Le Quattro Volte

Michelangelo Frammartino - 2010
The Godardian Goat- A Multiplied View on Le Quattro Volte

Le Quattro Volte, directed by Michelangelo Frammartino, refuses narrative synopsis. Even describing the meagre detail a viewer could follow- of a single ‘life’ transmigrating from dust, to man, to goat, to tree, to dust- would be a lie, in that there is no shot in the film that narrates the story of a single life-form. Every take, often high and long to enable comprehension, rather sets off multiple movements and presences. At every moment the viewer must make a choice; whether to watch the goat chewing on the left, or the dog playing on the right.
The Calabrian countryside is the setting for this teeming environment where, except in the most pantheistic way, the majority of elements are part of no ‘story’. If there is a tradition- from distracted modern Hollywood to early Lang and Strike- of ‘single cell’ shots of quickly processed unitary information, Le Quattro Volte has found an interesting way to reject it. In other words, Frammartino has watched a Jacques Tati film, or perhaps, to pick another, Edward Yang’s Yi Yi.
Allowing significant complexity into the frame presents a challenge to classical narrative. Every film has some dispersal of points of interest, but films based around this principle can reach a level where new storytelling problems develop. With a complex frame, the issue arises that the viewer can’t be expected to take in multiple causes or effects at once. This is why in Tati, and in Le Quattro Volte, there is a sense of circularity before progression. The past can’t be allowed to be left behind, as the cause of a later effect, because the viewer may well have missed the original action (or, any process of change that mustn’t be missed- for Le Quattro Volte the old goatherd’s progressive coughing seizures- is repeated so often that even slow Joe in the back row can pick up the idea).
What allows Le Quattro Volte to have stable themes, rather than being just a loosely related collection of similar images, is how its complicated images are themselves the film’s theme. Le Quattro Volte’s recurring disruption of the human world by the natural is always present as the film’s images enact this very disturbance. Narrative directions are curtailed because our focus is equally on a directionless goat. An attempt to use a cooking pot is foiled by the snails on the opposite side of the screen. Animals disrupt the camera’s, and the audience’s, project of telling a progressive story.
In this sense, the animals are malignant. Goats supposed to follow a path jump out of the centre of the frame to perch on a wall, presumably having watched their Hitchcock and realising that statically staring from a great height will freak the humans out. Nature is chaos to a systematising mind, an uncontrollable power. Humans and animals may be made of the same elements, but an animal’s decomposition carries entirely different connotations from a human’s. Rather than being fear-inducing, a portrait of a tragic loss of power, an animal’s life-force seems to nearly grow in strength as it is rechanneled into the earth. This differs from the sickness of a dying old goatherd; this isn’t a mind reintegrating, but disappearing.
Nature is chaotic in that multiple separate focuses refuse to tally. The movements strike one another, setting off rather than clearly unifying the components. Like Tati, Frammartino can also use sound to create a focus separate from the image. Animals are Godardian, Frammartino realises; the crazed bleats crossed with the docile blankness of a goat’s eyes are a perfect sound/image disjunction. The opening of the film, where in fact the image of a workman and the sound of his spade do join, is quickly undermined. It’s not just a spade we’re hearing, it’s also a heartbeat. The audience is immediately distanced from direct, perhaps diagetic, conceptions of the film’s sound mix. Two focuses are set up, only one of which can be fully comprehended at a time (for the images, because a cinema screen is quite large).

What Frammartino doesn’t do is give any of the multiple aspects of his screen much complexity. The viewer’s choice is often between a goat eating and a goat staring at a tree. When humans form part of the mis-en-scene they are wordless and not particularly excitable figures. Sometimes the second point of interest is only a shadow, or even just an explicit place in the frame given to the absence of anything (drawing attention, by framing decisions, to an absence can often be more effective than placing a nondescript item in the gap- think of most horror films, or the final shot of Shoot The Pianist).
Playtime and Yi Yi are masterworks set in a city; the old theory of overloaded perceptions, traffic and crowds and advertisements, explains the city as a setting that is experienced in a multifaceted way even outside of the cinema. Within the width of a camera frame multiple complex (physical or emotional) acts take place. Two people can be oblivious to one another, a businessman and a tramp, but their actions reverberate across the frame. In Le Quattro Volte, no matter how long the shots, two complex developments do not take place at once. We are, ultimately, choosing between an ant and a log. Le Quattro Volte is the form of the ‘multiple movements’ I have outlined, with next to nothing to say about the movement’s content. This is perhaps why I became uncomfortable whenever humans were involved; stripped of dialogue and reason, they became silly little shapes.
A variant in the film’s images are those of the great lump of black materials that make up a scarazzi- essentially a natural oven created to produce charcoal. These shots, give or take a workman plodding about, do in a sense constitute a single centre of interest. Yet this is undercut by how the scarazzi itself is a complex monster of crisscrossing smokeholes and branches. It is a singular hummock but, in that, a deeply complex one. It reminded me of a brain; thousands of neurons interlacing in a structure which is one only insofar as it is a collection of parts. The idea of a human brain is a baffling one, full of complexities beyond our current comprehension. Equally, we can’t look inside a scarazzi; only marvel at the little paths of white smoke pouring out.
There’s an unfortunate degree of underdeveloped gaping in Le Quattro Volte; none of the multiple aspects of the mis-en-scene are investigated, critical thinking ends with a misty ‘all is one’. If a single cut sums this attitude up, despite being completely out of keeping with the rest of the film’s gentle pace, it is the shock-cut to a goat plopping out of its mother’s womb. I was knocked back, failing to process the image with much clarity. For all the obvious thought involved in the conception and planning of Le Quattro Volte, the finished work seems to almost discourage its audience from applying proportionate critical skills.