|
Handcrafted
Cinema by Kent Jones
One
of the most unusual features of Italian cinema of the late ‘50s
and ‘60s is the way that it affords us multiple perspectives
on the same event, namely the economic boom following the postwar
recovery. Where the directors of the French New Wave each created
his or her own unique poetic universe, Italian cinema of the
same period feels like a series of moons circling around one
planet. Again and again, one encounters the same sociological
material, filtered through Michelangelo Antonioni’s elegant
precision, Luchino Visconti’s luxurious emotionalism, Dino Risi’s
exuberance, or Valerio Zurlini’s sobriety. Again and again,
one sees the construction sites, the quick-stop cafes, and the
cramped apartments owned by nosy landladies that were constants
of postwar Italian society. Most strikingly of all, these movies
feature a parade of young men outfitted in regulation white-collar
attire, betraying their essential inexperience. They are ill
equipped for a life of work and responsibility in a mechanized,
high-efficiency world, and lonesome for the nurturing comforts
of home.
Of
all the great filmmakers who visited this terrain, none responded
more soulfully than Ermanno Olmi, whose second feature, the
1961 Il Posto, ushered something new into world cinema:
a sense of intimacy between director and characters that surpassed
anything in the neorealist canon. In the intervening years,
Il Posto has had a profound effect on directors as
diverse as Wu Nien-jen, Abbas Kiaostami, and Martin Scorsese
(there is more than one visual quote from Olmi’s movie in Raging
Bull). If it has not achieved the same legendary status
as L’Avventura, Rocco and His Brothers, or La Dolce
Vita, it’s probably because of, rather than in spite of,
its intimacy. Olmi has almost always filmed people on the lower
end of the economic ladder, leading unspectacular lives, and
he treats the details of these lives with the care that a Quattrocento
master would have lavished on an episode in the life of Christ.
Consequently, his great films (Il Posto, I Fidanzati, The
Tree of Wooden Clogs, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, the
first half of Genesis) lack the romantic or aesthetic
luster of the aforementioned classics. Moreover, they also appear
to lack the kind of charismatic sweep we’ve come to associate
with grand artistic visions: in the work of an Antonioni, a
Visconti, a Federico Fellini, the artist’s sensibility acts
as a kind of umbrella over the characters and the action. By
contrast, Olmi, like Robert Bresson, works on a smaller canvas,
and his passionate humanism informs his art, Olmi’s films feel
like one-to-one exchanges with real people—you have the impression
that he is walking hand in hand with each of his characters.
“The sensation is that these choices of mine are not only mine
but that others have them too,” Olmi once told Ellen Oumano.
“I really don’t feel exclusive… My ambition instead, perhaps
because of my peasant-worker background, is to look at the world
with others, not as an aristocratic intellectual.”
To
say that Olmi identifies with Domenico, the young hero of Il
Posto on the verge of a “job for life,” is to put it mildly.
The pull of his narrative is fitted to Domenico’s inner turmoil,
his curiosity and his romantic longing, like two pieces of wood
joined by an expert carpenter. Even the lovely section in which
the story veers off course to examine the private lives of Domenico’s
future office mates (there are oddly similar tangents in Jacques
Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us and Jean-Luc Godard’s
Band of Outsiders, made around the same time) feels
like an illumination of Domenico’s own perceptions: these hushed
vignettes represent the lay of the adult land, as well as a
set of possible futures. And Olmi’s mise-en-scene
is just as finely tuned to Domenico’s wavelength— Il Posto’s
black-and-white cinematography is as gorgeous as anything in
8 1/2 or L’Avventura, but where Fellini and
Antonioni harmonize shapes, shadows, and graceful movements
into an abstract whole, Olmi is devoted to simply defining his
characters in space, giving Domenico and his coworkers a lovely
sense of line and volume; and his delicately attentive soundtracks
are as carefully built as Bresson’s but less rhythmic and percussive,
the many stretches of quiet prompting a meditative state shared
by director, protagonist, and audience.
Il
Posto is probably
Olmi’s most autobiographical film. Like Domenico, he clerked
in a Milanese company for over ten years. Gavin Millar, in his
perceptive entry on the director in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary,
surmises that Olmi must have been making his first documentaries
for Edisonvolta during the same period, and this accounts for
an interesting subtext in Il Posto, something unique
to the tone and feel of this one among all Olmi’s films. Most
of Olmi is work-oriented in one way or another (The Legend
of the Holy Drinker being a notable and touching exception).
All of his films are “documentary-based” in the sense that the
narratives are structured around unspectacular dilemmas reflecting
ordinary lives. They are all shot in real locations, and almost
all of them feature non-actors (some notable exceptions: Rod
Steiger as Pope John in Olmi’s one real failure, A Man Called
John; Padre Padrone’s Omero Antonutti as Noah
in Genesis; and an unexpectedly moving Rutger Hauer
in the aforementioned Holy Drinker, which is also one
of the director’s rare literary adaptations). Olmi’s heroes
are always poised between a lifelike, human solitude and membership
in some kind of community, be it family, village, or office.
Similarly, from Time Stood Still onwards, he has consistently
focused on elemental situations positioned between “the charm
of apprenticeship and the sadness of retirement,” as Millar
put it so well, in which everyday concerns are held up against
a long view of the not-too-distant future.
What
makes Il Posto so singular in Olmi’s oeuvre is the
rare intelligence of its hero, played by Sandro Panseri. “The
characters of Olmi’s films themselves pay great attention to
gestures,” writes Millar, “and seem to rely on other people’s
gestures rather than their words as a more trustworthy guide
to their behavior.” This is never truer than in Il Posto
. While Panseri’s Domenico is halting, generally respectful
(except to his mother and brother), and shyly recessive (always
pausing to gather his courage before he speaks, his sentences
generally losing steam and winding down into quiet), he is at
all times attentive to whatever is going on around him, stealing
glances at everyone and everything, privately sizing up this
strange world of work into which he has stepped. There are no
grand speeches in which he is allowed to deliver his opinion
of his coworkers or his feelings about the nature of existence.
But his silent, thoughtful size-ups run throughout the film
and imbue it with a sense of quiet uplift. In the end, as Domenico
is filling a position created by the recent demise of an accountant,
he is delivered into a potentially Kafkaesque future, but one
has the sense that his questing temperament will eventually
(perhaps ten years later?) lead him in another direction.
Too
much of film criticism is devoted to the easily quantifiable:
camera angles, plot points, the relative “correctness” of details.
Il Posto is a film handcrafted from the most subtly
elusive things in life: the precise way Domenico maintains a
safely respectful distance and loses a chance to make headway
with the beautiful Antonietta (Loredana Detto), whose presence
offers a dramatic contrast to the numbing atmosphere of the
office; the strange sensation of standing in a room filled with
rival job candidates before undergoing the collective indignity
of a “psychological test” (administered by Olmi’s close friend
and sometime cowriter, critic Tullio Kezich); the awkward feeling
of waiting for the dancehall to fill up for a big New Year’s
Eve party. And at the heart of this miraculous movie, made up
of precious and carefully gathered fragments of experience,
is an abiding feeling that for Olmi, everybody is a hero.
Kent
Jones is Film Comment’s
Editor-at-Large and a frequent contributor to the magazine,
as well as to many other publications around the world. He is
also coauthor of Martin Scorsese’s documentary Il Mio Viaggio
in Italia.
|
