Cinematic Encounters 2 by Rosenbaum Jonathan;

Author:Rosenbaum, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

CHAPTER 16

Ermanno Olmi

Prior to writing this essay, Ermanno Olmi remained mostly a blank spot in my film education apart from The Job (1961) and The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), both of which I hadn't seen since their original releases. So being assigned to write about his work for a retrospective catalog published in Portugal in May 2012—A Man Called Ermanno: Olmi's Cinema and Works, published by Edições Il Sorpasso (in Lisbon)—provided me with an opportunity to dig deeper, to reacquaint myself with those films and to begin to explore some of his other works. I still have a long way to go before catching up with his oeuvre as a whole, which has been difficult to access, especially in North America, but I hope this essay suggests that such an investigation is well worth undertaking…. Sadly, Olmi died on May 5, 2018, as this book was nearing completion.

Problems of Classification: A Few Traits in Four Films by Ermanno Olmi

For me, the cinema is a state of mind and a process of analysis from a series of detailed observations.

—Ermanno Olmi, from a 1988 interview1

Ermanno Olmi first became well-known as a filmmaker during the period in the early 1960s when the nouvelle vague and, more specifically, François Truffaut's formulation of la politique des auteurs, were near the height of their international influence. Yet it seems that one factor that has limited Olmi's reputation as an auteur over the half-century that has passed since then is his apparent reluctance and/or inability to remain typecast in either his choice of film projects or in his execution of them. Indeed, the fact that he repeatedly eludes and/or confounds whatever auteurist profile that criticism elects to construct for him in its effort to classify his artistry results in a periodic neglect of him, followed by periodic “rediscoveries.” And these rediscoveries are confused in turn by the fact that each rediscovery of Olmi's work seems to redefine his profile rather than build on the preceding one.

At least this has been the gist of my own experience. Although I'm clearly restricted by having seen only four Olmi features to date, the spotty and limited international distribution that his work has received has largely been responsible for this impasse. And the incomplete grasp that I have of Olmi as an auteur is not only a consequence of this problem but, more symptomatically, part of the problem itself insofar as it has inhibited me from making further explorations. In other words, he has largely fallen outside most international canons precisely because his work has resisted easy classification.

Olmi's style is frequently described as simple, but once any attempt is made to elaborate on this observation, this alleged simplicity often turns out to be far from simple—perhaps because Olmi's responses to his material usually turn out to be less pure than we initially assume them to be, and more intuitively open to chance, circumstance, and/or expressive variations than criticism often cares to admit. Consider, for instance, the brief sequence in Il

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