Le Quattro Volte director Michelangelo Frammartino returns with another nearly wordless mix of docudrama and contemplative tone poetry with Il Buco. Set in Italy at the top of ‘60s, a time when the nation was at the cutting edge of modern chic thanks to its celebrated fashion and cinema scenes, Il Buco turns its attention to the ancient, a time even before Rome. It follows a group of speleologists who come to survey the Bifurto Abyss, a cave in the south of the country that is tucked away in rolling, untamed hills and sinks several hundred meters below the surface of the Earth. Perched at the feet of the Pollino Mountains, the cave entrance looks almost like a natural entrance, albeit one that points down even at its mouth. Those who enter it cannot help but look like Dante trailing Virgil into the first level of Hell.
The film does not immediately begin with this descent, however. Instead, it establishes a contrast between the more modernized northern Italy from which the scientists hail and the traditional, almost pre-industrialization town near the cave. The dichotomy is established early as citizens of the latter gather around what may be the only TV set in the hamlet to watch a documentary on the erection of the Pirelli Tower, a skyscraper in Milan that was then the tallest building in the nation. As a TV host rides some scaffolding up the side of glass and steel, gazing at the office workers on each floor, the townsfolk huddle on cobblestones that may well date back to the Roman Empire. And when the speleologists arrive in the area, Frammartino shoots them almost like animals in a nature documentary, regularly framing them huddled together like penguins as they shuffle through town streets or ride in their large research vehicle over verdant hills toward Bifurto.
Once they finally arrive at the cave, the film becomes as overwhelming a showcase of the director’s mastery of cinematic landscape painting as his earlier film. The rolling terrain around the cave is captured in vistas worthy of John Ford or Straub-Huillet, testaments to an eternal beauty that hangs indifferently over human beings who are often reduced to small specks in extreme long shots compared to the looming mountains and cloud-dappled skies. Cattle are as significant as characters as the humans, each equalized by their sublimation before the world around them.
The real visual feast, though, begins when things move underground. One of digital’s main selling points for filmmakers is its vastly improved low-light capacity compared to celluloid, a boon that is rarely exploited to great effect in modern cinema and often results in sharp but flattened images. Not here. Frammartino achieves astonishing levels of visual clarity in the deepest recesses of the abyss, where the only source of light is often a headlamp on whatever spelunker is in the frame. Subtle sparkles of lantern light refracting off water droplets on rock walls throw crags and stalactites into Caravaggian relief. When the men occasional stumble upon subterranean lakes, the glistening waters lying still under faint light look like a suffocating variation of the Romantic maritime paintings of JMW Turner or Ivan Aivazovsky. The film maximizes the potential of digital to capture such images without need for all the cumbersome equipment that would make shooting these areas on film impossible, producing a work of dark beauty whose only peer is the later work of Pedro Costa.
The gorgeousness is reward enough, but Il Buco does build something of a symbolic, pastoral narrative. The group of speleologists intruding upon an alien land is regularly contrasted with an ancient cowherd from the region who gazes down on their activities like a guardian of the mountain. Soon, the old man falls catatonically ill in what seems an obvious indication of the last vestiges of the wilds being tamed by the modernity and scientific documentation embodied by the research team. But the film never lapses into simplistic commentary on urbanity steamrolling the rural and folksy; it is the scientists who find the cowherd and take him for treatment, and however silly they look roaming around the countryside as a pack, their respect for the cave matches their attitude toward locals. Il Buco is about communion, not conflict, and if the speleologists ultimately fill in a blank spot on the map, the film retains a sense of awe toward the idea that no amount of technological or exploratory advancement will ever rob the planet of its sense of unknowability.
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