Ermanno Olmi's Il Posto

CHAPTER 9 MARRIED TO THE JOB: ERMANNO OLMI’S IL POSTO Ermanno Olmi, born in Bergamo in 1931, is the Italian filmmaker most committed to and identified with a regional heritage. His films are distinctly Lombardian; for the most part they describe life in Milan, the provincial capital (e.g., Il posto [The Job, 1961], One Fine Day [1969], In the Summertime [1971], The Circumstance [1974]). He has also filmed in the Lombardian Alps (Time Stood Still [1959]) and in his native Bergamo (The Tree of Wooden Clogs [1978]), but even when he ventures to Sicily, it is to make a film about a Milanese worker temporarily assigned to the south who longs for home (The Fiancés [1963]). And when Olmi makes a semi-documentary biography of a Pope (A Man Called John [1965]), it is of the Lombardian pope, John XXIII. Furthermore, his work bears affinities to the central literary figure of the Lombardian tradition, Alessandro Manzoni, whose great historical novel, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), is variously reflected in at least three of Olmi’s films: most directly in The Fiancés, whose very title recasts the 1827 novel, but also in the idealization of a great ecclesiastic (A Man Called John) and in the vivid re-creation of a past century (The Tree of Wooden Clogs), which portrays peasant life in the nineteenth century rather than Manzoni’s seventeenth). Perhaps the most significant Manzonian characteristic of Olmi’s cinema, however, is its Catholicism. Of all the major Italian filmmakers, he has the least problematic relationship to the Church—a relationship amply on display in his 2011 film The Cardboard Village, in which an elderly priest – who, like the camera itself, never moves outside his beautiful yet condemned parish church—attempts to shield illegal African immigrants from the authorities. For the most part, Olmi’s career has centered upon the individual worker, legal or illegal, caught between the search for employment and the quest to assert his dignity through labor; quite often this tension carries over from work to the conjugal or pre-conjugal love life of the protagonist. One of the most unusual aspects of the Italian cinema of the late ’50s and the ’60s is the way in which it affords us multiple perspectives on this individual worker—indeed, on the economic boom of which he was a part following the postwar recovery. Whereas the directors of the French New Wave each created a unique poetic universe, Italian cinema of the same period feels like a series of moons circling around one planet. Again and again, one encounters the identical sociological material, whether filtered through Michelangelo Antonioni’s exacting nihilism, Luchino Visconti’s luxurious emotionalism, Dino 99 Chapter 9 Risi’s comic exuberance, or Valerio Zurlini’s stirring sobriety. Over and over, one sees the same construction sites, quick-stop cafés, barren roadsides, and cramped apartments (owned by noisy, nosy landladies) that were constants of postwar Italian society. Most strikingly of all, these films feature a parade of young men outfitted in regulation white-collar attire yet betraying their essential inexperience—of the world itself as well as the work-world. That is, they are ill-equipped for a life of work and responsibility in a mechanized, high-efficiency world, and consequently they are lonesome for the nurturing comforts of home. Of all the talented filmmakers who visited this particular terrain, none responded more soulfully than Ermanno Olmi. His seldom-cited début feature, Time Stood Still, for example, is itself a wonderful film that, with warmth and humor, meticulously chronicles the daily routine of two men who, isolated high in the mountains during the long winter months, guard an unfinished hydro-electric dam until the workers can return to complete it in the spring. Olmi manages in the course of this semi- documentary to perform the neat trick of portraying tedium without being tedious. But it was the one-two punch of his second and third pictures, not the impact of his first, that put Olmi on the international movie map. Il posto and The Fiancés are often bracketed together, and, although they are substantially different, it does make a kind of sense to regard them as bookend works. Think of them, if you will, as two estuaries growing out of the same large river: Il posto flows north to Milan, while The Fiancés flows south and across the channel to Sicily. These two films, like most of Olmi’s oeuvre, are job-oriented in one way or another (his The Legend of the Holy Drinker [1988] being a touching exception to this rule). All of his movies are also documentary-based, in the sense that their narratives are structured around unspectacular dilemmas reflecting ordinary lives. And they are all shot in actual locations, with almost all of them featuring non-actors (two notable exceptions: Rod Steiger as Pope John XXIII in Olmi’s only real failure, A Man Called John; and an unexpectedly moving Rutger Hauer in The Legend of the Holy Drinker, which is also one of this director’s rare literary adaptations [from the 1939 novella by Joseph Roth]). Like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Francesco Rosi, and Bernardo Bertolucci, Olmi is a filmmaker nurtured by Italian neorealism in that, not only has he worked extensively with amateur actors in simplified naturalistic settings, he has also eschewed artificial lighting and employed an ascetic camera style. Instead of a mobile camera, Olmi makes extensive use of the zoom lens and relies heavily upon montage and even more on overlapping sounds to transform his realistically photographed scenes into psychologically inflected domains of space and time. Like the neorealist protagonists of Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, Olmi’s heroes themselves are always poised between human solitude and membership in some kind of community, be it that of family, village, or office. Similarly, from Time Stood Still onwards, he has consistently focused on elemental work situations positioned between the charm of apprenticeship and the regret-cum-relief of retirement, in which everyday concerns are held up against a long view of the not-too-distant future. 100.

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