The Tree of Wooden Clogs

 

 L'albero degli zoccoli

Director & writer: Ermanni Olmi

1978, Italy 

I am a sucker for Epics By Masters, ever since I first saw Bertolucci’s ‘1900’: I had not seen anything like it at the time (it was part of some “World Cinema” season on TV, after which I was never the same again). Well, I always watched Leone’s ‘Dollar’ films when they were on as a kid, so that might qualify. Other than Leone’s work: ‘The Children of Paradise’, Kaurosawa’s ‘Ran’; ‘Heimat’, and at the time of writing I am watching ‘The Human Condition’; Tarr’s ‘Satantango’, Kieslowski’s ‘Dekalog’, Bergman’s ‘Fanny and Alexander’, etc. Pawlikowski’s ‘Cold War’ impressively condenses the sprawl of history, vistas, time and individuals that typifies the genre within ninety minutes. 

Olmi’s ‘The Tree of Wooden Clogs’ has the sprawl at three hours, and yes this contributes heavily to the label “epic”. But it’s the inverse of grand and sweeping, for it details the dramas of small community a handful of families of farmers, dependant on the graces of their landlord. It is like the counterpoint to ‘1900’ in that it eschews big gestures, overt political symbolism and shocks: they are there – a visit to a city in turmoil; animals butchered in real time – but they are organic rather than punctuation. But aside from length, it is both classic in scope and in its intent of recreating 19^th Century Italian feudal life, with its wealth of vistas and informative mid-range shots that keep its characters surrounded by a wider context of the farm. The symbolism more lies in the dedicated and delicate planting of tomatoes and hope.

Religion is organic and dominant. John Pym writes that, “the film’s juxtaposed and half-complementary political and religious arguments are underpinned by what Olmi has suggested is the film’s key, the permanence of the relationship between God’s land and the people who work it.” But there is nothing exotic in this peasant life and the land they toil. Religion is how they hold hope. Politics, however, is mostly a vague concept to these people in their limited experience, at least until the honeymooning couple go to the city and see but do not understand the upheaval. But then there is the moment where, rather than listening to a public speaker talk of change and democracy and respect for a citizen's right over privilege, the old man concentrates secretly on getting a coin lying in the dirt. Olmi never forgets the political context that the characters are unaware of.

Yet ‘The Tree of Wooden Clogs’ is also very much slice-of-life in that it is more about vignettes and incident rather than story or narrative. It is driven by the tales of how, for example, a woman seemingly saves an ailing cow with prayer; how this community gives one another jobs; shucking corn; the joy in community gatherings in the barn; the hiding of a coin; the routine of courtship. Or how girls spill laundry into the dirt making more work for their long-suffering mother. This farm is their whole world. There’s the overarching storyline of one of the family’s boys being deemed too smart for farming life and, at the priest’s instruction, is sent to school: it’s this that leads the incident with the wooden clogs which eventually leads to the closing injustice (an expulsion from Eden). 

 Roger Ebert says, “We say the movie is a masterpiece when we mean that it is about people we pity and respect.” If sentimentality leads us to overvalue a film… but by what criteria should a film be a graded a “masterpiece”? Not pity and respect? Ebert is famed for saying cinema is a machine for creating empathy, but surely sentimentality is a facet of that, too, for an audience? And surely sentimentality is an ingredient of the lives depicted? There is a hint of the condescending here. He goes on, “What I'm suggesting is that this movie should be viewed for its actual visual content, rather than for its noble pretensions.” I guess this is how I similarly ignore that garish sentimental half of a Spielberg film to enjoy the other half? Or, perhaps, the WWF mentality of ‘Predator’ to enjoy it as a monster movie? It seems to be that Ebert found the sentimentality of Oli’s film too saccharine, perhaps, but it didn’t strike me as such. My personal reaction is that the sentimentality of ‘The Tree of Wooden Clogs’ was not so garish that I felt myself rejecting it. Like its religious ethos, I felt it to be part of the fabric of these lives. By example: am I to believe the film is telling me that prayer can save a dying cow? I don’t go for this, but I can fully accept that the character believes this. And there are other reviewers contest its sentimentality. I am more in agreement with Kristi Matsuda: 

“Although Olmi, who also wrote, photographed, and edited the film, poeticizes some aspects of the peasant farming community—perhaps a hazard of filming in such pastoral parts—he presents a clear-eyed portrait of the farmers’ relationship to the land as one that’s practical rather than mystically earthy; in doing so he affords them an astonishing humanity.”

