Although most of what we know about the Greek
philosopher Pythagoras
derives from sources written four hundred years after his death, he is
regarded to have been a believer in the doctrine known as the
transmigration of souls, the idea that the soul of man can reincarnate
in different forms: as man, animal, vegetable, or mineral depending on
one's karma. Referred to in Indian tradition as samsara, the idea of
transmigration has recently been depicted in Apichatpong
Weerasethakul's, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, where
Boonmee's son is reborn as a monkey ghost and one of Boonmee's past
lives is as an erotic talking catfish.
The doctrine that all things are part of the divine whether a tree, a
lump of charcoal, an animal, or a human being is also dramatized in Le
Quattro Volte, written and directed by Michelangelo Frammartino. Set in
a small village in Calabria in Southern Italy where Pythagoras is said
to have lived, Le Quattro Volte is a quietly meditative film that is
divided into four sections separated by a blank screen. There is no
narration or dialogue other than the dialogue of nature: the bleating
of goats, the sheep bells, and the rush of wind blowing through the
trees. Frammartino offers no clues or connections to the viewer as to
what each segment represents. It is a film, he warns, in which “the
viewer must do all the work.”
As the film opens, an old man (Giuseppe Fuda), emerges out of the smoke
rising from a charcoal kiln, tending to his goats in a pastoral setting
that may not have changed for hundreds of years. The goat herder has a
persistent cough that he tends to by exchanging goat's milk for dust on
the floor of the local church and mixing it with a glass of water. When
he realizes that his medicine has disappeared, he goes back to the
church late at night but it is closed. Without his elixir, he dies the
following morning in his bed surrounded by a herd of goats that made
their way into his bedroom, one standing on the top of his table.
Taking a page from Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan, the scene shifts
suddenly from the darkness of the old man's tomb to the birth of a live
goat with its fluid being licked by its mother, a sequence that
suggests the continuation of life. We follow the young kid as it grows
steadily from taking its first steps to playing with other young goats.
His development is interrupted, however, by a ten-minute sequence
showing revelers taking part in a passion play celebrating Good Friday.
Hilariously the old man's dog, after being chased off by villagers
after annoying them with constant barking, retaliates by unblocking the
wheels of their truck parked on a hillside causing it to roll down the
hill, freeing a herd of goats enclosed in a pen.
As the goats are led through the forest, the baby goat becomes
separated from the herd and wanders in the heavy brush until he lies
down at the foot of a tall pine tree. With that, the film moves into
another stage that shows the process of cutting down and stripping the
tall tree. To complete the cycle, the tree is then made into a hut
where wood and straw are converted into charcoal to provide heat for
the winter, suggesting the oft-repeated phrase from The Book of Common
Prayer, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Lacking in what is generally considered to be drama or character
identification, Le Quattro Volte can be slow going and abstract, a film
that rarely engages the emotions, yet it has a serene and contemplative
beauty that allows its message of the impermanence of life to become
manifest. As Eric Benet put it in his well-known song “Dust in The
Wind”, “Don't hang on. Nothing lasts forever, but the earth and sky,
it's there always and all your money won't another minute buy. Dust. .
. all we are is dust in the wind. Dust in the wind…Time for the healing
to begin.”
GRADE: B+