Michelan­ge­lo Fram­marti­no – ​‘The pur­pose of art is to explore the ineffable’

It has been more than ten years since Michelan­ge­lo Frammartino’s philo­soph­i­cal and meta­phys­i­cal pas­toral rever­ie Le Quat­tro Volte debuted to crit­i­cal acclaim. Now, the direc­tor final­ly returns to our screens with his next fea­ture film, anoth­er slow and thought-pro­vok­ing explo­ration of the Cal­abri­an land­scape, Il Buco (or ​“The Hole”). A hybrid of doc­u­men­tary and fic­tion in the same vein as the director’s pre­vi­ous work, it is set in the ear­ly 1960s it fol­lows a team of Pied­mon­tese spele­ol­o­gists as they attempt to chart the inky dark­ness of the Bifur­to cave system.

LWLies: Where did the ini­tial idea for Il Buco first come from?

Fram­marti­no: To start with, the core theme was that of bound­aries. Peo­ple thought they knew this ter­ri­to­ry well, but then they were made aware of the caves and realised that beneath the sur­face there was a whole new world to be dis­cov­ered. So, mak­ing the film was about going under­ground, both in a phys­i­cal and metaphor­i­cal sense. You know, if you use Google Earth, the whole world has been mapped – with my son I might look online to see what it is like on the top of a moun­tain – but spele­ol­o­gists are still explor­ers. There are still places that nobody has ever been to, no human has ever been to; it hap­pened even to me! I was the first per­son in a cer­tain region of a cave. The pur­pose of art is to explore the inef­fa­ble. So that idea was intrigu­ing, but once we found out that this par­tic­u­lar cave had been explored for the first time in 1961, which has a spe­cif­ic his­tor­i­cal con­no­ta­tion for Italy, this made it even more irresistible.

I want­ed to ask about that his­tor­i­cal con­text. I assume inter­na­tion­al audi­ences are per­haps more famil­iar with the con­no­ta­tions of an image of JFK, as seen in the film, that they are with some­thing like ​‘il boom economico’?

It’s a real­ly inter­est­ing point because although the shoot was very much Ital­ian, the pro­duc­tion team was inter­na­tion­al. Every time we screened with them present, there would be unex­pect­ed obser­va­tions, so show­ing the film to inter­na­tion­al audi­ences wasn’t the first time we were con­front­ed with a dif­fer­ent take on the sub­ject. For instance, cer­tain Ital­ian crit­ics thought it was slight­ly repet­i­tive to have the text at the begin­ning and end of the film, but it ham­mers home to the inter­na­tion­al audi­ence what’s going on. Even though, yes, it was a peri­od of eco­nom­ic growth for the rest of Europe, in Italy, it was par­tic­u­lar­ly felt. We also have the divide between those in north­ern Italy and the south which is per­haps dif­fi­cult to under­stand for peo­ple of oth­er nation­al­i­ties. It is still present but at that time it was par­tic­u­lar­ly striking.

These two parts are rep­re­sent­ed by the high-rise in the north and the cave in the south, but also by the nar­ra­tive of the shep­herd who you place in direct prox­im­i­ty to the speleologists.

When we start­ed going down into the cave, the first thing we noticed is how organ­ic this jour­ney is – it is this almost anatom­i­cal jour­ney into the innards of the earth. I’m a teacher and I had fun show­ing my stu­dents pic­tures tak­en doing laparoscopy and pic­tures tak­en in the cave, side by side. They were sup­posed to guess which was which and were very often wrong. Gio­van­na [Giu­liani, co-writer] and I then came across this for­got­ten book by a French spele­ol­o­gist, François Ellen­berg­er, who found him­self in a con­cen­tra­tion camp between ​’40 – 45. He couldn’t go explor­ing in the usu­al way, so he applied his cog­ni­tion and his sci­ence to explore the body. We decid­ed to take a lit­tle risk on this con­nec­tion between the explo­ration of the moun­tain and the sto­ry of the shepherd.

That comes across quite strong­ly in some of your choic­es – par­tic­u­lar­ly lat­er in the film – when the edits real­ly make you feel as though there are lit­tle peo­ple inside him explor­ing this dying body.

You know, dur­ing the edit­ing, many times you think ​‘oh this is too obvi­ous.’ Not that my goal is to be obscure, but in all the con­ver­sa­tions, Q&As, and reviews that have been writ­ten so far, only one per­son has men­tioned – as you did just now – that they are inside the body, which to me was bla­tant­ly clear.

Do you think that some­times peo­ple need an explic­it frame­work, like the link to Pythago­ras in Le Quat­tro Volte, to guide them?

Per­haps. What is impor­tant for me is that when you build a project there is a map of mean­ing. I can­not believe there is only one way to see a movie. We are work­ing on a new project now and there are two or three ways to read it, but it’s not enough for me, so we may not do it. We need many ways to read it. The incep­tion point of Il Buco was dark­ness. With Rena­to (Berta, DOP) we want­ed to film dark­ness – which is, of course, unat­tain­able because you are chas­ing the dark­ness and by chas­ing it you make it vis­i­ble. Spele­ol­o­gy is a tale of defeat – you are always defeat­ed because, at some point, you just can’t go on. If you want to climb the moun­tain, you find your­self on the top of the moun­tain, so you reach your goal, but spele­ol­o­gy is like an infi­nite suc­ces­sion of defeats. Even in the film, you see that point when they reached the bot­tom; no more dark­ness, we destroy it.

Although the map that we see has sev­er­al unex­plored nooks and crannies.

Yes, exact­ly, and this is right because, in some ways, the case nev­er ends. This is why we have the voice of the shep­herd at the end. Sound is dif­fer­ent from image. When you explore the cave, the light, in some way, is killing the unfath­omable. The light is destroy­ing that fron­tier. But the sound, when you throw a stone, the stone is say­ing some­thing about the shape. It’s not clos­ing it, not killing it, because there is lots to imag­ine. The light is ter­ri­ble, the eye is ter­ri­ble – the ear is more democratic.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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