MelinusMargos
08-04-2013, 06:51 PM
A great movie depicting life in Northern Italy(in particular in Palosco, Bergamo, Lombardy) during the late '800. It's an excellent movie that show us how poor country life was during those years. I think most european people will recognize themselves to some extent in this movie.
The movie's set in Italy, in 1898, in a very poor country district where four peasant families live in the same farm complex and till the soil for the landowner, who gets three-quarters of whatever they do.
The lives of the families are very simple, centering around the change in the seasons, the condition of the soil, their own births and deaths and illnesses, their religion, their traditions. Somewhere else in Italy, a social revolution is growing and there are demonstrations in the streets, but to these peasants that is meaningless.
Olmi works very close to the land himself. He is in the neorealist tradition of DeSica, who experimented in "Shoeshine" and "Bicycle Thief" with the use of non-professionals. The people in "The Tree of Wooden Clogs" are not actors, we are told, but Olmi finds astonishing performances in them.
There are a lot of characters in the movie (which is three hours long), and we meet them in a series of many everyday activities. The fields are tilled, a hog is slaughtered, tomatoes are planted against the barn's sunny wall. A child is born, a cow grows sick, a widow takes in laundry, a courtship proceeds, there is a fight, a wedding and a river journey to Milan, and one of the landowner's trees is cut down to furnish wood for the clog sandal of a peasant child.
It is a very pleasant, even lulling, experience to watch these daily activities, and I found myself enjoying the film on a documentary level. Almost everything you might want to know about the external rhythms of Italian 19th century peasant life is here in this film, and, although Olmi is political and his film has a buried level of protest, this isn't a leftist tract like Bertolucci's "1900"; it's the story of some lives.
But Olmi has a tendency to grow too sentimental about those lives. The film's central image is of the peasant Batisti cutting down the poplar tree to make the sandal for his child. As he sits in his kitchen shaping the clog shoe, organ music by Bach plays on the soundtrack. And later the peasant family will be thrown off the land for stealing the tree.
As we wipe the tears from our eyes, may we also be permitted to reflect that (a) cutting down a whole tree is a rather drastic way to obtain the wood for one single clog shoe, and (b) that if Olmi's reasoning is carried through to its conclusions, would we also get Bach playing over scenes of a modern Batisti sticking up a shoe store?
What I'm suggesting is that this movie should be viewed for its actual visual content, rather than for its noble pretensions. It is a film to experience in an almost apolitical way: We are introduced to a community of peasants, we observe their lives and strivings, Olmi has brought an astonishing wealth of detail, accuracy and beauty to this record of their story, and that is enough.
source: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-tree-of-wooden-clogs-1980
There were actually 2 versions of the movie: the original is in Eastern Lombard language and the 2nd is a redubbed italianized version of it (in order to make it accessible to standard italian-speaking public).
The english version should be based on the 2nd version and it's subbed.
Hope you enjoy this movie. If you ever watch it, post your impressions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM4vESsLiXc
The movie's set in Italy, in 1898, in a very poor country district where four peasant families live in the same farm complex and till the soil for the landowner, who gets three-quarters of whatever they do.
The lives of the families are very simple, centering around the change in the seasons, the condition of the soil, their own births and deaths and illnesses, their religion, their traditions. Somewhere else in Italy, a social revolution is growing and there are demonstrations in the streets, but to these peasants that is meaningless.
Olmi works very close to the land himself. He is in the neorealist tradition of DeSica, who experimented in "Shoeshine" and "Bicycle Thief" with the use of non-professionals. The people in "The Tree of Wooden Clogs" are not actors, we are told, but Olmi finds astonishing performances in them.
There are a lot of characters in the movie (which is three hours long), and we meet them in a series of many everyday activities. The fields are tilled, a hog is slaughtered, tomatoes are planted against the barn's sunny wall. A child is born, a cow grows sick, a widow takes in laundry, a courtship proceeds, there is a fight, a wedding and a river journey to Milan, and one of the landowner's trees is cut down to furnish wood for the clog sandal of a peasant child.
It is a very pleasant, even lulling, experience to watch these daily activities, and I found myself enjoying the film on a documentary level. Almost everything you might want to know about the external rhythms of Italian 19th century peasant life is here in this film, and, although Olmi is political and his film has a buried level of protest, this isn't a leftist tract like Bertolucci's "1900"; it's the story of some lives.
But Olmi has a tendency to grow too sentimental about those lives. The film's central image is of the peasant Batisti cutting down the poplar tree to make the sandal for his child. As he sits in his kitchen shaping the clog shoe, organ music by Bach plays on the soundtrack. And later the peasant family will be thrown off the land for stealing the tree.
As we wipe the tears from our eyes, may we also be permitted to reflect that (a) cutting down a whole tree is a rather drastic way to obtain the wood for one single clog shoe, and (b) that if Olmi's reasoning is carried through to its conclusions, would we also get Bach playing over scenes of a modern Batisti sticking up a shoe store?
What I'm suggesting is that this movie should be viewed for its actual visual content, rather than for its noble pretensions. It is a film to experience in an almost apolitical way: We are introduced to a community of peasants, we observe their lives and strivings, Olmi has brought an astonishing wealth of detail, accuracy and beauty to this record of their story, and that is enough.
source: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-tree-of-wooden-clogs-1980
There were actually 2 versions of the movie: the original is in Eastern Lombard language and the 2nd is a redubbed italianized version of it (in order to make it accessible to standard italian-speaking public).
The english version should be based on the 2nd version and it's subbed.
Hope you enjoy this movie. If you ever watch it, post your impressions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM4vESsLiXc