An old shepherd lives his last days in a quiet medieval village perched high on the hills of Calabria, at the southernmost tip of Italy. He herds goats under skies that most villagers have deserted long ago. He is sick, and believes he can find his medicine in the dust he collects on the church floor, which he drinks in his water every day.
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Italian architect-turned filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino brilliantly channeled the spirits of Robert Bresson and Jacques Tati to create a disarmingly profound yet softly comic meditation on the interdependent moral and practical relationship between the human and animal worlds. Loosely focused on the figures of a goat keeper and charcoal gatherers, in Frammartino's native Calabria region, The Four Times pointedly offers them as examples of human labor interdependent on nature, on fauna and flora, respectively, and thus argues for a move away from anthropomorphic cinema. One of the most lyrical expressions of early twentieth century slow cinema, The Four Times almost entirely suppresses human language to instead expand an intermingled musical soundtrack comprised of the sounds and voices of plants and creatures lifted by the wind or perhaps another deeper force. Within the trilogy of films assembled for this program, The Four Times moves the furthest from an anthropomorphic view of the animal world and instead presents a world in which human and animal seem to exist on the same gently tipping, fragile mortal coil. (Haden GUEST | Director, Harvard Film Archive)
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Harvard Film Archive | mhjohns@fas.harvard.edu
Michelangelo FRAMMARTINO
