A mix between a straightforward video essay and a more abstract collage, this video briefly delves into the loose movement known as slow cinema, using the 2015 Chinese film KAILI BLUES, directed by Bi Gan, as a focusing lens. Equal emphasis is given to analysis and creation of a mood befitting the subject matter.Source :
Director Bi Gan discussed his film 'Kaili Blues' after its screening at New Directors/New Films 2016, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. A multiple prizewinner at the Locarno Film Festival and one of the most audacious and innovative debuts of recent years, Bi Gan’s endlessly surprising shape-shifter comes to assume the uncanny quality of a waking dream as it poetically and mysteriously interweaves the past, present, and future. Chen Sheng, a country doctor in the Guizhou province who has served time in prison, is concerned for the well-being of his nephew, Weiwei, whom he believes his thug brother Crazy Face intends to sell. Weiwei soon vanishes, and Chen sets out to find him, embarking on a mystical quest that takes him to the riverside city of Kaili and the town of Dang Mai. Through a remarkable arsenal of stylistic techniques, the film develops into a one-of-a-kind road movie, at once magical and materialist, traversing both space and time. A Grasshopper Film release.
Paul Schrader : "Tarkovsky's films mark a deviding point in the history of Durational Cinema. Before Tarkovsky, the use of withholding and distancing devices which Deleuze calls "Time Image", took place in the context of commercial theatrical cinema. Transcendental Style falls into this category.
After Tarkovsky the use of these devices became increasingly exagerated, and their films fell into the domain of film festivals and art museums. The 3 sec Bresson's shot of a door became a 10 min static view of traffic. Transcendental Style had morphed into the hydra-headed monster we call "Slow Cinema". Without going into length, I'd just say that Slow Cinema refers to films of considerable length where very little happens. [...] This is why I say it's outside the perview of commercial cinema. Cinema in my opinion is inherantly narrative."
Paul Schrader : "To me when movies move away from their narrative nucleus, they vector in one of three directions. And all three are dead endpoints. One is the Surveillance Camera, another is the Art Gallery and the third is the Mandala."
#36. Sátántangó - Tarr Béla, 1994
(34 votes : Adam Hyman, Andrei Gorzo, Daniela Michel, David E James, David O Mahony, Dmitry Martov, Esin Kucuktepepinar, Ewa Mazierska, Gary Indiana, Gertjan Zuilhof, Gusztáv Schubert, Henk Camping, Horacio Bernades, Janusz Wróblewski, Jonathan Romney, Jonathan Rosenbaum, José Manuel Costa, Jože Dolmark, Jurica Pavicic, Jytte Jensen, Lóránt Stőhr, Ludmila Cvikova, Marcelo Alderete, Marlena Lukasiak, Matthew Flanagan, Mohammed Rouda, Pavel Bednarik, Peter Walsh, Roman Gutek, Ronald Bergan, Thomas Beard, Ulrich Gregor, Vadim Rizov, Zsolt Gyenge)
#36. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles - Chantal Akerman, 1975
(34 votes : Amy Taubin, Andréa Picard, Annette Kuhn, Berenice Reynaud, Bill Horrigan, Briony Hanson, Bruce Jenkins, Bruno Di Marino, Cristina Álvarez López, Dana Linssen, David Jenkins, Dennis Lim, Ed Halter, Elena Oroz, Fritz Göttler, George Clark, John David Rhodes, Kristy Matheson, Lalitha Gopalan, Laura Mulvey, Liz Helfgott, Lola Hinojosa, Matthew Flanagan, Melissa Gronlund, Michael Koresky, Michael Sicinski, Michael Witt, Nathan Lee, Noam M Elcott, Sandra Hebron, Senem Aytaç, Stuart Klawans, Tim Grierson, Tim Robey)
- #8. Man with a Movie Camera - Dziga Vertov, 1929 (68 votes)
- #21. L’avventura - Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960 (43 votes)
- #42. Play Time - Jacques Tati, 1967 (31 votes)
- #73. L’eclisse - Michelangelo Antonioni (22 votes)
- #84. Sayat Nova - Sergei Parajanov (19 votes)
#3. Tokyo Story (107 votes); #6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (90 votes); #9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (65 votes); #11. Battleship Potemkin (63 votes); #15. Late Spring (50 votes); #16. Au hasard Balthazar (49 votes); #17. Persona (48 votes); #19. Mirror (47 votes); #24. Ordet (42 votes); #24. In the Mood for Love (42 votes); #26. Andrei Rublev (41 votes); #29. Stalker (39 votes); #50. La Jetée (29 votes); #69. Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (23 votes); #78. Once Upon a Time in the West (21 votes); #78. Beau Travail (21 votes); #81. Spirit of the Beehive (20 votes); #93. Yi Yi (17 votes)
