Review Il Buco: very exciting and yet mighty calm

Having a fear of heights, and then descending into an immensely deep cave to realize your new feature film. Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino did it, along with twelve acting speleologists and a handful of crew members. Frammartinos Il buco is a free recreation of the 1961 expedition that mapped the Abisso del Bifurto: a subterranean, serpentine abyss in the Calabrian Pollino Mountains, which leads to 687 meters below the earth and which at the time was considered the third deepest cave in the world. Frammartino and his gang went down on the spot, descending for four hours, clambering up for four hours. They had to make the trip more than thirty times before all the shots of Il buco were on it.

Call it the passion of a unique filmmaker, call it self-flagellation. In any case, it has resulted in an – literally – inimitable masterpiece that also sends the public on a journey of discovery. Like the speleologists, youngsters who descend from the north of Italy to the south, you as a spectator make your way through the partly vertical cave: groping past the images, the echoes of voices, steps and water drops resounding all around you and a intense black darkness that completely overflows into the darkness of the cinema. With a little luck you will emerge as a different person.

Il buco (‘The hole’), a film that deserves the largest possible screen, was awarded several times at the Venice Film Festival, including the special jury prize. The film’s seed was planted in 2007, when Frammartino sought locations for his previous production, the Pastoral Reincarnation Narrative Le quattro volte (2010). The mayor of Alessandria del Carretto took him to the Bifurto Gorge, where Frammartino really realized that such complete underground worlds exist. Despite his fear of heights, Frammartino trained as an amateur speleologist, before visiting the gorge himself for the first time in 2016.

The amazement he must have felt then is what Frammartino conveys with the almost dialogueless Il buco perfectly about. That is also certainly thanks to the masterly cinematography of Renato Berta. The now 77-year-old camera veteran has collaborated with numerous cinema celebrities, and agreed because he had never played in complete darkness† Berta’s digital camera was connected to a monitor with a nearly a kilometer long optical cable, allowing him to control the footage from the ground floor. Only the lights on the researchers’ helmets served as a light source; sometimes also a burning magazine, which was thrown down like a makeshift torch.

What magisterial, unforgettable images that produces. Light that caresses, flickers, bounces and rolls along damp rock faces never before captured on film. Striking is the tranquility with which it Il buco all is recorded. Relaxingly watching and calmly swinging, the camerawork absorbs both the precision work of the speleologists and the imperturbable, timeless depth of the cave. That makes Il buco something miraculous: incredibly exciting, yet mighty calm.

You have to let go of the need for a tight plot, or for characters with whom it is easy to identify. While most other filmmakers would have chosen one of the speleologists as the protagonist, Frammartino and co-screenwriter Giovanna Giuliani portray them as a homogeneous group of enthusiasts, without getting to know the researchers further. It goes in Il buco rather because of their place in space, their relation to the elements. Often Frammartino watches the men (and a few women) from a distance, from the darkness of the cave or, in the above-ground scenes, already beautifully photographed, looking down on their camp from above. The gorge, the clouds and the mountains get their own perspective, in Il buco†

And then there’s the look of the old cowherd Nicola (Nicola Lanza, a real shepherd, who passed away last year). From his permanent resting place, he watches the researchers arrive in the valley, pitch their tents and take the first exploratory steps into the abyss. The further they descend, the sicker Nicola gets. A parallel that is touched upon by Frammartino rather than emphasized.

Il buco also comments on the economic backwardness of the Italian south compared to the prosperous north. See, for example, the television report that the inhabitants of the nearby village watch in a café square, in which the reporter ascends by window-cleaner lift the Milan Pirelli skyscraper, completed in 1961: an upward capitalist symbol against a natural phenomenon that is, if you will, colonized by northerners. Such social criticism, however, remains subcutaneous in il buco, Which never loses its organic, gently mystical character.

With that continues Il buco the path of Il quattro voltea film that mainly showed how a shepherd’s soul jumps to a newborn goat lamb, how the animal transforms into a tree, and the tree again in a mineral. Frammartino proves itself with Il buco once again as a genius at providing associations. Particularly beautiful is the moment when a doctor shines his light into Nicola’s eyes, and the film switches to the researchers’ lights bouncing through the cave. As if there is no longer any difference between body and landscape, between inside and outside, between the blackness of an underground cave and that of a dim consciousness.

In Il buco such connections are readily available, as long as you give your imagination and attention free rein. It doesn’t have to be that hard. Once you get used to the dark, you will only see sharper.