Issue 8: Winter 2011
To Believe In This World: An Interview With Michelangelo Frammartino
Gianluca Pulsoni
Michelangelo Frammartino is one of the most unique Italian directors. Some moments of his feature films, and some visual qualities of his cinematic language, recall the physical strength of J. M. Straub's movies. They can be compared with works by Paolo Benvenuti as well. But his style and research are undoubtedly original and deserving of attention. His films include The Gift (Il Dono, 2003) and The Four Seasons (Le Quattro Volte, 2010), selected for Cannes and well-reviewed by most of the European and American press.
My request for an interview over Skype was cordially accepted...
Gianluca Pulsoni: What did you study?
Michelangelo Frammartino: I studied architecture. It remains the most important thing for me. My early works, short films and installations, allowed me to discover time and the shape of duration, something you might not consider a priority in this field until you finally realize how time is the most intriguing and curious question to investigate. So, that has been my 'cultural heritage'. Then, I attended film school in Milan, which directly linked to an important group, active for more than 30 years, 'l' associazione filmmaker' (www.filmmakerfest.org), which sadly lost its guiding light this year, Silvano Cavatorta, but is still going strong. It was a meaningful experience not to feel lost in your personal effort to make images.
GP: How did you become a director?
MF: When I talk about time and space in architecture, you must remember that they are figures you use to create a kind of project ethics, because it's through managing time that you can enter other minds and activate there that anthropological category, 'otherness'. I learned this practice studying architecture and then I tried to put it into my movies. Although I didn't feel it was something so relevant, it became absolutely clear watching what the famous Milan group 'Studio Azzurro' was planning during those years. Nowadays, other architects pursue that aim, like Venturi, who is able to make you understand how even a square can depict a 'narrative' that you should rewrite as a new development for the concept, or Mollino with his know-how and his conscious sense of narration, or designers like Santachiara, whose interactive work is conceived as a practical link with his viewers/users.
GP: How do you usually plan your work? Can you talk about your methods?
MF: It's a little bit complicated. When I start a new project I feel I can't do it! I mean, I have no method. I can only say I learn how to make the movie while I'm working on it, and this situation has always been quite desperate, it always causes anguish. Le Quattro Volte was no different: I had been travelling for two years around Calabria (a region in Southern Italy), travelling in quite a disorganized way, probably in search of a project that would appeal to me, until I realized I had discovered the four places recognizable as the four scenes you see in my movie. Then, it followed naturally that those four places should also symbolize four forms of life - human, animal, vegetable and mineral - as four possible films. So it could be described as a sort of preamble to this journey, uneasy but so surprising that I always felt it as a presence coming from elsewhere, like something I had rejected for a long time. Besides, I'm interested in ideas such as the 'aporia', which appears when you find unclassifiable places where you can't distinguish between internal or external, where objects are more alive than men. On the other hand, I have to admit that structure is so difficult for me that I usually consider drawing as my ideal tool to build it up.
GP: Can you expand on that?
MF: First, there's the way something is visualized in your mind, sometimes through images you can't see clearly, so doodles are the most faithful way of rendering these mental images, while written notes would perhaps muddy that 'snapshot'. So, doodle after doodle, I depict what's emerging my mind, while I think that writing trivializes images and their connections. Drawing has always been my preferred way of planning.
GP: Insightful reviewers related Le Quattro Volte to meaningful themes, like the Pythagorean theory of reincarnation or the postmodern decentralization of man, but nobody quoted anthropology clearly. It seems to me to be deeply present in your film as a kind of cultural cross-reference whose presence emphasizes any part, like the passage among the various states of life, through a magic both 'homeopathic' and 'contagious' as James G. Frazer, one of the fathers of the discipline, theorized in his masterpiece, The Golden Bough. Or also, the analogy between the opening and final shots which offers a key to consider the four lives you evoked as a circle that can always restart. So, I would say that your work does not refer to a gateway from man properly, but more precisely to a travel narrative, maybe in a pre-Christian atmosphere, whose symbolic efficacy conducts us to frame all the elements in their right balance. Am I right? Did you need any anthropological keys or is it just something you only expect as a possible, further reading from critics and people?
MF: My discovery was possible thanks to the help of a friend and the places I found are in a region, 'La Calabria', that is full of ethnographers and researchers nowadays. So, what you refer to when you talk about 'magic' is exactly what I found out focusing on animals' behaviour, like their mimicry: I was intrigued by those theorists who studied this idea not as a set of evolutionary patterns but as an act without benefits, as if an animal behaves in its usual way just because it's in tune with the whole world. Since Roger Caillois wrote that what behaviour is for animals represents narrative for men, Le Quattro Volte seems to me to be the story of a desire for merger, something you can read as a 'metempsychosis report' as well. I feel the loss of the bond between man and the world so profoundly that finding it again has become my daily obsession: an urgency I see more clearly in interactive exhibitions than movies. So, you may consider my work as an effort towards this aim. Obviously, this 'bond' is what I try to evoke in each spectator's mind and attitude, not necessarily because I want them to love my movie, but because I want to effect this merger with 'the thing-in-itself', the world. Now, let's talk about the circularity... Well, I admit this travel from man to thing was originally based on a simple and linear shape; then the circularity came, it was my film editor's contribution: since he felt all four parts are definitely linked, he suggested emphasizing this dialectic between visible and invisible during the editing. I must confess it messed up my original plan but, in the end, his conviction resulted in a better work. So, it's thanks to his belief that you can see Le Quattro Volte as a way to frame life in circle, just like it's always a belief that you need to recall and feel your bond with 'the other': but when I talk about this, I refer to what Gilles Deleuze theorized, 'to believe in this world'. Here, now. That's why I admire someone who believes, it's something that restrains you: someone who believes in reincarnation truly considers and respects animals like men. It's the magic. I can't believe, but I believe in those who do.
GP: What you say suggests a real anthropological attitude...
MF: Yes. By all means, I feel the need to know that a tree and I are not separate and almost the same thing. That's what I want.
GP: What about your next projects?
MF: I've been working on an animated movie for two years, after Le Quattro Volte seemed to fail. As a kind of rejection, I began to draw with no desire to go beyond that field. First, it appeared as a kind of graphic novel, but then the project changed. Besides this, there are other ideas for other works.
Gianluca Pulsoni (b. 1985) is a film and literary critic, independent researcher and publishing consultant, currently based in Italy.
He's graduating in anthropology from 'Università La Sapienza (Rome)'