Directors Top25 poll (voted by critics) :
- # 4. Ozu (189 votes); # 9. Tarkovsky (153); # 10. Bresson (149); # 17. Antonioni (110)
Man With A Movie Camera (Vertov); The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (Dreyer); Alexander Nevsky (Eisenstein); M (Lang); Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson); Vivre sa vie (Godard); Frenzy (Hitchcock); Tokyo Story (Ozu); The Round-Up (Jancsó); Berlin Alexanderplatz (Fassbinder)
Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai); A Brighter Summer Day (Yang); Regen (Ivens); Empire (Warhol); Valentin de la Sierras (Baillie); The Conversation (Coppola); Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick); The Eighties (Akerman); The General (Keaton); Sátántangó (Tarr)
Le Havre (Kaurismaki); Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul); The River (Tsai); Alphaville (JLG); Pickpocket (Bresson); Stalker (Trakovsky); The Killing of a chinese Bookmaker (Cassavetes); La vie moderne (Depardon); Aguirre (Herzog); Silent Light (Reygadas)
Sunrise (Murnau); La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Dreyer); The Only Son (Ozu); Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu); Night of the Hunter (Laughton); Les 400 coups (Truffaut); L'eclisse (Antonioni); Mouchette (Bresson); Ali, Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder); Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai)
Gummo (Korine); Mother and Son (Sokurov); Werckmeister Harmonies (Tarr); Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky); Persona (Bergman); Los Olvidados (Buñuel); Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi); Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies); Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (Bresson); El Verdugo (Berlanga)
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog); A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick); The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone); L' humanité (Dumont); Jeanne Dielman (Akerman); Landscape Suicide (Benning); Los Olvidados (Buñuel); M (Lang); Modern Times (Chaplin); Take the Money and Run (Allen)
The Big Lebowski (Coen); The Blair Witch Project (Myrick/Sánchez); The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Puiu); Festen (Vinterberg); Garage (Abrahamson); The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Leone); Monty Python's Life of Brian (Jones); Le Quatro Volte (Frammartino); Twilight (Fehér); A Woman Under the Influence (Cassavetes)
Providence (Resnais); Jeanne Dielman (Akerman); Festen (Vinterberg); Jubilee (Jarman); Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (Bresson); Le mépris (JLG); El sol del membrillo (Erice); Kes (Loach); Close-up (Kiarostami); Blowup (Antonioni)
Bicycle Thieves (De Sica); Viridiana (Buñuel); Hiroshima, mon amour (Resnais); Intolerance (Griffith); Rashomon (Kurosawa); Amarcord (Fellini); Barry Lindon (Kubrick); Ashes and Diamonds (WAjda); Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky); La bataille d'Alger (Pontecorvo)
Mirror (Tarkovsky); Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky); Tokyo Story (Ozu); Late Spring (Ozu); A Man Escaped (Bresson); Au hasard Balthazar (Bresson); Shame (Bergman); Scenes from a Marriage (Bergman); L’avventura (Antonioni); L’eclisse (Antonioni)
L' Age d'Or (Buñuel); Celine and Julie Go Boating (Rivette); Fata Morgana (Herzog); Perfumed Nightmare (Tahimik); Portrait of Ga (Tait); Soft Fiction (Strand); Tropical Malady (Weerasethakul); Vampyr (Dreyer); Weather Diary 3 (Kuchar); Woman of the Dunes (Teshigahara)
The Ascent (Shepitko); The Bicycle Thieves (de Sica); Come And See (Klimov); The Cranes are Flying (Kalatozov); Il Grido (Antonioni); Mirror (Tarkovsky); Mouchette (Bresson); Ossessione (Visconti); Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom (Pasolini); The Second Circle (Sokurov)
En novembre 2008, Tacita Dean a filmé Merce Cunningham (1919-2009) et sa compagnie de danse répétant pour un événement dans une ancienne usine d'assemblage Ford conçue par Albert Kahn à Richmond en Californie. L'ultime collaboration avec le chorégraphe, disparu quelques mois plus tard. Choisi et présenté par Hervé Gauville.
