ENTWINED ENTITIES Cavernous Reveries of the More-than-Human in Il Buco

Abstract

This thesis explores how Michelangelo Frammartino’s Il Buco (2021) develops an aesthetic of entanglement that reframes the more-than-human as a cinematic presence. Situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, phenomenology, and film theory, the study analyses how the film’s minimal narrative, meditative pacing, and observational style cultivate a perceptual engagement with more-than-human agencies. Through a detailed formal analysis structured around the PCS model—examining perceptual, conceptual, and stereotypical cinematic structures—the thesis traces how Il Buco constructs meaning not through traditional causality, but through analogy, repetition, and spatial-temporal resonance. Rather than presenting the environment as backdrop, the film renders landscape, animals, and elemental forces as co-actors within a shared ontological space. By thematising observation, collapsing human/nature binaries, and reflecting on its own medium, Il Buco proposes a cinema of attunement: one that privileges immersion over intervention, perception over progression. This aesthetic entanglement of entities, shaped by the film’s quiet rhythms and layered structures, invites a reimagining of cinematic presence—where form and world breathe together, and the more-than-human emerges not as peripheral, but as integral to both cinematic expression and planetary being.