Always far flung, the Tribeca Film Festival reaches north and east this year, to MoMA PS1 in Queens, site of “Alberi,†an installation by the celebrated Italian artist and filmmaker Michelangelo Frammartino.
Mr. Frammartino’s feature-length “Quattro Volte†was a critics’ favorite in 2011 â€" my colleague A.O. Scott called it “idiosyncratic and amazing†â€" and the 25-minute “Alberi†(it means trees in Italian) bears a strong family resemblance to the earlier film. It is free of dialogue but full of sound, and the VW Dome at PS1 wraps the viewer in wind, footsteps, rustling leaves and the indistinct hum of distant human chatter. It takes place in and around a village perched in the hills of southern Italy, and it gives equal, if not preferential, billing to its nonhuman characters: trees, streams, ancient stone buildings.
Where “Quattro Volte†achieved a full-fledged narrative involving cycles of life, from goat to man to tree and back again, “Alberi†is more of a fable or anecdote, as well as a piece of arboreal performance art (reportedly based on an ancient ritual of the Basilicata region). The men of the village gather and walk into the forest, where they encase themselves head to foot in vines and twigs. Then, like Birnam Wood, or a company of Swamp Things, they walk back into the village, recreating the forest in the town square while women and children clap and dance.
Seeing “Alberi†in the VW Dome, where it runs on a continuous loop, is not overwhelmingly different from seeing it projected conventionally â€" the space and screen aren’t big enough to produce a true Cinerama or Imax immersion effect. With its steep curve and absence of seats, however â€" the preferred viewing position is lying on the floor close to the screen â€" the dome is perfect for the film’s mirrored beginning and end, in which the camera looks up into canopies of leaves, first vast and whispering and alive, later constrained and crackling and already beginning to die.
In “Quattro Volte†Mr. Frammartino’s camera often hung back, taking in wide scenes from a distance in a way that facilitated a kind of slapstick silent comedy. “Alberi†is more intimate, with the camera sometimes traveling through the forest branches, and the effect is to replace the omniscient eye of the director with the point of view of nature itself: the trees, the boulders in a stream, the weathered ruins of farm buildings seem to be observing the strange doings of the humans, and comparing notes.
