Il Buco (The Hole) (Michelangelo Frammartino, 2021) (Patreon)

[Embargoed. You are not reading this right now. It is an illusion.]

It was eleven years ago that Michelangelo Frammartino became a signficant new name on the festival scene with his second feature Le Quattro Volte. That highly unusual film combined a kind of rustic classicism with the extreme reduction of drama typically associated with the avant-garde. Like fellow cineaste Eugène Green, Frammartino exhibits a paradoxical aesthetic, one that looks backward in order to move ahead. Le Quattro Volte was a film about landscape and labor -- the felling and subsequent processing of a single tree -- but even with the buzz of chainsaws and the occasional motor vehicle, the film felt like an object out of time. As with the recent work of Ben Rivers, Le Quattro Volte ("the four times") adopted the perspective of nature itself, a force unconcerned with human temporality, much less narrative.

At the time, I admired Frammartino's patience and his single-mindedness, even though it seemed to me that this Old World approach to land and time might conflict with the filmmaker's apparent aims. It's difficult to put my finger on it, but Le Quattro Volte conveyed an air of rustic Romanticism. We were watching people who could reasonably be referred to as a peasantry, molding their lives to the change of the seasons, the drift of clouds and the slow sedimentation of the Earth. Perhaps I misunderstood the film, but I wanted it to be a bit more rigorous and stop trying to cultivate mystery.

If anything, Frammartino's latest doubles down on its commitment to purity. Il Buco as a film is both a landscape and a portrait, an ostensible period piece that is nevertheless situated in the present. But unlike a film like Petzold's Transit, Frammartino is not at all interested in the conflict between past and present. If anything, Il Buco tries to overcome that conflict by suggesting that the "two times" are completely the same. The countryside in 1961, when the film's events take place, has not evolved in any meaningful way. The meadows, the trees, the cattle, and the shepherds are all ambassadors for an ahistorical "way of life."

The film is a recreation of the discovery and exploration of the Bifurto Abyss, the world's second deepest known cave. It was found and penetrated by members of the Piedmont Speleological Group who, having charted all the major caverns in the north of Italy, went south and found the mouth of the Bifurto in a grazing meadow in the Pollino Mountains. For the recreation that forms the heart of Il Buco, Frammartino cast twelve certified Italian spelunkers, surrounding them by actual elderly shepherds from the area. And of course, real livestock.

In its attention to authenticity, Il Buco is often thrilling and frequently nervewracking. We are watching the spelunkers, as well as Frammartino and cinematographer Renato Berta, travel down hundreds of feet below the earth's surface, squeezing into the narrowest of crevasses and dead-end branches. This is the kind of film we could easily imagine Werner Herzog making, but he would no doubt provide narration (and ironic commentary) that would cement us in the present. After all, the thrill of a project like this for someone like Herzog is that it is happening now, that cinema is capturing bold human achievement at great risk.

By contrast, Frammartino wants to position us in what we might call "cave time." This hole was etched in the earth over millions of years, both by great seismic shifts and painstakingly slow, gradual erosion by the elements. Il Buco aims to take us out of time altogether, on the assumption that the discovery of the Bifurto Abyss will continue as long as human beings are alive to experience it. This is a reenactment that is a repetition of the bold initial act, and is only slightly less treacherous now than it was fifty years ago.

However, Il Buco insists on placing the people of the Pollino Mountains within this non-time as well, and this is where Frammartino goes astray. Through unambiguous parallel editing, the director shifts back and forth between the exploration of the cave and the weathered, workaday visage of a single elderly shepherd. We see him in long shot with his herd of cattle, and later, once the explorers arrive, Frammartino repeatedly cuts back to him on a hilltop, impassively watching the crew set up camp, harness up, and head down the hole. 

In purely formal terms, the shepherd is Il Buco's representation of our point of view. Long shots of the spelunkers alternate with medium shots, and later close-ups, of the shepherd looking off into the distance, and we know that, in essence, he is watching Frammartino's production as well. But as we get (literally) deeper into Il Buco, we see more of the shepherd's life, as he collapses, falls into illness, and eventually dies. The film more or less corrals him into the position of "the human life cycle," even as Frammartino's attention to his haggard face implores us to honor his individuality.

The results are highly ambivalent. Frammartino uses repetitive shot set-ups to show the old man over time, and these nearly identical images are as etched and deliberate as anything you might see in a structural film. But then he breaks with this method, the old man now subject to dire incident. Since we know nothing about him, we cannot necessarily read him any differently than we would the horses and cows, of the hills and trees for that matter. This approach situates the old man out of time, making him a stand-in for the people of the region, picturesque, craggy, and as eternal as the land that sustains them.

All the same, there is no sense denying that Il Buco is a major achievement. As a romantic vision of the Italian countryside, it is never less than breathtaking, with Frammartino exhibiting an unfailing ability to register nature's majesty on camera -- the shifting light through clouds, the wind across the hilltops, or a field being gradually enveloped in fog. Everything promised by Le Quattro Volte, Il Buco delivers and then some. Still, I can't help but feel like Frammartino is involved in a project that is unthinkingly reactionary. This is the sort of film Ansel Adams might've wished he made, and for me that is the trouble. If you don't care about such theoretical matters, get ready for one of the best films of the year.