« L'impressionnant décor de Craneway, sa beauté unique, sont parfaitement en résonance avec l'écriture chorégraphique de Merce Cunningham. Pour Tacita Dean, il ne s'agissait pas de réaliser un documentaire de plus sur Merce et sa compagnie mais de transformer l'observation de leur travail en une vision onirique, quasi mythique.
Les hangars de Craneway ouvrent sur l'océan. Les vastes verrières qui éclairent les séquences filmées dessinent simultanément des zones d'ombre, des contrejours, qui rendent énigmatiques les actions en cours : tantôt des jeux de miroirs modifient les perspectives, tantôt les danseurs prennent l'aspect d'un cortège d'ombres chinoises.
[…] La lumière crépusculaire de Craneway abrite et perpétue à jamais l'échange entre Merce et ses danseurs. Échange dont on sait qu'il était au principe de sa danse.
Et lorsque vers la fin du film Merce s'assoupit un instant, les danseurs qui s'en aperçoivent, frémissent, désemparés. Comme si déjà il n'était plus tout à fait parmi eux. […] »Patrick Bensard, octobre 2010
Early this summer, before the onslaught of summer blockbusters had completely destroyed his capacity to protest, Variety’s film critic Todd McCarthy described Stephen Sommers’ truly awful Van Helsing:
Packed with nothing but big scenes and breathlessly paced in a way that suggests panic at the idea the audience might get bored if things were slowed and toned down even for a moment…Sommers knows how to startle an audience—he’s big into suddenly dropping hideous faces into the frame from above—but never develops any sense of creepiness or dread because he won’t take the time to do so. (Variety, May 3, 2004)Less than a month later, another blockbuster, The Day After Tomorrow, seemed determined to raise the audience’s consciousness about global warming. However, the filmmakers clearly felt it was necessary to speed things up. Dan Schrag, a Harvard paleoclimatologist acknowledged that the facts of global warming as conveyed by his scientific colleagues in Senate testimony were relatively dull: “Getting people excited about something that happens over decades is difficult, so I understand why they shortened it to a couple of days. The consequences are going to be just as severe as the movie suggests, but it may be boring to watch.” The fact these blockbusters are frenetic is not surprising. Speed and cinema have always gone together, as evidenced by this 1915 quote from Vachel Lindsay: “The keywords of the stage are passion and character; of the photoplay, splendor and speed.” The chase scene, for example, was a key component of early cinema. Its best practitioners, like Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, made their chase scenes address directly the experience of modernization and the accelerating speed of modern life. This is certainly true in the Lloyd film we’re screening, Speedy, which races the last horse drawn trolley in the city against the dark forces of the transit monopoly.
Cinema was one of the fast machines of modernity, like the railway journey, whose rapid panoramic views were often evoked and echoed in movie theaters. Movies gave audiences a thrill similar to that of the train and automobile, a sensation that Milan Kundera has described perfectly: “when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine…his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, non-material, pure speed, speed itself, ecstacy speed.” He believes we like this feeling our prosthetic mechanisms give us:
“Speed is the form of ecstacy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.”Fast forward, as we are wont to do, almost a century later, and the thrill ain’t gone. Since the eighties, in fact, there has been a notable speed-up in cinematic pacing, and many believe that the instigator was MTV. The station’s editors took advantage of the emergence of the “Avid” and digital editing to give the station “a helter-kelter style of quick video bursts.” U.Va. alumnus Mark Pellington worked on the MTV show Buzz in 1990 with editors who were “just punching images into the machines, to see how fast we could get them to go.”
During the same decade, digital editing equipment began making it easier for Hollywood filmmakers to “give the screen energy” by speeding up the cuts, piling on extra shots, and so keep up with MTV. Some observers actually began counting average shot length, and noticed that the duration of shots in contemporary Hollywood films was considerably less than in the classic period:
“Where it lasted 7.85 seconds in Spartacus, it was only 3.36 seconds long in Gladiator, 8.72 seconds in The Fall of the Roman Empire and 2.07 seconds in Armageddon” (Michel Ciment, “The State of Cinema”).Critics began to notice and complain:
“Closeups predominate, because they play well on television….Contemplative long shots and a smooth, methodical pace have largely disappeared, as filmmakers worry that moviegoers will grow restless. Action has become confused with movement” (Scott Eyman, “The U.S. Screen Scene”).It may be satisfying, but it’s not fair to pin the blame on MTV. There is obviously a cultural context that has spurred the recent rise of fast food, instant messaging, video games, and sound bites. Audiences prefer the hair trigger reaction to the reflective response. Kundera bemoans this in Slowness (a short book that is—and this is a compliment—not a quick read). He believes we’re collectively trying to avoid reflecting and remembering: “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.” He asks: “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear?” Once upon a time, Kundera claims, indolence didn’t mean boredom and the lack of activity; an old Czech proverb admired the happy indolent who were “gazing at God’s windows.”
