At once pre- and postmodern in its concerns, the cinema of Michelangelo Frammartino tranquilly traverses the tides of time. Over the course of 26 years, the Italian director has produced a small but mighty corpus of shorts, installations, and feature films, all of which stand outside traditional notions of narrative in both the storytelling sense and in the recurrent (i.e., industrialized) manner in which movies are typically produced and released. Nearly two decades separate Frammartino’s first feature, Il dono (2003), and his third, Il buco, which recently premiered in competition in Venice, where it picked up the Special Jury Prize. But if Il buco stands out in the context of contemporary festival fare, it does so as much for its deceptive integration of various storytelling as it does for belonging…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 89 - Winter 2022