Frammartino's Il Buco at Venice2021 (press review)
Il Buco (Michelangelo Frammartino, Italy) in competition at the 2021 Venice Festival !
"Now Frammartino is back – 10 years later, not wanting to rush things – with the lovely Il Buco, another film that is content to saunter on the wild side, gazing at woods and sky, rocks and trees and identifying a serene, quiet heaven in everything that it sees. It’s not quite a documentary, yet nor is it exactly a narrative feature. It lives alone; the cinematic equivalent of a hermit on a mountaintop."
The Guardian - Xan Brooks (4 sept 2021)
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This is not a documentary but a reenactment of an event that occurred in 1961 in Italy. The Milanese director equipped 12 young speleologists, selected during a year and a half of casting throughout Italy, with 60-year-old equipment and filmed them as they repeated the feat of their predecessors along the 700 meters of the narrow fracture in the ground. [..]
The caves remain absolutely off-screen like a darkness hostile to the camera, as Frammartino pointed out in a meeting with the press at the end of filming. Yet, "the off-screen, the invisible, represent its deepest 'substance.'" [..]
The farmer is photographed in the foreground, while the explorers are always seen in the distance, from a raised observation point, as if seen through an impartial and equitable gaze. The dialogues are unintelligible (as in his previous film), recorded by Simone Paolo Olivero's microphone in a naturalistic way, the ensemble creating a sensation of absolute suspension.
Cineuropa - Camillo De Marco (4 sept 2021)
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If “Il Buco” constructs a fiction using the tools of documentary, it’s a far cry from the land of Christopher Guest. Showcasing crystalline HD footage of the Calabrian wilderness, and offering no spoken dialogue or musical cues, “Il Buco” wants to be mistaken for a hands-off, ethnographic nature doc about a group of young spelunkers in the southern Italian mountains. And it is very much that, though this 1960s-set excavation has been entirely mounted and period-staged for the purposes of a conceptually rigorous film.
Rigorous is the operative word here in a project that employs a substantial cast of actors without ever showing anyone’s face in full (save for one). The film is scored by nothing but the distant jangle of livestock (for all its sparsity, “Il Buco” needs no more cowbell) and allows whatever occasional snippets of overhead talk to go by muddled and without subtitles. The effect is one of immediate distancing, as if Frammartino is simply relaying what his camera caught on the fly and not what he and his team worked to organize, choreograph, and meticulously design.
Ben Croll - IndieWIRE (4 sept 2021)
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Frammartino’s rumination on the insignificance and transience of human existence through the exploration of a deep abyss in Italy’s deep South shows that time and space are important to us, but mean nothing to nature. People come and people go, but nature remains, unmoved, on a timescale far beyond human comprehension. [..]Frammartino’s cinema is for the patient, the ones willing to observe. His films hold to the old adage that you will only see it when you understand it. His images need contemplation, and never more so than in Il buco. The shots of people descending deeper and deeper into a cave (which must have been a grueling shoot) get repetitive after a while, but this in itself is another comment on time: the length of a film, the length of a lifetime, it is all insignificant to the length of eternity and the history of the universe. Il buco is a brilliant reminder that we are here for just a short while, and in that time given to us we should observe the world around us with awe and respect.
Venice 2021 review : Il Buco - Michelangelo Frammartino
Marc van de Klashorst - International Cinephile Society (5 sept 2021)
Marc van de Klashorst - International Cinephile Society (5 sept 2021)
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