THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
When it comes to the origins of cinema, it is very often to the myth of Plato’s cave that we return, as to a primitive scene, where men chained in a cave see the shadows projected on the wall. from the outside, which they take for reality. A truly primitive film would therefore consist of returning to the Platonic cave, renewing this experience of depths, darkness and moving shadows, which assimilates perfectly to the cinema. Such a film exists, it is the third feature film, in twenty years, by the parsimonious Michelangelo Frammartino (after Il Dono, in 2003, and The Quattro Volta, in 2010). It is no coincidence that the 54-year-old filmmaker is part of a neo-primitive current in Italy that brings together other “on the bone” filmmakers, such as Alice Rohrwacher or Leonardo Di Costanzo.
Il Buco, awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, is an incredible film, an exploration story that focuses as rarely on the description of a place, and even more of a relief: a fold in the bark of the world. It retraces a pioneering expedition dating from 1961, led by a group of Piedmontese speleologists in a fault in Calabria, at the foot of the Apennines, the Bifurto chasm, in the old South, which will reveal itself, at the end of a descent of almost 700 meters, one of the deepest in the world. In the ageless village where the researchers first stop, then in the pastoral heart of the valley where their camp is established, the era can only be guessed by a handful of signs: vintage equipment (the flame helmet , before the electric headlamp), a black and white cathode-ray television broadcasting a report on the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan, a magazine cover bearing the image of JFK…
Precise and minimal gesture
Through this precise and minimal gesture of reconstruction, the film takes the path of fiction, but keeps one foot in the documentary throughout. Because the descent, shot in situ, is carried out in real conditions, the camera immersing itself in the abyss alongside real speleologists as interpreters. At the same time, Frammartino pays the attention of a landscape painter to the splendid theater of nature that surrounds the expedition, to the cycle of days and nights that fall on the valley, to the climatic variations that it accommodates. From time to time, the cries of an old shepherd with a parched face resound, the other protagonist of the film with the cave, who often contemplates this virgin site on the hillside, before returning to his wooden hut, located away from the village.
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