Kundera is joined by other cultural renegades who resist the cultural maelstrom and the impatience of modern life. One of these heroes, whom our Festival is welcoming to Charlottesville, is a man named “Speed” Levitch. From New York City tour buses, he encourages people to meditate deeply, and join the higher Cruise. When the bus stalls in traffic, he reassures: “Congestion is the city-teacher’s method of inflicting patience on a population addicted to impatience.” His first precept in Speedology is: “The fastest way to adventure is to stand still.” Are you bored? “Boredom is the continuous state of not noticing that the unexpected is constantly arriving while the anticipated is never showing up. Boredom is anti-Cruise propaganda. Cruising is an act, the realization that standing still is exalting.”
Milan Kundera and “Speed” Levitch have many comrades in the cinema world, making movies that resist movement, and we are featuring them in this year’s festival as exemplars of what Michel Ciment calls ”the cinema of contemplation.”
Facing this lack of patience and themselves made impatient by the bombardment of sound and image to which they are submitted as TV or cinema spectators, a number of directors have reacted by creating a cinema of slowness, of contemplation, as if they wanted to live again the sensuous experience of a moment revealed in its authenticity. Angelopoulos in Greece, Nuril Bilge Ceylan in Turkey, de Oliveira and Monteiro in Portugal, Bela Tarr in Hungary, Abbas Kiarostami in Iran, Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien in Taiwan, Philippe Garrel and Bruno Dumont in France, Souleyman Cisse and Idrissa Ouedraogo in Africa, Sharunas Bartas in the Baltic state, Aleksandr Sokurov in Russia, and several directors in Central Asia have been proponents in recent years of a resistence to the fetishism of technology. (Michel Ciment ,The State of Cinema)
The contemporary directors Ciment cites (all worth tracking down, and you can get off to a glorious start with Ceylan’s Distant in our festival) have significant predecessors: Antonioni, Ozu, Bresson, Kubrick, Rohmer, Malick… These slow-teurs have suffered some abuse for telling uneventful stories. Remember how some critics dubbed Antonioni’s leisurely films about alienated characters and their environments “Antoniennui?” How Gene Hackman in Night Moves passed on an invitation to watch an Eric Rohmer film by comparing it to “watching paint dry?” In response, I’ll quote Robert Bresson: “Condemned are the films the slowness and the silence of which are mistaken by the slowness and the silence of the audience in the cinema.” The action of contemplative cinema is latent in the mind of the viewer who becomes, in our featured guest Paul Schrader’s words, “an active participant in the creative process.” Schrader’s influential book Transcendental Style in Film, on Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, noted that the paring down of action and performance and spectacle liberates the viewer to soar imaginatively and spiritually.
The contemplative style is not limited to the realm of the less-than-popular art film. Last year, Peter Biskind marveled that Lost in Translation, with little plotting and an inconclusive ending, somehow was made and widely seen: “I really felt like I was back in the 1970s…The shots were held longer, like in the ‘70s. It wasn’t bam bam bam. I could watch a medium shot of Bill Murray standing in an elevator full of Japanese businessmen for about ten minutes.” And David Chase marveled, in The New York Times, at how successful he was making a TV show, The Sopranos, that was, just like HBO claims, not TV.
Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner. It looks like they’re off to some important thing because they’re walking 15 miles an hour and they’re talking and handing papers off. It’s the modern style….I prefer sitting in the therapy office for a 12-minute scene…I wanted the audience to have to figure out what was important, to actually do the same work that Dr. Melfi was doing….I think there should be dreams and music and dead air and stuff that goes nowhere. There should be, God forgive me, a little bit of poetry…. (New York Times, 2-29-04)
Meanwhile, one of Michel Ciment’s contemplative directors, Bruno Dumont, has been trying to get financing for a murder mystery called The End, to be shot in L.A. with major stars. He told the Village Voice: "Humanité is very slow, and now I want to make a film that's fast—there's as much power in speed as there is in slowness.” He believes his fast film will permit contemplation: “The interior of a film can stay very austere, but have the appearance of a Hollywood film." I’d like to go further and argue that one can and should watch any fast film slowly… the mind can speed faster than the film (sort of like bullet time) and examine and explore instead of simply gape. This year’s Festival, then, offers both fast (Bullitt, The Great Escape, Faster, Speed) and slow films for your contemplation. So hurry up and order tickets. Then take your time.
