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The Tree of Wooden Clogs
Category: Video |
List Price: $19.98
Our Price: $5.49 |
As of: October 11th, 2008 09:53:25 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 A Sweet and Bitter Harvest
As an award-winning Italian film, 'Tree of Wooden Clogs' examines a cross-section of four Italian peasant families during the turn-of-the-century. For nearly three hours we get the full deliberations of people who marry, work the land, and deal with their meager existence. Despite the adversity, they summon peaceful resolve with their Catholic faith while the winds of revolution blow around them with an agitation that garners nothing but their indifference.
The heart of the plot revolves around Batisti (Luigi Ornaghi) a family man whose wife brings forth another son. Bearing a fragile existence, Batisti cuts down a landlord's tree to replace another son's broken wooden clog. For side plots, one elderly man finds a coin on the ground during a holiday festival and hides it inside a neighbor's horse's hoof, while a newly married couple travels to Milan to celebrate their honeymoon in a convent.
For those who liked 'Into Great Silence (Two-Disc Set)' this movie classic will be comparatively moving. Almost identical in movie time, the deliberate pace is less slow, but equally beautiful to watch.
 A look at rural Italy and its faith more than a century ago, a springboard to discuss social change
This moving film follows a year in the lives of four Italian tenant-farming families in the late nineteenth century.
Although it is a drama, the film has a strong documentary or ethnographic flavor, portraying the lives of the families, the seasons, the farm animals, country and town, courtship and marriage, and above all faith. The four families live in the same compound, and the plot revolves around events within the compound and the village -- enrolling a boy at school, the sickness of a family's cow, boy meets girl, an adoption, planting tomatoes, the illegal felling of a tree, the difficult circumstances of a widow, and an eviction.
Director Ermanno Olmi drew the members of the cast from Lombardy farm families. The effect of the localized events and the non-professional cast is to pull the viewer into the world of these families in a way few films do. The length of the film and its "slow" pace have a parallel effect -- to draw the viewer out of the fast pace of our modern life back into a time when lives moved to different and slower rhythms.
Many will wince, as I did, at the scene when a large hog is slaughtered. The pork that comes to us in wrapped supermarket packages distances us from the reality of farms and animals, and the film makes us confront it. (All of our great-grandparents knew the reality, and they might be surprised by how the scene discomforts their own descendants.) The scene shows Olmi's evenhandedness. Nostalgia for the past is balanced with a clear look at its hardships and cruelties.
The film's large theme is to show how the lives of these ordinary people were inseparable from their Catholic faith, evident in their prayers, conversations, and responses to their homely crises. The film then subtly portrays how modernity begins to intrude on that thick web of faith and life. The film gives viewers who are interested in social transformation a great deal to discuss.
-- In the film the landlord subtly represents the modern (and impersonal) economic order of markets. Do markets liberate, or oppress? With any economic change, who wins and who loses?
-- Another transformation will be literacy. The major crisis in the plot stems from a boy's walk to school each day.
-- In another generation, the world of these families will be transformed by nationalism and war, alluded to in the film by local orators, by the passing of cavalry through the town, and arrests of agitators. Many other "-isms" will darken the skies.
-- The families live in an age before birth control and family planning, and one can sense the economic difficulties that come with more children. Yet they consider themselves blessed, not burdened.
The four families, then, live in a world not yet modern and still in many ways unjust. As time pulls them into a modern interconnected world of nations, not families and villages, what will they have gained? And what will they have lost?
On the 100th anniversary of cinema in 1995, the Vatican included "Tree of Wooden Clogs" on its list of noteworthy films. It is a mature artistic treatment of rural and family life informed by Catholic meditations on social justice.
The four families' world of faith is Catholic in an older way. With its Hail Marys and Rosaries, its portrayal may initially jar modern Catholics, viewers of other faiths, or non-believers. To all viewers I say "see it through." It is an affectionate portrayal of rural Italy at the end of the nineteenth century, to be sure, but patient viewing and discussion of the film can yield something more -- a view of the role of faith in a society.
Start the discussion with something Will Durant wrote about the commandments and those who follow them: "Through these commands they are made part of a divine drama, and their harrassed lives take on a scope and dignity that cannot be canceled out by death."
-30-
The Tree of Wooden Clogs
One of Olmi's greatest accomplishments, "Clogs" is a sensitive, verité-style drama that unfolds at a leisurely pace, with indelible, naturalistic performances by the entire cast of nonprofessional actors. Olmi based the film on stories his grandmother recalled about growing up in Lombardy, and the subtle power of this film comes from the calm, unforced manner in which he portrays lives of drudgery and sacrifice. Some scenes stick in the mind, like an old-timer regaling villagers with a ghost story, or a honeymoon trip to Milan on an old barge. Give "The Tree of Wooden Clogs" time to blossom, and you'll reap the rewards.
Hard to swallow masterpiece
This three hour movie about the lives of a group of peasants in Northern Italy in the late 19th Century is probably a masterpiece, but is also one of the most conservative movies I have ever seen. Made with a cast of amateur actors, it's a brilliant movie alright, but Olmi's social conservatism is very hard to swallow. In a way, his position seems even more backward than the Catholic Church: while today's Church gives at least some lip service to the idea of redistribution of wealth, Olmi's ideology might be best described as favoring the medieval concept of social immobility: peasants will always be peasants, the Church will look after them as long as they remain faithful to it, but they should never rise against their masters. The landlord is a horrible person (expelling a peasant from his property for felling a tree in order to make the shoes of the title for his little child) but amazingly this never seems to cross the mind of the peasants, who accept their destiny stoically. Another thing I didn't like: the movie features two scenes where animals are slaughtered (apparently for real, and graphically). Without being an extreme supporter of animal rights, I don't think this was necessary. I believe that no piece of art is worth killing an animal.
Witness the life of real 19th century peasants
This is not a typical film, even for European standards. Of course it's not a documentary either. So what is it? It's more a document than a documentary, because there seems to be no point of view, no story-teller. We are just there, seeing whatever is going on.
First of all, it is very long: three hours. It is filmed in rather long and slow-pace scenes.
Second: These are real folks, living their peasant lives in northern Italy, doing their daily chores with no tv noise in the background and all the dirt and realism you can expect to find if you were to live in an Albanian farm today.
Third: the classic music played for this film has been very wisely and appropriately chosen.
Fourth: The most important thing in this film are the faces of the people, worth the three hours, if only for that. Authenticity is hard to find.
I find this work very interesting, specially because most of us can see in these people our own ancestors, maybe to the time of my grandparents' youth in Spain (so much like northern Italy). But beyond the luck, or craftiness, of catching real folks doing their thing in situ, and catching it well enough, I don't see any "mastery of movement, color and imagery", bla, bla. And it won the Grand prize at Cannes Film Festival. Which, well thought, it is not surprising, since they always reward weirdness and extravagance under the label of originality. In my opinion the director, Ermanno Olmi, isn't any Orson Welles, but his good intentions got him a reward.
Nothing to say about the lives depicted here. We are only to watch and respect them. Whatever we may think of them, it will probably say more of us than of them.
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