Ermanno Olmi: Praise To Simplicity

Published: 2008 - August/September, Culture, Current Affairs

Although overdue and eventually arrived is the Leone d’Oro to the Career of Ermanno Olmi, on the stage of the 65th International Film Festival of Venice. He, a bit distant, a bit solitary and absorbed in a magic that sinks its roots in the slowness of time, in nature and the eyes of the plain folks, has already imposed his conditions. The maestro has let it know that he wishes to receive the award from the hands of Adriano Celentano, the self-proclaimed “King of the Ignorants”. Even in this, the Bergamo’s own director has not failed his eternal affection for those who, in the world, become successful tiptoeing softly, without any proclamations and without the red carpet. And yet, Olmi has threaded many times that red carpet: that of the Casino at first and Palazzo del Cinema later. He is multi-awarded for his works of extraordinary introspection and depth of insights. An insight, that of the Lombardy born, but Veneto adopted director (for years he lives his ‘buen retiro’ good retirement, on the Plateau of Asiago), who has fine-combed the mood of the Italians as documentarists.
The director of “La leggenda del Santo bevitore”, drawn from the namesake novel by Joseph Roth (Leone d’Oro in 1988), of “Lunga vita alla signora” (Leone d’Argento in 1987) and the critic’s award in 1961 with “Il posto”, started his filming career as documentarist of history and customs. In cinematography schools, his documentaries on life in the fields and factories are studied. Works that have paved the way to “E venne un uomo”, (“And Then Came a Man”), of 1965 dedicated to the figure of Pope John XXIII (with the unforgettable Rod Steiger) his illustrious fellow countryman. Yet the two paths cross before the lenses of Olmi’s camera, an objective at times pitiless, which knows how to shoot without judging, telling the story starting from the bottom, from what is the humblest and most modest. Modesty, good morals, family values, the sense of the sacred and divine, dot the film career of Ermanno Olmi. The maestro has assimilated the neorealist lesson from Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, extracting a very personal style, which, in some ways, critics have assimilated it to the lean and hard cinema manifesto of Pier Paolo Pasolini. After all, the two directors knew each other and saw themselves in the poetry of the latter.
For Ermanno Olmi the look is fixed on the landscape, on the color of leaves and transformation of natural events into mysterious omens. It is a contemplating dreaming, where one reads in between the lines the farmer’s wisdom permeating, invading and fortifies even the more intellectual and rarefied lines of Olmi’s narration. An aspect found also in his latest evangelical and sublime masterpiece “Centochiodi.” Nature is always the boss, a silent witness and, if necessary, a patronizing choir, an eternal love for the cultivated forest, originating exactly from “il segreto del bosco vecchio”, (“The Secret of the Old Wood”), drawn from the novel of Dino Buzzati “Il taglio del bosco”, (“The Cutting of the Wood”). Some of Olmi’s films seem to bear intact the experience of full-length filming by commission, of direct testimonials brought on the screen. To comprehend the epic of a filmmaker who has never shed the clothes of the de-facto semiologist of feelings and changes dictated by the meteorology of emotions, one must know the Olmi of the “I Fidanzati” or other full-length films going back to the early Fifties.  
In fact, the director owes his beginnings to Edison Volta, where he organized filming by directing, between 1953 and 1961, about thirty documentaries, among which “La diga sul ghiacciaio” (1953), “Tre fili fino a Milano” (1958) and “Un metro è lungo cinque” (1961). Ermanno Olmi has the gift of discretion, measure, temperament, which says it all without overwhelming. It is an attention to the fellow man that radiates from his own words. “Today more than ever, everything influencing a character of violence, I see myself more and more as part of the ‘anonymous’, I intend to continue being ‘a’, voice in the general chatting. A voice that by tone and measure (fully aware of the limitations) stands not amongst the learned people who teach and propose solutions, but amongst the anonymous, who looks for an answer.” At a time when sensationalism combines with special effects and cinema loses its education role, the maestro from the Bergamo valleys, shakes public opinions with a statement that would have had his friend Pasolini smile. “Ordinariness attracts me. I believe more in the mystery of ordinariness, he has stated, than the holler of official speeches. What is authentic is never truly trivial.”