at the film society of lincoln center's walter reade theater: salt of the earth: the cinema of ermanno olmi march 21 - april 12, 2001 photo: the tree of the wooden clogs

film descriptions and times Co-presented with the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival "Work is man's chance to express himself," Ermanno Olmi once said, "the average person's opportunity to be creative.... What I am against is the relationship man has today with the world in which he works." You could say that work lies at the spiritual heart of Olmi's cinema - it provides the very framework of existence for his characters, among the most convincingly "ordinary" people in the history of movies. These people have very lifelike priorities and goals: negotiating every pitfall, setback and moral conundrum as it comes, trying to make it through life as honorably and responsibly as possible, and every once in a while letting a touch of vanity slip through. Simply put, they are people like us. Olmi became interested in movies through his job at the Edison factory in his native Lombardy, where he and his mother worked after the war. He filmed numerous documentaries for Edison before making Time Stood Still, his first feature, in 1959. Olmi put a new, quietly revolutionary wrinkle on Neorealism: this anti-careerist, home-based artist took down the quotation marks around the "common man," and became one with his characters (almost always played by non-actors, their situations very close to those in the film), never looking down on their modest ambitions or slotting them into a political framework. He made a worldwide impact with the early-60s diptych of IL POSTO and I FIDANZATI, two of the most beautiful films of that heady era, and went on to make a series of earthy, quietly expressive, profoundly human films, each as luminously simple as a medieval book of hours: ONE FINE DAY, THE SCAVENGERS, CAMMINA, CAMMINA, and his 1978 masterpiece, the incomparably moving THE TREE OF THE WOODEN CLOGS. Join us for a retrospective of the work of this great, unjustly neglected artist, Ermanno Olmi. Acknowledgements: Antonio Monda, Roberto Cicutto, Felice Laudadio and Camilla Cormani from Cinecittà Holdings, Cecilia Valamarana, Giuseppe Cereda and Bianca Giordano from RAI, Alitalia, and Paolo Riani from the Italian Cultural Institute.

ermanno olmi

THE FIANCES / I FIDANZATI 1962; 76m Olmi's follow-up toIL POSTO was this tender study of a young Milanese couple who fear the toll that separation will take on their love when the boy is sent by his company to help open their new steel factory in Sicily. As they exchange letters, the only thing they share is a sense of solitude that becomes more pronounced with each passing day. Freer in form than its predecessor and even more emotionally devastating, I FIDANZATI is one of the truest portraits of romantic solitude in movies. Wed March 21: 1, 5 & 9 Fri March 23: 3:15 & 7:15 Sat March 24: 4:30 & 8:30 Sun March 25: 4:30 & 8:45 Mon March 26: 6:15 Wed March 28: 4:15 THE JOB / IL POSTO 1961; 105m A young boy named Domenico applies for a "job for life" as a clerk in a large company in Milan, and Olmi takes him through the elaborate hiring procedure (complete with a psychological test), a brief flirtation with a girl who's also in the hiring pool, his initiation into the hermetic, impersonal office and the strangely insular world of its employees, a company New Year's Eve dance of pitch-perfect boredom, and, in an episode of the most exquisite lyricism, the death of an employee whose position Domenico will occupy. The film that put Olmi on the international map, IL POSTO is one of the key works of the 60s, and the movie that took the Neorealist idea impulse into the cold, hard world of the Italian economic boom. It's also vastly influential, on everyone from Martin Scorsese to Abbas Kiarostami to Charles Burnett to Taiwan's Wu Nien-jen. Wed March 21: 2:45 & 6:45 Thurs March 22: 3 & 7:10 Fri March 23: 1, 5 & 9; Sat March 24: 6:15 Mon March 26: 1 Wed March 28: 9:20 TIME STOOD STILL / IL TEMPO SI È FERMATO 1958; 98m Like Visconti with La Terra Trema, Olmi began his feature debut as a documentary that gradually evolved into fiction. His subject was a hydorelectric dam in the mountains of northern Italy, and he built his story around the watchman of the dam and his young assistant, who arrives as a holiday replacement. Right from the beginning, Olmi's extraordinarily precise, gentle eye was fixed on the rhythms and realities of day to day existence - the time it takes two people to get to know each other, the way that they slowly bridge the gap between them through their shared work. "The film's structure seems improvised, yet quite the contrary is true. The overall patterns of the entire film...are meticulously embroidered to evoke the impression of casualness.... Seen in perspective, Olmi's inconspicuous debut was an event of quite extraordinary importance for the future." - Mira Liehm Thurs March 22: 1, 5:10 & 9:20 Sun March 25: 6:45 CAMMINA, CAMMINA 1982; 165m Olmi's retelling of the journey of the Magi, filmed in Lombardy, has the rustic, earthbound beauty, simplicity and poetry of a rural pageant. The cast is entirely made up of non-actors, and the film is brimming over with the warm spontaneity of their interactions. As the director himself put it, "Institutions are the death of any sentiment whatsoever of religiosity and faith." Like Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew (only far less severe), CAMMINA, CAMMINA gives fresh, vibrant life to one of the most familiar stories in western culture. "It is as fine and spiritual a commemoration of the birth of Jesus as anyone has ever put on film." - John Hartl Mon March 26: 3 & 8; Wed March 28: 1 & 6:15