"A cinema of contemplation, or devotion as Dorsky calls it, requires a contemplative mindset, and a contemplative environment. Though cinema is rarely thought of as a contemplative art, if given the space and accord, its potential is nearly untapped.
But on the other hand, these self-same formal/pictorial considerations that activate and guide us as we move through the precisely simmered intensity of Dorsky's expressions, are also at work in the much more rapidly articulated montages that function successfully out in the clickety-clack of the world, albeit usually at more trivial levels.
Why only usually? You'd think triviality would be endemic in the quick-cut montage.
A montage that's assembled relatively quickly by an editor through straightforward gut instinct and experience with the kinetic flow of moving pictures, is organized and constrained by the same abstract qualities of rhythm, motion, light, color, texture and depth that play across the screen and across the cuts in Dorsky's films. So there is a correlation between the nature of the considerations that were designed to impart. If the considerations happen to be deeply contemplative where vectors of reference radiate softly in all directions and the vector-cadence is extremely finely measured, a thoroughly darkened and intrusion-free situation is necessary. Outside the safe harbor of a contemplative cinema, the vectors need to be shorter, faster, straighter, narrower, and need to resonate on a very different level.
For a montage that's at the beginning or end of a typical film drama or TV show, profundity of resonnance is rarely as big an issue as popcorn and sodas or exit strategies. And for anything on TV, it seems to me that the walls are way too thin for the resonance of formal values to reach very far.
In fact, clicker-driven TV demands its very own approach to editing sequences, scenes or montages. so before we can articulate in any medium, we have to take note of whether the frame around the entire experience is opaque and impervious, or practically transparent. Quick cutting would seem to have the inherent attention grabbing potential for lively TV viewing, and a concomitant lack of intellectual or spiritual depth as well.
Maybe so, maybe not.
What something can communicate is limited by the depth of attention we can accord it. This isn't as pessimistic as it might sound at first. In fact it's at the root of the idea of interactive cinema. Films of Dorsky's ilk are interactive on a spiritual and cerabral level, rather than on the level of the action/response we now more commonly associate with the term.
So, although we can see that rapid cutting has great appeal in a digital world where the frame around the screen is negligible, and the image is designed to interact with life on the loose, it's harder to see that ultra-fast cutting also has the possibility of reaching as deeply into a zone of contemplation as does the apparently relaxed pace of Dorsky's films."
"Des révélations comme celle-là, il s'en manifeste rarement. Des cinéastes comme celui-ci, il faut les honorer. Ce film, d'une malicieuse simplicité, est stupéfiant de beauté et de gravité. [..]
Majesté du silence, musique des grelots. Bêlements, bruits de sabots. [..]
Aucune prise de tête dans Le Quattro Volte, rien que de la poésie secrète, une captivante exploration de coutumes et des temps qui scandent vie, mort, et renaissance. Une éblouissante limpidité narrative. [..]
Grand Prix indiscutable du dernier festival de cinéma italien d'Annecy, Le Quattro Volte témoigne d'une curiosité contemplative pour les mystères et d'une réticence viscérale pour les artifices. [..]
Ici, le réalisme extrême de cette fiction aux apparences de documentaire réinvente la mécanique des catastrophes en chaîne et l'art du cadavre exquis."
"Le Quattro Volte" : de l'humain au minéral, l'enchantement du monde; Jean Luc Douin, Le Monde, 28 Dec 2010
"Disposant d’une distribution aussi frêle qu’un chevreau nouveau-né, Le Quattro Volte de Michelangelo Frammartino risque malheureusement de passer assez inaperçu en cette fin 2010. [..]
Le Quattro Volte capte le fugace et l’éternel à partir d’un localisme très ancré. [..]
Le Quattro Volte avance en philosophant sur l’ordre des choses avec une tranquillité limpide, faisant allègrement tomber les murs du local pour atteindre l’universel. [..] Dans la continuité, la séquence devient une méditation éblouissante, une précieuse miniature. [..]
