Ermanno Olmi
Born: Bergamo, Italy, 24 July 1931.
Unusual among Italian directors in being of working-class (originally peasant) origin, Olmi started his film career as a maker of in-house documentaries for the Edison Volta electric company of which he was an employee. After making documentaries in the 1950s he wrote and shot his first feature, Il tempo si è fermato / Time Stood Still, a delicate study of two men trapped in the mountains, in 1959. Still in the same documentary-influenced style he made Il posto / The Job (1961) and I fidanzati / The Engagement (1963), establishing himself as a sensitive and careful observer, not afraid to use a deliberately undramatic narrative rhythm. Another facet to his character – his Catholicism – emerged with E venne un uomo / A Man Named John (1965), a biopic of Pope John XXIII narrated by Rod Steiger. After a relatively fallow period in the mid-1970s he returned to prominence with L’albero degli zoccoli / The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a peasant family saga which won the Palme d’or at Cannes in 1978 and was widely interpreted as a Catholic and politcally right-of-centre (so by implication Christian-Democrat) response to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Marxist epic Novecento / 1900 (1976), though a more pointed contrast could be made between the full-blown rhetoric of Bertolucci and Olmi’s gentle understatement. In the 1980s Olmi obtained commissions mainly from Italy’s state-owned RAI television network and reverted to documentary, but a deal struck with RAI, the producer Mario Cecchi Gori and a French company enabled him to make a foray into international film with La leggenda del santo bevitore / The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1988), an adaptation of Joseph Roth’s novel, enlivened by a marvellous performance by Rutger Hauer as the eponymous drinker. A full-length documentary, Lungo il fiume / Down the River (1992), about the ecology of the Po valley, rich in pious sentiment but short on analysis, revealed his limitations as a filmmaker, but his early unpretentious films will secure his place in film history.
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