The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

I got myself a fantastic birthday present yesterday: I purchased a copy of the newly-released Criterion Collection DVD of director Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs.  I first saw this movie a few short weeks ago, and I can say, without a hint of exaggeration, that this film has almost instantaneously rocketed near the top of the list of my favorite films of all time.  And I’ve watched A LOT of movies!

From the back of the slipcase of the 2016 Criterion Collection DVD, released yesterday, 2/14/17:

“A sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian peasant life, Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs focuses on four families working for one landowner on an estate in the province of Bergamo.  Filming on an abandoned farm, Olmi adapted neorealist techniques to tell his story, enlisting local people to live as their ancestors had and speak in their native dialect on locations with which they were intimately familiar.  Through the cycle of seasons, of backbreaking labor, love and marriage, birth and death, faith and superstition, Olmi lovingly evokes an existence very close to nature, celebrating its beauty, humor, and simplicity but also acknowledging the feudal cruelty that governs it.”

This movie is over three hours long, but I was never bored watching it.  Apparently, it was originally produced as a three-part miniseries for Italian television.  The program was entered as a film at the prestigious Canne Film Festival inn 1978, and won the Palme d’Or, the highest award granted a film at the festival.  It was a just reward, and the film still stands the test of time almost four decades later.

Director Ermanno Olmi was motivated to create a picture of life during the time of his grandmother, who hailed from the Italian province of Lombardy.  At the time this film was made, the way of life presented had just about died out.  Olmi employed real farmers from the region in his film roles, given the feel of a documentary, you-are-there feel to scenes.  He also had them speak their lines in the local dialect of Burgamasque, necessitating subtitles even for native Italian viewers.  He came across the farm (dilapidated but still feasible) used in most of the movie almost by accient (he would say by providence) during a fog-shrouded drive scouting locations.

Olmi handled both the cinematography and editing of the film.  He spent years in development, writing the script, and creating the plot.  He used an alternative to the traditional Kodak color film to give the movie a different look that films usually shot in a warmer climate.  There’s not much to said plot, but we really get a great sense of this near-forgotten world Olmi paints like on a canvas for us, with his camera lens.

The title refers to an incident pertaining to one of the four families followed during the course of events of the movie.  A young peasant boy named Minek (Omar Brignoli) is given an extraordinary opportunity for a peasant child of that time: he is allowed to enroll in a local school, instead of having to go to work for his family.  Unfortunately, one day on the way walking the long four miles home from school, one of his wooden shoes (clogs) unexpectedly breaks beyond repair, and he is late arriving home.  His father, who does not own any appropriate shoe wood of his own for making shoes, takes it upon himself to cut down a tree owned by the wealthy landowner for whom he works and rents his home and livestock.  This fateful action taken by the father, leads to disastrous results.

Director Olmi was and is a devout Catholic, and his faith definitely shines through and pervades this movie’s many scenes.  The tenant farmer protagonists are a deeply religious folk: they huddle together to pray the rosary late at night as the last thing they do, before going to bed; the local parish priest, Father Carlo, is the individual that encourages young Minek’s father to send his bright son to school, despite the sacrifice for the family; it is not uncommon throughout the movie to see various characters praying for the divine intercession of the Lord in every crisis or near-crisis they face; two major characters are married in a Catholic religious ceremony, and spend their honeymoon in a convent in Milan as the guests of a Sister that is a family relative; and so on.

Director Olmi, unlike fellow directors of Italian Neorealism era, came up from actual peasant stock, and was not well-to-do like many of these fellow directors.  Many Italian Neorealist then and now describe themselves as Marxists.  Olmi, as well, apparently has described himself as such, but there is a difference with him, in that he eschews the atheism and revolutionaries traditionally closely associated with Marxism. 

Olmi was criticized by critics on the left at the time his film premiered.  These critics felt that the peasants portrayed in his films passively accepted their fate, instead of rising up and attempting to overthrow their oppressors.  The film 1900, directed by an Italian Neorealist contemporary of Olmi, Bernardo Bertolucci, premiered a short two years before The Tree of Wooden Clogs and explored similar themes of the peasant vs. patrician class struggle.  In Bertolucci’s film, which is far more dramatic and eventful, the struggle is more framed in a violent revolutionary context.

In a 2008 Interview located on the DVD, Olmi addresses his critics directly.  He claims that they failed to realize that, whilst in their comfortable ivory towers, these intellectual critics can complain all they want about the peasants not rising up, as they are not looking at the situation from the peasant’s perspective at the time.  No doubt if the peasants did rise up and revolt after being deprived, they would risk being killed, and lose what they had anyway.  The best the peasants can do is to pray for justice, which they indeed do.   

Writer Deborah Young, in an essay included with the DVD entitled “Sacred Realism,” sees The Tree of Wooden Clogs as the film that resonates more with audiences in terms of sympathy over the peasant’s plight.  She also notes this important difference between the two films:

“Whereas Bertolucci gives his padroni the familar face of Robert De Niro and Dominique Sanda, in Tree we barely glipse the man who holds the power of life and death over these children of the earth.  Olmi’s only comment on the landowner and his family is to associate them with the well-heeled culture of opera and chamber music. The peasants, instead, are identified with the sublime music of Johann Sebastian Bach, heard repeatedly on the soundtrack, until Bach’s baroque harmonies provide a spiritual metaphor akin to the ones in the films of Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson, a sort of divine blessing from above.”

 

On a personal note, a lost a good friend last week, Joseph Abraham.  He was a leader the guiding force behind the Catholic young adult group I’ve been involved with over the past several years.  Like me, he was a cinephile, and had an appetite for faith-based films in particular.  I do not know if he had seen The Tree of Wooden Clogs before his death, but I have no doubt he would have loved it.  If you're a person of faith, or even if you are not, do yourself a favor and watch this movie.  You'll be glad you did.