Le Quattro Volte is a piece of slow cinema, a poem rather than a play. It is set in a remote village in southern Italy. The four times, or four turns, is a reference to the Pythagorean idea of metempsychosis and the cycle of four phases of life at different levels: human, animal, plant and earth.

The human segment follows an old goat-herd as he tends his flock in the mountains by day and then follows them back to their enclosure at night. He is old and sick. An accident breaks the goat’s enclosure, and as we follow them through the town we find the goat-herd dead in his bed.

The transitions between segments are marked by fades to black. We hear before we see the animal segment beginning with the birth of a goat. This is larger scale goat farming and the goats are led out into the hills rather than followed, so that strays are not noticed. The kid, its legs tied together, cannot jump out of a ditch, and becomes separated and lost. It lies down to die under a tree.

The third segment follows a tree through the cycle of winter and summer until it is felled and taken to the village to be erected in the square as part of a folk ceremony.

In the final segment, the tree is taken down, cut-up and added to the elaborately constructed charcoal mound, where it is turned into fuel. It is delivered back to the village, where we see the smoke rising from the same chimney pots we saw in the first segment.

The film was directed by Michelangelo Frammartino and released in 2010. There is no dialogue.

 

There are not so many goats in the Turkish film Beş Vakit. Although the title means literally five times and refers to the daily calls to prayer in Islam, in English the film is called Times and Winds. The five segments are labelled by the five times of day when the call to prayer is heard, working backwards from night, through evening, afternoon and midday to morning. I think this works well; the retrogression capturing the cyclical passage of time better than a progression through the day might have. The last scene of the film is a glorious sunrise.

The setting is spectacular. The village is by the Aegean, which sparkles in the distance under sun and moon. The mountains rise rapidly from the coast and we look out over the village from the high ground to the sea, the only building clearly visible the slender minaret of the mosque. High above the village the goats are herded and the fields worked.

Village life is seen from the point of view of three children, Omer, Yukup and Yildiz, at school, at home and in the fields. Omer is the son of the local imam. His father favours his younger brother, so Omer tries to hasten his death by opening a window to let in cold air, emptying the capsules containing his father’s medication, and collecting a scorpion. Yukup is enchanted by the local schoolteacher and daydreams in class but later he catches his own father spying on her through a window. Yildiz runs errands for her mother and while carrying her newborn brother stumbles and drops him in the road. The children are still in school and out of school hours largely run free through the mountains and the village, not yet bound in to families and work.

Here also long takes make the film slow and meditative. Cut into the naturalistic sequences are tableaux of the children, lying as if dead, on rocks and in barns. The cinematography is in this sense misleading. This is not a pastoral but a hard and limited place to grow up.

The director is Reha Erdem and the film was released in 2006. The music comes from Arvo Pärt.

 

Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la Luz, Nostalgia for the Light, is a documentary as well as a poem. Released in 2010, the film is set in the Atacama Desert in Chile and is concerned with the astronomers’ observation of the stars and the search for the truth by relatives of the victims of the Pinochet regime. The astronomer Gaspar Galaz says that, like archaeologists, astronomers are looking into the past. Indeed, everything we experience is a fragment of the past, because even something seen across a room is a few micro-seconds in the past, the time it takes light to traverse the intervening space. The present is constructed from the traces of the past. And astronomers, like archaeologists, by finding answers, only create more questions to be asked.

We hear the testimony of survivors from the prison camps, finding freedom in learning about the constellations. One survivor, Miguel Lawner, measured out by steps during the day and then drew the prison camp at night, before flushing the drawings away in case of a raid. Another survivor, Luis Henriques, tells how while he remembers, his wife is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and is slowly forgetting, an apt metaphor for Chile itself. The film also follows some of the few remaining women who are still searching to find the bones of their family members discarded in the desert by the regime. One woman, now an astronomer, Valentina Rodriguez, tells how as a child she was threatened in order to force her grandparents to divulge her parent’s whereabouts. She finds solace in the idea that nothing is lost but that everything is continuously recycled as matter and energy. Though forgetting means being trapped in the present, remembering doesn’t have to mean being trapped in the past. Guzmán concludes that we have to remember because with memory we are able to live in the transient present moment whereas those without memory cannot live anywhere.

The analogy Guzmán draws between the astronomers and the survivors avoids banality. This is achieved through the unity of the location, the Atacama Desert, and the unity of the experiences recounted. The striking photography also contributes. The time-lapse photography of the stars wheeling overhead is something that couldn’t be experienced directly but only through cinema.