Ermanno Olmi
Cento Chiodi

A clarification is necessary, this "Cento Chiodi" has already received two reviews on DeBaser and an overwhelming multitude of critiques, exegeses, explanations, in many other sites, containers, and newspapers: was it really necessary to write about it once more? I don't know, you decide. What I care about is clarifying once again, beyond the artistic merits of the film, those of content, its message. The message of a Christian director, to his people and to the structure, with its rites and rigidities, in which Christianity has incarnated. I therefore apologize to Poetarainer and Sabatino, who have illustrated two very different subjective views of the same work, hoping to add something.

"Entering the cramped little room, we count 10 or 11 people, but after all, we'll understand soon enough, this Olmi film - apart from Raz Degan's name - doesn't seem to have anything to offer today's audience, it even seems an anachronistic and ahistorical film. "Cento Chiodi" is a shock of beauty, sublime in its ethical and aesthetic representation. It can also be interpreted as a sign in response to the famous Dostoevskyian prophecy - beauty will save us! - which seems to come true in works of art like this that know how to unite intellect and feeling. One cannot help but be shocked in front of the clarity and purity of this feature film, it may be objected to its form, moreover governed by a magnificently directed photography, but its contents cannot be disputed. Olmi, in his last fiction work, as he himself announced, seems to want to synthesize the entire message of his professional life, spent on the side of the weaker, the different, the marginalized, seems to want to clarify his principles to the world and does so with a cry of unrestrainable passion.

The parable is simple and adopts the same linear yet deeply disturbing tone of the Gospels. A philosopher of religions - an intense Raz Degan - nails 100 ancient books contained in a precious faculty library. This "scandalous" story opens with a breathtaking scene, a scene that will remain impressed in the memory: disturbing, critical. "Every spirituality" recites Raz Degan at the beginning of the film, quoting Jaspers, "turns into profit and the joy of living is as false as the art that expresses it". The film doesn't tell us, but we know that the time in which the anonymous professor, protagonist of the film, lives his solitary intellectual crisis, is the present of a deep social crisis marked by widespread distrust of man towards civil and religious institutions, with a church that appears to be on the defensive. It is from this present that the protagonist flees, renouncing the system of rules and knowledge on which it is founded. If Montalbán had his Carvalho burn his library ("One day you'll thank me for having read one less book", he says to his young friend), Olmi prefers to nail the books, just as they, the books, symbol of the established order, two thousand years ago nailed the subversion of Jesus. "Books have not saved the world, just as religions have not saved it [..] there is more truth in a caress than in the pages of these books" Degan says to an Indian student shortly before leaving.

The professor's escape leads him to find his locus amoenus along the shores of the Po. "As in all bucolic escapes, what matters is not the realism of this dimension, but the candor and purity of the poetry that the author manages to enclose there." suggests Paolo Caroli from the lines of the Adige. The river thus becomes the river of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, that of John Ford in the film "In the Name of God", a poetic subject, but capable, in its transcendence, of teaching something, the Truth of Nature, which is Absolute Truth. Olmi uses a suggestive language of considerable expressive force, which is realized through the shots of landscapes, people, slight movements, in the care of sounds, as rarely happens in works dominated by a content message. Here, the message is present, and it is all too clear, but it expresses itself at its best moments in a reflective, indirect way, entrusted primarily to the environment and its voices. Those peasant faces, those simple phrases, those dances in the farmyards, that "last supper" which has such figurative power, as to not even need words, dialogues (which, in fact, sometimes appear as superfluous intarsia in the economy of the work).

Slowly, engaged in the reconstruction of an old ruin in an anonymous location along the river, he meets the locals and integrates into the life of an elderly circle threatened with eviction, a place that continues, despite the continuous warnings, to be a place of infinite humanity and encounter. Degan will find, here, in this group of simple people, his modern "apostles," he will help them face the most difficult situations, the abuses of the institutions, the bulldozers sent by institutions, and will end up being recognized and imprisoned, condemned by those same institutions he was fighting, as a criminal, as unjust. The story, in short, as we all know it.

The plot, I repeat, is simple, not without defects, but it is the richness of meanings, accompanied by the brilliance of the signifiers, the beating heart of this film. A film that at a time of strong friction for the ecclesiastical hierarchy, brings life back to those simple values that should characterize it. It brings Christianity - "which is not a religion, rather it is liberation from ties, from any bond" quoting Don Giorgio De Capitani - to its most sincere dimension. Olmi's Christ is the radical Christ, the one of the outlaws, the rejected, the Christ of the first Christians, a Christ that strikes against institutions when they suffocate man in a swamp of harassment and cynicism, that rejects and fights Power with the courage of a revolutionary gesture. The radical Christ is the one not tethered in the church-structure, the one beyond the hierarchies, the one that burns in the heart of the prophets, according to Olmi, the only flame that can burn this decadent society and bring light to a new future. It is a Christ that finds a breath of life, its human dimension, a Christ, Olmi seems to say to the hierarchs, capable of gathering attention and hearts around itself. A Christ outside the rite, which is death, inside the flesh, which is life, which reaffirms man as the fundamental soul of God's design, as an entity of almost infinite possibilities.

Critique has been divided in front of this film, as always happens with strong ideas. As far as we're concerned, it is in front of a splendid work that before being thrown to sterile critiques, should be comprehended thoroughly, considering our difficult historical moment in which values waver, simply thanked: a thanks to a director of depth and the small great prophecy he reaffirms. It doesn't matter if the finger is thin, stubby, small, or expressionless, never like in this case, it is necessary to look at the moon, go beyond. How many false Christians will have been indignant in front of the last scene's dialogue, when Degan tells the old cardinal, his first master: "God will have to account for all of human suffering .." Who knows how many armchair intellectuals will have been indignant seeing all those books crucified and vilified that "are not worth a coffee with a friend". Yet this indignation is the defense shield of those who do not want to see reality, of those who are not willing to fully immerse themselves in the message of this contemporary parable.

The book is not offended and debased in its nature - so much so that throughout the film there are multiple direct quotes from the Gospels - it is offended as an instrument at the service of power, as a dead page, as a good simulacrum for every master, for having transformed the incarnate Christ into the christ-idol of altars, standards, ideologies, into a Christ distant from the people and from his first radical prophecy.