Background
OLMI, Ermanno was born on 24 July 1931 in Bergamo.
OLMI, Ermanno was born on 24 July 1931 in Bergamo.
The uneventful life of a clerk—like that of the young man in ll Posto—led Olmi into more creative work. Having worked as an actor and producer in the theatre, he made industrial documentaries in the late 1950s before his first feature, a study of a veteran and a younger man living together in isolation because of their work on a dam project.
Olmi is a director in a reticent, elliptical, and detached vein that is not characteristically Italian. Equally, it is not easy to fix him in neo-realism, despite his preference for real settings, ordinary people, and slight plots. Although he has professed a debt to de Sica, his near-mystical tenderness for people is more impressive than de Sica’s sentiment, and the most intriguing element in his films seems closer to the abstracting eye of an Antonioni.
In Time Stood Still, the elements of human kindliness and documentary observation of work rested on a gradual distillation of the relations between the two men. At his best—in I Fidanzati—Olmi achieves a subtle mastery of apparent visual simplicity to suggest complex emotions. The subject of the film is very plain—the separation of a couple because of the job the man must take. But the filming of it wonderfully suggests the feeling of separation and melancholy through the concentration on ordinary street scenes and interiors and the use of natural silence. Olmi’s true subject is the state of mind made manifest in a way of seeing undramatic reality. I Fidanzati is an ostensibly neutral account that, we suddenly realize, is so subjective as to be nearly hallucinatory.
The quality has been present, too, in II Posto (which is generally closer to neo-realistic sentiment) and Durante l'Estate—the first, promising sign of comedv in Olmi with a note of Chaplinesque social criticism and a defense of eccentrics that veers toward whimsicality.
E Venne tin Uoino is too dutiful and vague a life story of Pope John XXIII, while the other films were made for Italian television. I Recuperanti repeated the relationship of Time Stood Still. This time the two men recover ironmongery from battlefields. As well as the evolving relationship between them, Olmi is commenting on the way a war's wounds heal. The observation is clear, sympathetic, and amusing, but Olmi still seems passive, too deeply rooted in a laudable but commonplace humanism.
There is a hint of the evangelical bureaucrat about that, a conventional sensitivity belied by the subtlety of Olmi’s style. Visually, he is not far short of being austere; yet that suggests an intensity that he seems shy of . A question mark hangs over Olmi, as if he needed some gust of passion or surrealism to free him from the aspirations of realism.
His masterpiece is The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, a peasant epic set in Lombardy at the end of the nineteenth century, yet made with innate fondness for the commonplace and for humble attitudes. The daily routine blends effortlessly into a spiritual perspective so that the three-hour movie is like a religious panorama, a mix of Breughel and neo-realism. Since then, Olmi has worked less frequently. But he is his own man, a devout Catholic, cameraman and editor as well as director, determined on an unstressed view of life.
His version of Genesis is a kind of revery, with a narrative read by Paul Scofield, while his latest film would seem to be a story about the innovative impact of artillery.
Quotations: “I am interested in producing ideas. In order to distribute these ideas, it seems to me that the cinema is the most useful medium of our times. So I make films because I desire to talk about the reality of the times in which I live, in other words I desire to express ideas and propose them to the largest number of people. The only unit of measure for me, the only point of reference, the only common denominator is Man.