“Le Quattro volte” – a beautiful movie by Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino.

Sound in this movie plays a fundamental role, it’s a narration on its own, as there are no dialogues or any human-spoken words so to speak. Goats are the centre of this picture , everything evolves around them, their timeline and their journey. The goat keeper is with his goats every day until he gets back home in the evening. Goats are his companions until the very end, they come to pay tribute when he dies in his bed.

Goat’s bells and the environmental sounds create the world the shepherd and the goats live in. We enter this serene, lonely world, accompanied by shots of magnificent nature. After only a few minutes I fully emerged and felt a part of it. I started to hear the difference in timbre and the way this choir of metal bells just blended and became an integral part of the road that the herd have been traversing with their leader every day. After his death, the sound and the actions are changing, we can observe and hear the people of this small village preparing for the ritual that I don’t fully understand, which entails cutting one of the tallest trees in the area and eventually burning it. Again, all we can hear is what you would hear being there, the steps, cutting, and a bit of human voice (still no dialogue). Just as if you were there, watching the tree fall in suspense, and later celebrating with other villagers.

“Le Quattro volte”, in the sense of sound design, is the great example of the “less is more” rule coming into life and working perfectly. Using only environmental and naturally occurring sounds from that particular environment, giving the lead to nature rather than people contributed to creating the movie that literally “takes” the audience to that small village in Southern Italy and lets them be there, with the goats and their shepherd, for 1.5 hours.