The Tree of Wooden Clogs
L’albero degli zoccoli
Ermanno Olmi (1978)
A coincidence: just before seeing Ermanno Olmi’s film, I’d read a piece by Francis Spufford, in his True Stories collection of articles and lectures, praising the horizons-expanding power of books. This is a familiar theme within the Spufford corpus (vide The Child That Books Built) but its reiteration is refreshing at a time when cultural fashion insists – more and more insistently – that people need to see themselves ‘represented’ in what they read or watch on screen. The Tree of Wooden Clogs is set in rural Bergamo, Lombardy, at the very end of the nineteenth century. Its central characters are four peasant families who scrape a living off the land; the income deriving from their work as tenant farmers is mostly destined for their landlord’s pocket. The one major episode of the story set in town rather than country follows two members of this group – a young, newly-married couple – to Milan, on a mission to adopt a foundling from a nunnery. The child will guarantee its adoptive parents a regular income – a kind of family allowance – throughout its early years. Olmi (1931-2108) was born in Bergamo and grew up in Milan but in social circumstances very different from his characters’. The lives he describes are even further removed from those of most audiences who’ve seen and will see his film. That distance is a big part of what makes The Tree of Wooden Clogs so illuminating.
There are some difficult consequences to entering this world, especially for a viewer coming to the film for the first time (as I was doing) more than forty years after its original release. Chief among these is the treatment of animals on screen. The Wikipedia article’s warning of ‘real footage of a goose and pig being killed’ hardly prepares you for it. The bird’s execution is over quickly; the pig’s isn’t, and its terrified screams are gruelling. Later on, one of the characters happens to find a gold coin, which he decides to conceal inside his horse’s hoof. When, unsurprisingly, the coin is dislodged and lost, the man blames the horse by striking it repeatedly. It’s another suffering animal that brings into sharpest focus a different foreignness – the power of the Catholic faith that sustains the community. Much of the livestock kept by the tenants belongs to the landowner. When an exception, a cow owned by one of the families, falls ill, the local vet is called urgently and delivers a cursory, gloomy prognosis. The materfamilias, after praying in church for the cow’s survival, feeds her holy water. The animal survives.
‘A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. They may seem very wonderful to the people who witness them, and very simple to those who perform them. That does not matter: if they confirm or create faith they are true miracles.’
The cow miracle brings to mind those words, spoken by the Archbishop of Rheims in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan – except that the woman in Olmi’s film seems to find the answer to her prayers a wonderful and a simple matter. The religious disposition of The Tree of Wooden Clogs is devout yet unsentimental. A woman giving birth has the serene expression of a Madonna but the baby is another mouth to feed. The peasants believe that God will provide but use their own ingenuity to ensure that happens. The elderly Anselmo grows tomatoes each year to sell to local grocers. As do others – so Anselmo, assisted by his little granddaughter, decides to plant the seeds earlier than usual to gain a competitive edge. The plan pays off (though it’s unclear why he’d not thought of it before).
The Tree of Wooden Clogs covers a year, illustrating the changing seasons and the established annual rhythms of the families’ lives. Olmi thus returns two or three times to the progress of Anselmo’s tomato crop but another recurring theme – the focal point of early scenes and the root cause of the closing ones – makes for a less happy ending. The farmer Batisti faces a dilemma. One of his children is reckoned by the local priest bright enough to attend school – something no other member of the family has hitherto done. The reassuring priest persuades Batisti that he should allow his son an education. Each day, the boy completes a long solo walk to and from school. In winter weather, his footwear disintegrates. Batisti cuts down an alder tree from which he makes his son a pair of wooden clogs. When the landowner discovers what has happened, Batisti and his family are evicted. Their neighbours mourn their departure but not much else will change in the cascina. New tenants will move in. Work and rest, birth and death will go on as before.
In addition to the Milan excursion, there are scenes outside the farm and its environs at locations such as a fair and a public meeting, where a political radical makes a speech. Although this is given Private Eye contd p 94 treatment, presumably to suggest how little the speech interests the peasants in the crowd, the moment serves as a reminder of a nearly contemporary, almost diametrically opposed magnum opus of Italian cinema, Bernardo Bertolucci’s decidedly political 1900 (1976). The English subtitling of the Italian dialogue (mostly in the Bergamasque dialect) in The Tree of Wooden Clogs is somewhat sparse, giving the gist rather than the detail of what’s being said. The soundtrack also includes church bells and Bach organ music. The latter – on the face of it, a surprisingly sublime choice – seems to reflect the film-maker’s view of his characters, despite their indigent circumstances, as in a state of grace. As well as writing the screenplay, Olmi did the cinematography. This is an instance where the use of natural light is both apt and satisfying.
Olmi’s decision to cast non-professionals, including some who actually make their living on Lombardy farms, also pays off handsomely. He could have searched the ranks of pro actors for years and not come up with the magnetic collection of faces assembled here. Besides, the cast aren’t simply being themselves. Even allowing that the pace of change in rural communities has continued to be much slower than in towns and cities, it’s hard to believe their way of life hasn’t altered at all in the interval of eighty years between the setting of the story and the making of the film. The performers must have drawn on imagination as well as personal experience to animate their characters. Untrained actors may not be the only reason why the film has drawn comparison with Italian neo-realist cinema of the late 1940s but the style and structure are very different from, say, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Bicycle Thieves (1948). Where the De Sica narratives are succinct and eventful, Olmi’s storytelling is unhurried and often descriptive. He moves easily between quasi-documentary and drama; it’s a hallmark of the film that the more dramatic moments, when they do occur, never feel forced and gain impact from matter-of-factness. At just over three hours, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is longer than Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves put together but Ermanno Olmi doesn’t waste a minute.
29 October 2021