Ce formidable plan burlesque se gonfle de déflagrations comiques inattendues baignant dans une bande-son très sophistiquée, tout en répétant, à la manière d’un motif, d’amples panoramiques. Ces derniers deviennent nécessaires tant la multitude de récits ayant trouvé leur origine dans le champ se poursuivent en dehors de lui. La caméra semble perdre la tête et nous faire éprouver la difficulté de contenir un tout dans un seul plan. En l’occurrence la transformation d’une réalité prosaïque en une situation extrêmement complexe et inextricable, où tout se trouve lié par un réseau touffu de causes et de conséquences. [..]
Film sur la circulation entre les quatre états, chaque plan grossit et finit par accoucher du suivant. Dans ces conditions, le raccord transmet, dynamise et transforme le plan précédent en autre chose. Le plan serait le temps de la gestation et le montage celui de la nativité. [..]"
Le Quattro Volte; Arnaud Hée (Critikat, 28 décembre 2010)
"Il faut se réjouir de l’existence, rare, de films comme celui de Michelangelo Frammartino, cinéaste que nous avions découvert en 2006 avec son premier film, déjà étonnant, déjà tourné dans la même région et avec le même manque de moyens et le même sens de l’espace, Il Dono. [..] Frammartino (jeune homme cultivé, professeur de cinéma milanais issu d’une famille de paysans calabrais) fait un cinéma antérieur à l’invention du cinéma, ou plutôt qui ignorerait la narration cinématographique, qui repose souvent paresseusement sur le conflit. [..]"
Le Quattro Volte de Michelangelo Frammartino; Jean-Baptiste Morain (Les Inrockuptibles, 28 décembre 2010)
"Frammartino constate la dissolution de ce monde. S'il ne nomme jamais Alessandria del Carretto, c'est que chez lui la démarche documentaire a inversé ses fins. Chez lui, la métaphysique, l'intemporel, sont au premier plan. Il s'agit alors, pour son cinéma à lui, de retrouver l'apparence, le temporaire, l'existant qui se cache derrière l'essence métaphysique des images. [..] Ce qui fait le prix de ce film est aussi sa limite. La dimension choisie est conceptuelle. [..] Si l’on perçoit vite le carcan qui enferme ici l'émotion, Le Quattro Volte offre néanmoins une réflexion sur l'oeuvre de De Seta et sur le monde filmé par celui-ci."
Francesco Boille (Independencia, 13 janvier 2011)
"Gigantesque pour les promesses dont il est porteur. Minuscule parce que, dans son pays, il est un des seuls à les porter. [..]
De prime abord, Le quattro volte fait craindre le style très académique d'une modernité taiseuse, au récit volontairement âpre et pauvre, qui se contente de buter sur des extériorités et n'y trouve rien que l'absurdité du monde, son chaos permanent. Très vite, on s'aperçoit qu'il n'en est rien. Le quattro volte se révèle un film 'plein', chargé de récits, de microfictions virales qui, sous couvert d'observation, envahissent le plan à mesure qu'il se déroule, l'air de rien, sous nos yeux. [..] La succession des événements, d'abord frappants, d'abord anodins, d'abord séparés, nous révèle leurs liaidons profondes et leur importance dans le cycle décrit. [..] Le moteur de ce cinéma c'est bien évidemment la durée. [..]
Ce cinéma se fonde sur cette belle idée que l'image, prise dans une durée et laissée à cette durée, sans rhétorique (montage, dialogue, fondus, ellipses, etc. : tout ce qu'on appelle l' "expression"), accouche de sa propre dramaturgie, d'une dramaturgie presque naturelle. [..] Le quattro volte est aussi un film d'action. Ou disons plutôt : un film d'actions. [..] Frammartino ne fétichise pas pour autant le son direct. [..]
Tout est tissage, tissage de fils disparates qui donne, vue de haut, une image d'ensemble. [..] Ce neoprimitivisme abreuve le cinéma de nouvelles ressources. Comme par exemple cette idée de mettre un animal au centre du film, san rien abandonner au vococentrisme et à l'anthropomorphisme courants du cinéma, san rien lâcher non plus sur le désir de récit."
La chèvre et le chou; Mathieu Macheret (Trafic, n°77, printemps 2011)
Naomi Kawase: "Dans tous les aspects du travail, on donne la primauté à la rapidité. Mais nos ancêtres, avec cette faculté à attendre, n’avaient-ils pas au bout du compte un meilleur sens des priorités que nous aujourd’hui ?"