Olmi’s cinematography reminds me something of Polaroids, with contrast that seems both turned up and yet a little dulled on occassion. It is like that kind of look that I have a penchant for in Ozu’s colour films, where the establishing shots look like Polaroid snapshots. It’s a 16mm camera. The cast are non-professionals – but not that you would know or criticise, for such is their veracity – speaking in the Bergamasque dialect (the subtitles on the Arrow release only translate much instead of all that’s said; non-speakers are missing out). It’s the little details that hook: the boy frequently in the background leaving the farm for his long daily walk to school, for example. That’s the story.

For all of cinema’s heightened dramatics, a film like ‘The Tree of Wooden Clogs’ reminds that its recreation of ordinary lives is the equal of any fantasising, and equally as picturesque and wondrous. It is long but always compelling in its recreation of the forgotten lives of workers lost to history.

'Black Peter' and slice-of-life

Black Peter - Cerný Petr

Milos Corman

1964, black& white, Czechoslovakia

Writers: Milos Forman & Jaroslav Papousek

Loose-limbed New Wave slice-of-life, Czech style. It’s about nothing-and- everything: about a hapless 17year-old starting out in the world of work and romance, and none too successfully. This age of uncertainty is captured wonderfully, without judgement, and often funny. There are truthful organic details such as Peter/Petr (Ladislav Jakim) being ever-so-slightly more confident with his own age-group but just sitting and absorbing his parent’s concern and hectoring, browbeaten. Every time he is with them it seems like an interrogation: they aren’t mean, just overbearing and old-fashioned and not understanding of their son’s underdeveloped sense of confidence and ability.

There’s subtle political context in the way Peter’s first job is employed/trained in a store to spy and inform on shoplifters – with his boss’ spin of “we’re just trying to educate our customers to themselves” quickly dissipating – and how even the painting of the Madonna is watching them at home. The parents hector and lecture because, probably, they just feel it’s their job, not aware they are giving away their own discontent. They aren’t really inspiring aspiration. Aside from the political allegory, overbearing parents are something any teen could understand. But Peter isn’t intending to rebel, just trying to fit in or do what is expected. Even Peter’s acquaintance, the boorish Cenda (Vladimir Pucholt), isn’t quite the bully and rebel he initially might seem to be, but as equally awkward and embarrassing as he is pushy. Hey, he even comes to give Peter his money back. He’s the light relief.

The slice-of-life sub-genre is easily dismissed as inferior to something more strident and obviously trying to say something. Not that they don’t have a point and themes, but I am defining these as films that are led more by incident than narrative; less defined and marred by tragedy than accentuating the incidental the trivial. I seem to be thinking slice-of-life as the lighter side of neo-realism’s trend towards the downbeat. It’s about tone, editing, a feel an intention. So ‘Kes’ qualifies more as neo-realism but ‘We the Animals’ is slice-of-life, with its elliptical editing and dreaminess, even though they are both tragic.  But the modest agenda of something like ‘Black Peter’, or ‘We are the Best’, or a litany of other coming-of-age dramas that don’t hold with clamorous character “journeys” holds their own considerable power as reflections of daily life; of capturing moments between all the vivid dramatics. ‘Jim Jarmusch excels at this, perhaps the slightest of his slice-of-life being ‘Paterson’ (a favourite: it tells acres about daily artists; Jarmusch is less reliable when doing genre narrative). Or you have the likes of Linklater’s ‘Before’ Trilogy, or indeed his ‘Boyhood’. An example like ‘Les Centre Cents Coups’ is an example where the New Wave condenses that slice-of-life lightness with neo-realist tragedy.

There’s a lot of flash-and-dazzle in the New Wave, but in ‘Black Peter’ Forman only allows for one obvious trick: a freeze-frame that can’t help but nod to the aforementioned ‘The 400 Blows’, but for different intent: here, it stops Peter’s father’s lecturing in his tracks, as if saying make-way-for-something-new, or is-that-all-you-have? Certainly, Peter looks up expectantly.

Forman keeps the tone low-key and unaffected, but like the work of Yasujirô Ozu, the understatement allows for themes to bubble under and captures a mundane truth of daily life that something more bombastic can’t ease in to. For example: I never was a Czech teen starting work in the Sixties, but I certainly related to the slightly rudderless stumbling into adulthood that starts with Peter’s slightly difficult road crossing. For example, the prolonged aimlessness of the scene at the dance is a highlight, a delight in its capturing adolescent navigation of awkwardness and bravado and expectation. This slice-of-life genre captures the universality of experience, its randomness, despite the specifics, however strong our proclivity to impose narratives.