Under no circumstances should this film be streamed

In the meantime it has almost become the norm to precede stories with advance warnings. Maybe we should do the same in this case. Not because the story is so terrible, so dangerous, so disturbing that it could shake people to their moral foundations. Although… But we are anticipating.

What we absolutely have to say in advance is not so much what happens in Michelangelo Frammartino's "Il Buco", for which he received the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, but what is not happening right now.

There is no film music, there are no dialogues. Nobody is murdered, the world doesn't end, not even the smallest one, there is no affair, no drama, actually there is no story at all.

What happens, because of course something happens, can be said in a few sentences. We're on the border with Calabria and it's 1961. Young speleologists set out to explore the interior of the earth.

They come by train, spend the night in a village where there are no lights on the streets, which is only illuminated in the evening by the reflection of the only television in town, which hangs in a bar and brings images of a world to the archaic place , in which everything is always bigger, higher, in which other standards are used.

In the sacristy of the village church, next to the stretched out sculpture of the dead Jesus, the speleologists sleep. A truck rumbles into the mountains with them. They set up their tents on an almost Mongolian-looking plateau. There are cows and donkeys and horses. There is also a shepherd whose face you could read hundreds of stories.

And then they climb up there in the Abisso di Bifurto. They threw stones in before. And the burning cover of a magazine that featured Kennedy and Nixon. The Abisso di Bifurto is, but they don't know that yet, they're measuring it now, the third deepest abyss on earth. After a good seven hundred meters they have arrived at the foot of the cave. They pack up their tents.

Frammartino did not direct the 1961 expedition as an adventure film. It's a kind of reenactment. He sent today's young speleologists - accompanied by the latest film technology - into the abyss with the equipment from back then. A kilometer of fiber optic cable is said to have been laid, lamps used that were modified for Frammartino's six-month shoot in the mountain.

The casting is said to have taken a long time. Spelunkers seem to be a light-shy people. You don't see them at all. Frammartino keeps us at a distance, you can hear her mumbling, but you don't understand anything. Nothing of their fears is visible, almost nothing of the work, the danger underground. Nothing happens to them, the only victim of the cave passage is a soccer ball, which falls down the explorers' throats while they are playing recklessly on the plateau.

Now there are a few more sentences. And the astonishing thing about this “Allegory of the Cave” has perhaps already become apparent between them. You sit there in this strange meditation, of which you see nothing, of which you only hear natural sounds, noises - shepherd calls, flies buzzing, cow calls, bells - and which only gradually emerge from the darkness of the cinema (you can watch this film at all do not stream under any circumstances).

And sits and looks at the passing clouds, the sunrises and sunsets, sees from inside the abyss two cows casually looking down at us, seeming to wonder, and then trudging on. And, because you can't help it, look for a message.

And only finds caverns of meaning that Frammartino has created under his strangely casual, superficial, and silently passing sequence of images, without comment. Of course, the rich north and the archaic south, technology and nature, the mapping and surveying mania of modernity and a world that doesn't need surveying, remains unpredictable. Frammartino contrasts the scientific journey into the darkness of the earth with a journey into the darkness of human existence.

At some point, however, you stop searching. Becomes very quiet. Surrenders to the landscapes, the scenes that Frammartino throws on the cave walls of the cinema. Renato Berta filmed them. He's almost eighty. Filmed Godard, with Straub and Daniel Schmid. His camera stands still, uninvolved, neutral like nature and the look of the shepherd from the mountain, he observes the movement of people and clouds, the sun and animals from the long shot in the world.

In the abyss you sometimes feel like you are caught in a geological gastroscopy. Almost organic structures haunt out of the blackness of the abyss. Berta leaves herself and us completely to the light of the headlamps and their limitations, their shadow play, she always lets new spaces appear. And finally, this is perhaps the central cavern of meaning to which Michelangelo Frammartino takes us, is "Il Buco", this grandiose play with light and darkness, a homage to the magic of cinema.

The explorers of that time made no fuss about their adventure. You just left. "Il Buco" doesn't go by without a trace. It's not that easy to escape from Frammartino's film. When it gets dark again on the screen after an hour and a half and the letters from the end credits roll by silently, something has happened to us.

That's why the warning at the beginning might not have been a bad idea after all. In "Il Buco" you may not be shaken to your moral foundations, but your cinematic ones will be. One should perhaps watch this film every six months (perhaps alternating with Philip Gröning's "The Great Silence"). He clears his eyes again. And frees cinematic thinking. Quite apart from all the rest.