There are a lot of goats in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Cycle of Life artfilm. Shot Neo-Realist style in the hills of Calabria, small & incremental in story if not in theme, its first four reels (the film shot on actual 35mm*) carefully carry us thru the final days of an elderly goatherd as he tends his contented flock and troublesome cough. The latter, unsuccessfully ‘treated’ with useless doses of ‘Sacred’ church dust. His end a visual astonishment as goats come to call in his small room in the ancient town he lived in. Immediately followed with a startlingly abrupt cut to the birth ejection of a beautiful white ‘kid.’ Small incidents continue in the second half of this short film, ending with a strongly etched sequence where a felled tree is broken down, cut up, stacked in a dome shape that becomes a purpose-built kiln where it is all transformed into charcoal. A sequence that, in its far more modest manner, need not be embarrassed to stand beside Andrei Tarkovsky’s casting of the church bell in ANDREI RUBLEV/’66. Largely made in long patient takes, sometimes static/sometimes not, shot after shot has a rigorous compositional beauty (the goatherd’s kitchen a particular knockout), yet the frame-worthy look doesn’t stop forward momentum as it often does in these film-fest oriented projects. A new Frammartino film, THE HOLE/’21, is about spelunking ancient historic cave sites. Go figure.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *While advantages of 35mm over digital capture continue to shrink, fine disparities in Grey-Scale show the difference as much as anything. A subtlety of graduation easily spotted in still shots of stacked charcoal logs seen here. You’ll want to order prints for framing.
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