin."

Le Quattro Volte is a beautiful document. It opens a window on a time, place and people that are very different from modern city life. And yet the cycle man-animal-vegetable-mineral is still ours. While the movie depicts life as it is today in the Italian village (someone is taking a photo with a mobile phone) it could have taken place fifty years ago. The film depicts events at a slow pace, giving you time to absorb the events and landscape. Yet the film is engaging from start to finish. Scenes such as the one where the young goats are playing in the shed or when the dog challenges the boy are captivating, even sitting at the first row in a small art-house cinema.