08 September 2021 3:02 pm
The hole by Michelangelo Frammartino, presented at the Venice Film Festival, is certainly one of the most extreme films in the history of a medium of expression that dominated the twentieth century, the cinema. And it is a return to origins, but it can also appear as a challenge to the future.
It doesn’t have much to do with Becker’s masterpiece of the same title (from 1960, the same year as the feat re-enacted but also once again risked by Frammartino and his troupe), which was the story of an escape attempt condemned to defeat, because the “hole” dug by the prisoners nevertheless led to the city, within its laws.
Frammartino has accustomed us to extremely rigorous cinematographic enterprises such as The gift and the splendid The four times, rare and deliberately different films, as even more rare and different is the latter, The hole, which is in its own way “a historical film” as it evokes the feat accomplished by a group of young speleologists in 1960 – returning to the same cave and reaching the same depth, with documentary tension and in its own way epic; with the advice of the protagonists of the time and the participation of speleologists of today, and of the same training and the same energy, of the same ambition.
Tradition and emotion
In short, this film is perhaps a unique undertaking, in the history of cinema, against the tide of that of the best documentary cinema, which has had very high examples from Flaherty to De Seta. However, that of De Seta is the only name that is made to mention, asking us what he would have said about Hole; and noting in passing that De Seta was from Calabria and knew the Pollino plateau well where the “hole” of the film is, and that Frammartino is from Milan but of Calabrian parents, and very attached to his origins.
I used to say “historical film”, a re-enactment of an important undertaking, which in this sense can make us think of the film on K2 and the like, traditional yet exciting documentaries, because man’s attempts to confront the unknown of nature, indeed to to challenge it, they always move something in our depths, for the desire that is of man, for better or for worse, to know and dominate it.
“Historical film” because Frammartino does not fail to include in the film some historical feedback, newspaper pieces and the like, with photos of Kennedy or Loren or images of the Pirelli skyscraper under construction, a push upwards to which the he exploit of speleologists reacts in the opposite way, pushing itself as if backwards, in one of the deepest caves on the planet. Frammartino won his bet, bringing the camera into the “hole”, down to almost hundreds of meters deep, assisted by a brilliant operator like Renato Berta and aided later by the editing of Benni Atria, and he did something indeed extraordinary and perhaps unique in the history of cinema.
Old and new
The vision of the Hole arouses a strong emotional participation, minute by minute, and a kind of anxiety very different from traditional suspense. It is mitigated by the contrast with what happens on the surface (the arrival of the group, the nearest village, the small camp, the green of nature and the profiles of the mountains) where the beauty of the Pollino is always a “we went out to see the stars again. ”Not from a hellish afterlife but from an extreme material concreteness, it is a nature where tension is loosened, rests.
The director thought it appropriate to contrast the “new” of the group, an “old” who has the body and face of an old cow herder with a face that also seems rocky, an old man who we will see slowly die. Does the attempt to penetrate the maternal womb of nature react to her mortem on the surface? Fortunately, Frammartino does not play on symbols, but the group of young people who return to the most past but with a thrust that knows of the future, opposes an old man from beyond time, an ancient man and almost always.
Or at least since man has existed as we know him, as we know ourselves. In contrast, the group of young people penetrates deep into nature, as in a prenatal womb, or as a return to the prenatal.
Frammartino does not play on symbols, but one ends up wondering the reason for this rigorous filmic undertaking, the reason for this re-enactment today and today, in the face of a new ecological awareness and a new attention, which in part follows from it. , for the mystery of nature and life; and for their fate. The impression is that he was fascinated by this enterprise without knowing very well where to direct it, and he preferred, chosen, to “simply” and rigorously reconstruct it and tell it and show it to us in the belief that his story could be eloquent in itself, and that everyone could find their own, fascinated and stimulated by what is shown and not by what is said (in a film that is among the most laconic that is known…).
We ask ourselves why, why he wanted to do it and did it, and everyone is free to respond in a different, personal way. But still amazed and admired by a truly unique enterprise, to our knowledge, in the history of cinema, and in particular of ours.
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