Word: olmi
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Alas, these minor revelations-and two marvelously vigorous films from old masters, Italy's Ermanno Olmi (Camminacammina) and Poland's Andrzej Wajda (Danton)-were not enough to keep businessmen and journalists from grousing, as they lolled for a fortnight in one of the world's lushest garden spots. Nor will a disappointing festival keep these congenital optimists from returning next year to this bunker on the Côte d'Azur. - By Richard Corliss
...TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS Directed and Written by Ermanno Olmi...
...evidence of this movie, the 1978 Grand Prize winner at Cannes, it seems safe to say that Italian Director Ermanno Olmi is no fan of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900. Like 1900, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a lengthy (three hours), luxuriously photographed film about Italian peasants, but after that all similarities end. 1900 was a didactic epic that attempted to merge the florid drama of opera with the tenets of Marxism; Clogs is pointedly a tranquil, nonpolemical attempt to describe the peasants' daily existence in the objective manner of documentary cinema. Given their respective goals, Olmi...
There is nothing wrong with Olmi's decision to avoid the contrivances of narrative or ideology, as long as he then goes on to reveal the truth about his characters. This he has not done. Despite its length, Clogs is entirely composed of very brief scenes. Though the flow of vignettes captures the outlines and rituals of the people's lives, the individual peasants are permitted only predictable reactions to clichéd situations. Nor does Olmi allow his characters the chance to talk, however inarticulately or apolitically, about the matters of life, death and love that perpetually...
...learn only that every peasant is a saint who suffers in stoic silence. Bertolucci's observations are no less sentimental, but at least he took some artistic risks in the process. While Olmi seems to feel that the sheer homeliness of his technique amounts to blunt honesty, his aesthetic is every bit as disingenuous as that of a professional waif portraitist in Montmartre. All he has done is serve his picturesque peasants on a pretty platter so that rich people, from a safe distance, can get their fill...