Ermanno Olmi
L'albero degli zoccoli

Palme d'Or at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, a masterpiece of Italian cinema, much loved abroad despite its strong, primarily linguistic, territorial connotation, due to its universal themes that still resonate with everyone today.

The Tree of Wooden Clogs,

an opus on the distance and closeness to a world of the past, from which Olmi and his family originated, but from which we all, in some way, originate. The world of the past looks at us and can always teach us something profound and spiritual, beyond the strictly religious concept. The religious aspect is always, however, important in Olmi's poetic. Catholic by training, "aspiring Christian" by self-definition.

Where Fellini, with Amarcord, showed us his memories of the fascist era, distorted in the fog of Time and dreams, with the unique ability of the master from Rimini to render everything true through falsity and distortion, what is shown, reconstructed, ultimately represented with the utmost possible realism in The Tree of Wooden Clogs, starting from the use of non-professional actors chosen directly from the rural world of Bergamo, is the peasant world that stood on the awareness of an immutable condition in difficulties, poverty, the sense of community, and the values of the timeless world. Before any form of social, political, or economic progress. Although some small seeds began to sprout in the form of small town rallies.

These are the words, in this regard, with which Gilles Jacob, an important French critic, awarded Olmi's film in '78 with the Palme d'Or at Cannes, of which he was the director.

"Here Olmi is much more than a director: he is a true author. The themes of this author are family values, love for one's loved ones and roots, a return to the earth. I was immediately seduced by The Tree of Wooden Clogs, by its mixture of angelic sweetness and real life."

With these words, instead, Olmi himself speaks of the central episode of the miraculous healing of the cow within his work:

"The healing of the cow is an episode that happened to my grandmother, when, after the First World War, she was widowed with children, and this cow in desperate conditions prompted her to go to the countryside church, where a small river originally passed. So, the water that passed under the little church was blessed water, and she took a flask of it. I remember she said: 'I absolutely wanted that grace. The Father Almighty could not abandon me.' The faith of these people was so granite-like, that it triggered a very fair and aware attitude because, in a relationship of love, there can be no winner or loser, one above the other. In love, there are rights and duties, so my grandmother, in her love relationship with the Lord, asserted her rights. I find that a rightful attitude. In today's faith, such tensions, such passions are rare, and yet there is a need to believe in the Almighty or in oneself and say 'I demand from you.' Unfortunately, there is a noticeable cooling in faith in today's society, not only the traditional one but also in faith in man, in nature, in life."

Olmi also speaks in this way about a very important aspect, conceptually, in his cinema, that of mystery:

"The mystery represents the space in which our imagination, our capacity to imagine finally exercises the faculty of freedom. In the immanent, freedom always has connotations that contradict it. God himself at the moment of performing the act of creation renounced a part of his freedom. The mystery is that space, neither qualifiable nor quantifiable, that allows man to perform, through almost total freedom, his creative act."

Like the famous film by Fellini, and also Bertolucci’s Novecento, this one by Olmi is a journey back into our history, through which to reflect on what remains and what has inevitably been lost in the sands of Time. On who we are and who we were. And on who our fathers and grandfathers were.

And a film, as Jacob pointed out, on the millennial sacredness and centrality of the Earth, a theme that will return, in more fantastic forms, in The Secret of the Old Woods, with a memorable Paolo Villaggio.

A film of great and extraordinary humanity, not lacking in potent moments, undoubtedly an important experience to live. Visually and sensorily (where the evocative soundtrack with pieces by Bach and Mozart, and the splendid photography, done by Olmi himself - the complete author of his most personal and representative work - do not fear comparison with those of Tarkovsky’s works). But also on a more intimate level.

To be seen in the Bergamo dialect version (completely understandable and familiar, in reality, for any Lombard), to fully grasp its authenticity and the value of roots.

And, without intentionally pressing on the rhetoric given by this particular historical moment (recently it was broadcasted on TV as a tribute to the city of Bergamo), seeing The Tree of Wooden Clogs today can offer something even more.