Le Quattro Volte

Le Quattro Volte is a beautiful document. It opens a window on a time, place and people that are very different from modern city life. And yet the cycle man-animal-vegetable-mineral is still ours. While the movie depicts life as it is today in the Italian village (someone is taking a photo with a mobile phone) it could have taken place fifty years ago. The film depicts events at a slow pace, giving you time to absorb the events and landscape. Yet the film is engaging from start to finish. Scenes such as the one where the young goats are playing in the shed or when the dog challenges the boy are captivating, even sitting at the first row in a small art-house cinema.

My main study is in the nature of insight and immersion, the mechanisms that control it, linked to meditation, so a lot of these slow-paced/ meditational films are recommended to me by friends and users on here. Very few work, and for every Antonioni there are three times as many Tsai Ming-Liangs. This one does.

The difference between one that works and others, which is the difference between meditation and sleep, is how well the filmmaker structures. It's not enough to convey an empty room, there has to be somehow someone there who is just a few words short of self and the room still being empty.

The structure here is that we have three worlds, three burials (four, if we listen to the filmmaker). Dissolution of one means birth in the next, and the whole is being spun because we breathe in the world of the film. In between we get the transient flow of things simply being themselves. We get rituals of living that pass the time, from the absurd Roman parade to sweeping a church floor to herding and playtime among baby goats, rituals about the passing of time like the one with the tallest tree cut down and erected as the center of a ceremony then symbolically cut down again, and our film as a ritual that reflects both kinds of passing.

Its function is like the mandala of Tibetans, a space where you still the mind until you begin to notice more than painted symmetry. From passing time to observation about the passing.

I would have preferred a little less quirkiness from Tati in the individual parts and a little more purity but that is a minor complaint. If you like this, look out for a guy called Ben Rivers.

The end is not an end in the classical sense and only recycled being, another mandala here. But you have to see it. What is the smoke of burned trees blowing out to the forest but transformation, the forest returning to itself? There's a beautiful Zen saying about this.

"O Lord, you have seduced me, and I was seduced." This, the central sentiment expressed by the Carthusian monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in "The Great Silence" (2005), was also how I felt on leaving "Le Quattro Volte" (2010).

As with "The Great Silence," one of the most striking features of "Le Quattro Volte" (The Four Times) is its lack of dialogue. However, whereas for some individuals the 169 minutes of near silence in "The Great Silence" was overly taxing, in this shorter, more widely focused film - quietly reflecting aspects of life in an isolated village in Calabria – the Milanese director Michelangelo Frammartino has given us a predominantly visual poem of place, of space, of people and of the passing of time.

Although not overly religious, it is a spiritually orientated film in which we are asked to consider Pythagoras' contention that we must each know ourselves four times due to the fact that we "have four lives within us - the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the human".

Therefore within its 88 minute run the small number of central human characters that are featured within it are soon relegated to positions of equality, or of equal vulnerability, before nature. Thus, for example, the goat-herder's animals soon come to the forefront of the film, as do other elements of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms, in order to declare – seemingly – that these other realms also warrant serious and respectful consideration.

An extremely enjoyable and far-from-always-serious film, I found this a beautifully filmed, calming and thought-provoking movie.

I saw this film in Norway where it recently came out in the cinemas.

The title refers to the four seasons and the story follows a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. There is a symmetry in the film, and each part focuses on the fate of one individual (a farmer, a goat and a tree, for instance).

The film makes effective use of the beautiful landscape of Calabria, and the old, ramshackle village. The setting is perhaps in itself the main character of the film. Humans are often viewed from above, and we are in a sense getting the "God" treatment.

There is barely any plot or a story to speak of, yet we go through stages of life that are eternal and inevitable - and we are reminded again and again that all things must pass.

There are life-like documentary aspects to this feature. The film is shot in available light with amateur actors and animals that will endear you. The result is breathtaking and inspiring. The sound scape is also rich: it helps create an emotional journey through every chapter of the film.

I can highly recommend this to anyone interested in unusual films with no dialogue or discernible plot, but anyone also will no doubt be captivated by it's gorgeous setting, it's humble characters or the feeling of watching life pass, unfiltered.

Would that life in life in an isolated village in Calabria, or any other place be as beautiful and silent.

There was not one word of dialog in the film. The only utterances was the dog barking and the sheep bleating.

An old man dies and presumably is reborn as a goat. The goat dies and it subsumed into a tree. The tree becomes charcoal, a mineral and dust.

Dust thou art and to dust thy shall return.

Matter is neither created nor destroyed.

Pick your interpretation.

It was a film to contemplate. It was full of Christian imagery, but it also stimulates mediation.

Not for everybody, but it was a beautiful film.