The making of caving film Il buco: ‘Maybe only God has been there’

With only three features to his name over 20 years, Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino is one of those auteurs whose prestige is directly related to his scarcity value. But it is understandable if he works slowly. On his new film Il buco, it would sometimes take him hours just to reach the location of a single shot — up to 700 metres underground in the Abisso del Bifurto cave system in Calabria, southern Italy.

The film is a fictional evocation of a pioneering exploration of the abyss in 1961 — and for Frammartino and a small crew, the task of carrying equipment made the trips more cumbersome than they were for the original speleologists. “Four hundred metres down, there’s a small lake,” Frammartino says. “It could take me two hours to reach it, but the camera operators took five. Sometimes it took 20 hours to go down and back, just to film for 45 minutes. Many days we’d shoot for five minutes and come back with nothing.”

The term “immersive cinema” has become something of a cliché, but Il buco — literally, “the hole” — is as immersive as cinema gets. Ironically, cinematographer Renato Berta always stayed on the surface — all the more extraordinary since his camerawork is so beautifully alert to the textures of the cave walls. “We communicated with him by fibre optic cable,” says the film’s co-writer Giovanna Giuliani, “and that was the only communication we had. He’d wait for us to put down the cable and sometimes he had to wait for five hours outside without knowing what we were doing. Sometimes we didn’t meet for days because by the time we got back to the surface he had left.”

What was it like going down into the Abisso for the first time? “Paura! Fear!” Frammartino instantly exclaims. “Giovanna and I were really scared — we were convinced our rope would break. But then we realised that fear wasn’t stopping us, that something was calling us towards this project.”

Frammartino overcame the terror sufficiently to sound almost blasé about getting trapped 700 metres down when the cave flooded. “We went down a side tunnel, and when we tried to get back, it had been raining — we were looking at a waterfall with a 40-metre drop. We just decided to camp it out, but the fire brigade and the police and the TV news made a big fuss about it. For us, it was a very quiet situation, perfectly normal.”

Il buco is one of those films that you absolutely should see in the cinema if you can — because its play of light and dark is so subtle, with the glimmer of the explorers’ torches giving the cave walls a magically tactile quality. “Usually,” says Frammartino, “cinema is about adding light, colours. With this film, you’re in blackness, you go somewhere where human beings have never been — maybe only God has been there. There is no world like this. It’s real, but it’s at the borders of reality.”

This heightened sense of the unearthly within the Earth gives the film an ecological resonance that makes you altogether reconsider your understanding of the shape of the planet — the relation between its depths and its mountainous heights. In contrast to the darkness below, Il buco also explores the daylight landscape around the caves, the Pollino National Park, where an old man tends his herd of cattle in the mountains above. This was real-life cowherd Nicola Lanza, who died last June, aged 92. “He worked with his animals till the night before. In the morning, he woke up and he said to his son, ‘You take the animals, I’ll just drink a glass of wine and I’ll join you.’ He was OK till the last minute.”

Lanza can be heard keeping his animals in order with a distinctive system of calls — a language that seems to have been lost with time, says Giuliani. “The new generation don’t seem to have that skill, they’re much more aggressive, they throw stones and shout to round their animals up. But Nicola had this much more persuasive way, and it was very obvious that he and the cattle understood each other.”

In person, Frammartino comes across as easy-going and affable, but it is clear that he is a rigorously committed film-maker who is more than prepared to do things the hard way. Born in Milan to Calabrian parents, he trained as an architect, then started making video installations. He made his first feature, the almost wordless Il dono (The Gift), in 2003, then had a seven-year gap before Le Quattro Volte (2010), also largely dialogue-free, and also low on narrative — a cogitation on nature and the seasons, based on traditional Calabrian beliefs about reincarnation and cycles of life.

Speleologists like to play and make jokes about their own fears, to keep their morale up

Focused less on people than on trees, goats and weather, Le Quattro Volte is a key exhibit in a new wave of experimentally inclined Italian ruralism, along with films by Alice Rohrwacher (The Wonders, Happy as Lazzaro) and Pietro Marcello (Martin Eden). But it was also a pricelessly comic film, as witness a dazzling extended sight gag involving a village parade, a dog, a truck and a herd of goats. Il buco displays the same deadpan humour, notably in a sequence where a football is kicked to and fro across the mouth of the abyss, threatening at any moment to plummet to the bowels of the Earth. “Speleologists don’t take themselves as seriously as mountaineers do,” says Frammartino, “they like to play and make jokes about their own fears, to keep their morale up.”

There were 10 years between Le Quattro Volte and Il buco but, Frammartino says, “This kind of cinema needs time.” He estimates that he and Giuliani made 100 visits to various caves over two years even before they started writing Il buco, and not only researched early-1960s caving methods but also spoke to people, now in their seventies, who remembered as children seeing the original expedition party arrive from northern Italy. “Time is necessary if you want to respect the place where you film,” Frammartino says. “You can’t just go there as an outsider and impose your own stories, your own meanings, without taking into account what that place has to tell you.”

In fact, Frammartino spent three years between Le Quattro Volte and Il buco working on a project that didn’t happen. “It was Pinocchio backwards — not from wood to boy, but boy to wood.” He might still make it one day, though — and, after all, he says it’s all part of the process. “The films that don’t happen can also be important.”

In UK cinemas from June 10 and in US cinemas now