We went to the shops on Cowbridge Road this morning and it started to rain, so we took refuge in Chapter Arts Centre for a cup of coffee. There we noticed an interesting Italian film 'Le Quattro Volte', and got tickets for this evening's early screening. We lunched at Oscar's on Wyndham Crescent - our first visit there since the former 'Le Gallois' was taken over by the Cowbridge restauranteur. It was an enjoyable experience, though not one we could afford to repeat too often. Food prices have certainly risen recently, and the overheads of running any restaurant, let alone starting a new one, makes any new eating place a risky venture, now that people can afford to eat out less than they used to,
At Chapter cinema, we were surprised and delighted to find ourselves sitting in the same row as Clare's teaching colleague Jackie and her husband Russell, and Jan, Vicar of 'the Res' with Peter her husband - all of us, I suspect were attracted by the unusual nature of the film. It portrayed in a very simple way a sliver of life in a Calabrian hill village. The place initially gives the impression of being suspended in another era, fifty or sixty years ago. Attention to detail reveals that it could have been set any time in the past twenty years. It's just that the village is a poor, left behind sort of place, with a way of life and landscape little touched by the passage of time.
The film portrays the daily life of an elderly goat herding peasant who dies on Good Friday after the via crucis is enacted in the street outside his home; the birth of a kid-goat and its struggle to survive in the open with the herd; a traditional folk ritual involving the erection of a huge felled pine tree on the village square; and a group of charcoal burners at work. The Guardian review gives a superb précis of the story.
What made it special for me was the absence of music, not that it was a silent film. The sounds were those of its natural setting - wind in trees and grass, bells attached to a herd of goats, church bells, an occasional vehicle, hubbub of people talking without their conversation being audible. The camera recorded scenes like a still photographer composing a view, whether of a landscape or an intimate close-up, but then staying with it for minutes at a time, registering all that happens from this perspective, before switching to another. No use of zooming or fading shots, just gazing contemplatively at what happens.
It was a meditative observation of the basic elements of life. Indeed, the title of the film in English - the four turns - comes from the Philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, who founded a religious sect in the southern seaport city of Crotone in Calabria 2500 years ago. He spoke of needing to know aspects of four lives within ourselves - mineral, vegetable, animal and human. This is what inspired director Michaelangelo Frammartino to create a docu-drama of great beauty, capturing a way of life that persists where wealth and power hardly reach to turn the world up-side down and disconnect its inhabitants from their environment.
The film reminded me of the Greece got to know as young island hopping backpackers in the sixties, before the advent of mass tourism and modernisation, or even the remoter agricultural parts of Haute Savoie today, still untouched by the encroachments of the ski industry. Some may regard these as 'backwards places' in the new Europe, because they seem unable to move beyond subsistence. Yet, in a way, they show how some folk are at ease with having just enough. No matter how hard their life and work may seem in our eyes, their closeness to nature makes contentment possible.
The film portrays the daily life of an elderly goat herding peasant who dies on Good Friday after the via crucis is enacted in the street outside his home; the birth of a kid-goat and its struggle to survive in the open with the herd; a traditional folk ritual involving the erection of a huge felled pine tree on the village square; and a group of charcoal burners at work. The Guardian review gives a superb précis of the story.
What made it special for me was the absence of music, not that it was a silent film. The sounds were those of its natural setting - wind in trees and grass, bells attached to a herd of goats, church bells, an occasional vehicle, hubbub of people talking without their conversation being audible. The camera recorded scenes like a still photographer composing a view, whether of a landscape or an intimate close-up, but then staying with it for minutes at a time, registering all that happens from this perspective, before switching to another. No use of zooming or fading shots, just gazing contemplatively at what happens.
It was a meditative observation of the basic elements of life. Indeed, the title of the film in English - the four turns - comes from the Philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, who founded a religious sect in the southern seaport city of Crotone in Calabria 2500 years ago. He spoke of needing to know aspects of four lives within ourselves - mineral, vegetable, animal and human. This is what inspired director Michaelangelo Frammartino to create a docu-drama of great beauty, capturing a way of life that persists where wealth and power hardly reach to turn the world up-side down and disconnect its inhabitants from their environment.
The film reminded me of the Greece got to know as young island hopping backpackers in the sixties, before the advent of mass tourism and modernisation, or even the remoter agricultural parts of Haute Savoie today, still untouched by the encroachments of the ski industry. Some may regard these as 'backwards places' in the new Europe, because they seem unable to move beyond subsistence. Yet, in a way, they show how some folk are at ease with having just enough. No matter how hard their life and work may seem in our eyes, their closeness to nature makes contentment possible.
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