At once pre- and postmodern in its concerns, the cinema of Michelangelo Frammartino tranquilly traverses the tides of time. Over the course of 26 years, the Italian director has produced a small but mighty corpus of shorts, installations, and feature films, all of which stand outside traditional notions of narrative in both the storytelling sense and in the recurrent (i.e., industrialized) manner in which movies are typically produced and released. Nearly two decades separate Frammartino’s first feature, Il dono (2003), and his third, Il buco, which recently premiered in competition in Venice, where it picked up the Special Jury Prize. But if Il buco stands out in the context of contemporary festival fare, it does so as much for its deceptive integration of various storytelling as it does for belonging to the ever-novel and programmable category of the wordless film (as do all of Frammartino’s features), which generally leans on certain observational cinema tropes at the expense of any sort of involving drama. Bucking this trend, Frammartino has long specialized in expertly constructed hybrids that only appear to operate in the realm of ethnographic nonfiction, when in fact they stand as narratives of a high and complex order.
Never has this been more apparent than in Il buco, which is not only Frammartino’s most ambitious project to date, but in many ways his most innovative. That he’s ventured into the past in order to find a way forward is but one small irony in a film that functions throughout in fruitfully contradictory ways. An honest- to-God period piece that finds the director returning to his ancestral home of Calabria to recreate a 1961 speleological expedition to the region’s famed Bifurto Abyss, Il buco resembles Frammartino’s previous work in both style and substance, but expands upon the formal and conceptual ideas he’d earlier laid out. Where Il dono found an acute poetry in its parallel portrait of two ill-fated Caulonians, and (2010) took a circular approach to its rapt depiction of rebirth in a small Calabrian village, , which was conceived and co-written in collaboration with the actress Giovanna Giuliani, pushes quite literally into the unknown, beyond the spatio-temporal boundaries that tether most cinematic restagings. Without betraying either the historical particulars of the events depicted or the filmmaker’s more spiritual concerns related to labour, the body, and bygone cultural traditions, the film is structured around a series of seemingly irreconcilable extremes: light and dark, life and death, the modern and the old-fashioned, the terrestrial and the subterranean.