the legend of the holy drinker

THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY DRINKER / LA LEGGENDA DEL SANTO BEVITORE 1988; 125m Olmi's adaptation of the Joseph Roth story is doubly unusual, because it is set in Paris, far from Olmi's customary northern Italian home turf, and also because it features real, honest-to-goodness movie stars. Andreas (Rutger Hauer), an alcoholic who lives on the streets, is given 200 francs by a stranger (Anthony Quayle). The catch is that he has to pay it back to the local chapel as soon as he can afford to. Hauer has always been a great actor, but he's rarely had a role as good as this one. Andreas tramps through the streets of Paris and tries to hold himself together as he confronts his miserable past, and Hauer gives us every nuance, every twinge of psychic and spiritual pain. A beautiful film and, on these shores, a vastly underappreciated one as well. Thurs March 29: 1 & 6:15 Wed April 4: 3:30 & 8:15 LONG LIVE THE LADY! / LUNGA VITA ALLA SIGNORA! 1987; 115m Six young graduates of a hotel management school get their first real taste of the trade at an elaborate dinner party given in a medieval castle in Lombardy. Olmi begins by following the rituals of banquet preparation and then, with the arrival of the obscenely wealthy guests, slowly segues into a near-phantasmagoric examination of bourgeois self-delusions and hypocrisies. Set to the music of Telemann, this 1987 film, winner of the Silver Lion at Venice, is one of the director's most unusual and bracingly funny. "Irresistibly funny. . . an incredibly rich tapestry of human behaviour" - Tom Milne Thurs March 29: 3:30 & 8:45 Tue April 3: 1; Wed April 4: 1 & 6 THE TREE OF THE WOODEN CLOGS / L'ALBERO DEGLI ZOCCOLI 1978; 170m Olmi wrote, directed, shot and edited this intimate epic, a chronicle of the lives of several peasant families in turn of the century Lombardy. They make their living as tenant farmers, and turn over two thirds of their harvest to their landlords, but Olmi never engages in the kind of overt politicizing that the subject would prompt from almost anyone else. This is a great work of luminous humanism, in which faces, fog-bound landscapes and sky take on a genuine, unadorned majesty. There's been nothing else like it, before or since. "A fully articulated work of cinematic art.... After only a few minutes of the film, I felt myself magically transported to the realm of sublimely expressed feelings" - Andrew Sarris Fri March 30: 1, 4:15 & 7:30 Sat March 31: 4 & 7:30 THE SCAVENGERS / I RECUPERANTI 1969; 97m Shot near the mountain village of Asiago, where Olmi himself has lived for many years, The Scavengers is the story of two men, one young and one old, who make their living combing the sites of World War I battlefields for scrap left from fallen bombs and shells. The interplay between Gianni and Old Du, who never stops singing or muttering to himself, is at the heart of this plaintive, personal film, about the lasting presence of war even after it has become a distant memory. Tue April 3: 3:15; Thurs April 5: 1, 5:10 & 9:15 Wed April 11: 3:45 & 8:45 GENESI - LA CREAZIONE E IL DILUVIO 1994; 101m (in Italian, no subtitles) Olmi’s contribution to Turner’s ongoing series of biblical films is a genuine work of art. The first half of the film is a meditation on the book of Genesis, in which there is no past or present. Olmi’s calm yet rapturous flow of images is based in the belief that the wonder of creation is eternally present wherever there is life, as are the fundamental flaws in human nature. The second half of the film is devoted to Noah, played by Padre Padrone’s Omero Antonutti (he also plays the Bedouin narrator), and tells the story as delicately as it’s possible to imagine. Thurs April 5: 3 & 7:10 THE CIRCUMSTANCE / LA CIRCONSTANZA 1973; 92m Olmi’s most complex, modernist film tells its story in quick, vivid bits of action and dialogue that stretch elliptically across a summer. The film examines the life of an upper-class Milanese family, and zeroes in on the mother and father, whose lives are changed in subtle but decisive ways by two striking events in their lives: the mother witnesses a car accident, and becomes attached to the boy who’s been injured, while the father suffers the indignity of an aggressive