The Peasant, The Pagan, and The Christian: Landscape and Cinematic Spectatorship in Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte

As human relationships to the natural world become increasingly abstract and antagonistic, the need to find new modes of being and being-in-common is more urgent than ever. This means re-conceptualizing not only human positionality within larger environments and ecologies, but also re-thinking how we understand the world itself. Filmmaker and installation artist Michelangelo Frammartino offers one such re-conceptualization with his 2011 film Le Quattro Volte, in which he sequentially takes up the modes of being of human, goat, tree, and charcoal in the Southern Italian region of Calabria. Frammartino invites the viewer to temporarily dwell in the spatialities, temporalities, and ontological truths of Calabria which include, but exceed human activity. I examine Frammartino’s film through the lens of Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Uncanny Landscape,” in which Nancy presents three modalities of engagement with land and world: peasant, pagan, and Christian. Nancy contrasts peasant and pagan engagement with the land, in which the land is understood and co-existed with in accordance with its omni-presence, with Christian relation to landscape in which presence is withdrawn, replaced by absence and distance. I argue that in Le Quattro Volte, Michelangelo Frammartino, with the aid of the viewer, develops a set of representational strategies that signify cinematic “presence”, suggesting a “pagan” mode of spectatorship in which all things (animal, vegetable, and mineral) are revealed as having autonomy, perspective, temporality, and unity. Furthermore, I contend that this “alternative” reality is not self-enclosed, as the film world opens onto the spectatorial world. Le Quattro Volte offers an opportunity for a mode of embodiment that places us in and among the world rather than at a distance.