The movie is a portrait of peasant life in late-19th-century Lombardy, rendered with a sublime understatement, humanism, and lyricism that recaptures the best of Italian neorealism.
Date/Time: Apr 15 2017, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Vancouver, The Cinematheque
Ermanno Olmi’s masterpiece L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs, 1978, 186 min.) has recently been restored and it will be screened at the Cinematheque (1131 Howe Street, Vancouver) for four days on April 14, 15 and 17 at 7:00pm, and April 16 at 3:00pm. Made with an ensemble cast of non-professionals, and with an exquisite appreciation for the everyday, this movie is a contemplative, unhurried, deeply spiritual work that follows several peasant families through the quotidian rituals of rural life and the changing of the seasons. The injustices they suffer under their landlords, culminating in a heartbreaking incident involving the tree of the title, provide the film with its dramatic centre.
“A cinematic miracle ... To see it is to be stirred to the depths of one’s soul.”
ANDREW SARRIS, VILLAGE VOICE
NEW RESTORATION | Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1978, Ermanno Olmi’s elegiac portrait of peasant life in late-19th-century Lombardy is rendered with a sublime understatement, humanism, and lyricism that recaptures the best of Italian neorealism. Made with an ensemble cast of non-professionals, and with an exquisite appreciation for the everyday, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a contemplative, unhurried, deeply spiritual work that follows several peasant families through the quotidian rituals of rural life and the changing of the seasons. The injustices they suffer under their landlords, culminating in a heartbreaking incident involving the tree of the title, provide the film with its dramatic centre. Olmi — who wrote, directed, shot, and edited — intended this moving, intimate-yet-epic pastoral as a paean to the peasant roots of Italian civilization (and, perhaps, as an answer to the baroque bombast of Bertolucci’s 1900).
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