seminar called the "Business Game," which his company has obliged him to attend. This is perhaps the most piercing of Olmi’s films, perhaps because it’s one of the rare times he’s explored an upper-class milieu. "Without sacrificing any of his ‘humanity,’ or his realistic approach, Olmi has moved onto a different plane of filmmaking." — Gavin Millar Fri April 6: 1:30 & 6:15; Sat April 7: 4:45 & 9 Sun April 8: 4:30 & 8:30 THE SECRET OF THE OLD WOODS / IL SEGRETO DEL BOSCO VECCHIO 1993; 134m "I prefer a relationship with reality, not reconstructed in a studio," Olmi has said, adding, "A real tree is continually creative; an artificial tree isn't." Olmi’s profound connection to the natural world is a running theme throughout his cinema. It’s at the center of this lovely fable set in the Dolomite region during the reign of King Victor Emanuel III. Colonel Sebastiano Procolo (Paolo Villagio) inherits a forest. When the colonel is compelled to go against the wishes of his benefactor and exploit his inheritance for commercial purposes, the magical forest won’t alow it. This ravishing, delightful film is the closest Olmi has come to a children’s film. Fri April 6: 3:30 & 8:15; Wed April 11: 1 & 6 ONE FINE DAY / UN CERTO GIORNO 1968; 106m One Fine Day is a carefully detailed study of a middle-aged, middle-class man named Bruno, the assistant managing director of an advertising agency, with a wife, family and mistress. When his boss suddenly retires after suffering a heart attack, Bruno gets his job (complete with a mandate for a new product: frozen "Job Dinners"). The film examines his sensitivity towards his old boss, whom he doesn't want to hurt, towards his employees, and towards his wife and mistress. In 1969, anyone else would have been merciless with such a bourgeois subject, but Olmi (working with a non-actor named Brunetto del Vita, whose own life was very close to his character's) refused to judge his hero, and looked at him and his prototypical situation with an extraordinary amount of tenderness and clarity. "Olmi observes people as they are and not as he would wish them to be. He will not make them serve other purposes at the expense of their individuality." - Gavin Millar Sat April 7: 6:45; Thurs April 12:1 MILANO '83 1983; 62m Olmi’s relaxed, soulful document of the city where he spent his formative years, just before Christmas in 1983. Olmi has always had the sensitivity of a great jazz musician – here, his touch with the camera and his supple hand at the editing table make this the most human of all city films, and one of the most oddly moving. Unobtrusively, gracefully, Olmi gives us a troubling vision of the essential solitude of city life, a solitude that, in the filmmaker’s own words, "doesn’t even have the shape of sadness, but of indifference, which is even worse." preceded by Tre Fili Fino a Milano (18min) Sun April 8: 6:30; Thurs April 12: 3:15 STUDENTS OF ERMANNO OLMI: TRE STORIE / THREE STORIES Piergiorgio Gay and Roberto San Pietro, 1998; 85m A love story with a difference, between three former drug addicts named Paolo, Martina and Giovanni. Piergiorgio Gay and Roberto San Pietro’s film is a wonderfully realistic portrait of spiritual reawakening — exhilarating at first, painful once the realities of daily life begin to sink in. San Pietro and Gay, a former assistant to Olmi, create a moving testament of real-life fortitude — in fact, the three leads are played by actual recovering addicts. preceded by La bomba (Giacomo Campiotti, 1985) Mon April 9: 2 & 6:15; Tue April 10: 3:30 MAICOL Mario Brenta, Italy, 1988; 90m Maicol is a small child who lives with his mother — an unmarried factory worker who is torn between her responsibility toward her son and her obsessive attraction for an inconsiderate lover. The dynamics of this triangle result in a crisis that culminates in a long, lonely night in the Milan subway. Director Mario Brenta has created a sensitive and poignant film that makes superb use of the urban landscape. Also superb are the performances of Sabina Regazzi as the distraught mother and Simone Tessarolo as a child whom circumstances have forced to live within himself. Without sentimentality, MAICOL provides an unique perspective on childhood alienation. Mon April 9: 4:15 & 8:30; Tue April 10: 1:30