THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS Movie Review

L'Albero Degli Zoccoli

Director Ermanno Olmi's 1978 epic tells the stories of four sharecropping peasant families in turn-of-the-century Lombardy. Although a specific incident gives the movie its title—a father risks punishment by cutting down one of the landlord's trees to make new shoes for his son—The Tree of Wooden Clogs is for the most part that most difficult kind of story (never mind epic) to bring off: a movie made up of small, individual moments without an overwhelmingly linear plot on which to hang them. And yet it works, and works brilliantly. Olmi has captured details of the lives of these people with such a stunning combination of realism and poetry that those accumulated details—and the rhythm of Olmi's editing—become the movie's storyline, and a compelling one at that. There is an authentic sense of family and community permeating this movie; Olmi does not try to conjure it with false and gratuitous tearjerking scenes of tragedy. The film is simply a vision of a time and place, populated with richly drawn characters, and it's so skillfully achieved that it becomes a permanent part of our experience. We presented this three-hour movie for one weekend only at the Detroit Institute of Arts exactly twenty years ago. People who saw it still come up to me at the museum and request that it be shown again; they remember moments from it, and they want to take people they know—some born long after that weekend—to see it as well. It's an overwhelming experience. Grand Prize Winner, 1978 Cannes Film Festival.

NEXT STOP … The Sound of Trumpets (II Posto), La Terra Trema, Bandits of Orgosolo

1978 185m/C IT Luigi Ornaghi, Francesca Moriggi, Omar Brignoll, Antonio Ferrari; D: Ermanno Olmi; W: Ermanno Olmi; C: Ermanno Olmi. Cannes Film Festival ‘78: Best Film; New York Film Critics Awards ‘79: Best Foreign Film. VHS, LV FXL