Customer Reviews

The Tree of Wooden Clogs

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I saw this movie 1979 when I was fourteen back in the small mountain village where I grew up near the Swiss-Italian border. I have seen many movies since, came to live and love a new country and people, yet L'Albero degli Zoccoli remains my favorite. In a world of x-boxes, consumer spending indices and ADD, it is sobering to sit down once in a while and learn about other cultures; you may as well transplant this story in any corner of the world as it holds true across cultures and continents.
Thomas Schaer, Veterinarian & Organic Farmer

This moving film follows a year in the lives of four Italian tenant-farming families in the late nineteenth century.

Although it is a drama, the film has a strong documentary or ethnographic flavor, portraying the lives of the families, the seasons, the farm animals, country and town, courtship and marriage, and above all faith. The four families live in the same compound, and the plot revolves around events within the compound and the village -- enrolling a boy at school, the sickness of a family's cow, boy meets girl, an adoption, planting tomatoes, the illegal felling of a tree, the difficult circumstances of a widow, and an eviction.

Director Ermanno Olmi drew the members of the cast from Lombardy farm families. The effect of the localized events and the non-professional cast is to pull the viewer into the world of these families in a way few films do. The length of the film and its "slow" pace have a parallel effect -- to draw the viewer out of the fast pace of our modern life back into a time when lives moved to different and slower rhythms.

Many will wince, as I did, at the scene when a large hog is slaughtered. The pork that comes to us in wrapped supermarket packages distances us from the reality of farms and animals, and the film makes us confront it. (All of our great-grandparents knew the reality, and they might be surprised by how the scene discomforts their own descendants.) The scene shows Olmi's evenhandedness. Nostalgia for the past is balanced with a clear look at its hardships and cruelties.

The film's large theme is to show how the lives of these ordinary people were inseparable from their Catholic faith, evident in their prayers, conversations, and responses to their homely crises. The film then subtly portrays how modernity begins to intrude on that thick web of faith and life. The film gives viewers who are interested in social transformation a great deal to discuss.

-- In the film the landlord subtly represents the modern (and impersonal) economic order of markets. Do markets liberate, or oppress? With any economic change, who wins and who loses?

-- Another transformation will be literacy. The major crisis in the plot stems from a boy's walk to school each day.

-- In another generation, the world of these families will be transformed by nationalism and war, alluded to in the film by local orators, by the passing of cavalry through the town, and arrests of agitators. Many other "-isms" will darken the skies.

-- The families live in an age before birth control and family planning, and one can sense the economic difficulties that come with more children. Yet they consider themselves blessed, not burdened.

The four families, then, live in a world not yet modern and still in many ways unjust. As time pulls them into a modern interconnected world of nations, not families and villages, what will they have gained? And what will they have lost?

On the 100th anniversary of cinema in 1995, the Vatican included "Tree of Wooden Clogs" on its list of noteworthy films. It is a mature artistic treatment of rural and family life informed by Catholic meditations on social justice.

The four families' world of faith is Catholic in an older way. With its Hail Marys and Rosaries, its portrayal may initially jar modern Catholics, viewers of other faiths, or non-believers. To all viewers I say "see it through." It is an affectionate portrayal of rural Italy at the end of the nineteenth century, to be sure, but patient viewing and discussion of the film can yield something more -- a view of the role of faith in a society.

Start the discussion with something Will Durant wrote about the commandments and those who follow them: "Through these commands they are made part of a divine drama, and their harrassed lives take on a scope and dignity that cannot be canceled out by death."

-30-

I bought this video after the death of my father who was born into a very poor family in northeastern Italy. Watching it was a poignant experience. The hardships of peasant life at the turn of the century are realistically portrayed. Also portrayed are the strong bonds of faith and love that unite a family whatever hardships life may bring. One of the story strands follows a pair of young sweethearts who have become parents in an unusual way by the end of the film. It is enchanting. All in all a moving true to life film that brought tears and smiles as it evoked the memory of the stories Papa told us. American audiences may be impatient with length and slow pace of this film, but it is well worth the time spent.

Yes it is slow, but so was our heritage, not as Italians, but as human beings. It needs to be slow to develop the story of why sharecroppers left families for America, the faith that they were raised with, how interwoven it was in their lives, and how a child is and has been everything to a parent. Not for the testorone driven Arnold mindless, but was one of the best movie going experiences I have ever seen. I love looking at a movie, walking out hours later, and feel as if I really learned something about the people, a place, and the time that they lived in. This movie was breath taking. Yes it is slow, you have to earn it, but breath taking nevertheless.

If you've ever enjoyed hearing stories from Grandpa of his youth in the "old country", you will love this film. The word "movie" doesn't fit because it's as if you're observing first-hand the lives of these turn-of-the-century peasants, upclose and personal, rather than being entertained or thrilled.
So very realistic!!! Just as if you had stepped back in time.
Fascinating.

Exceptionally moving. Demonstrates that 'modesty' can communicate far, far more powerfully than most of those 'big' ambitious narratives do. 'Tree...' shares meanings by sensitively observing small things. Deserves to be far better known. Incidentally, Olmi (the director) has a superb talent for using the right music in the right places. 'The Legend of the Holy Drinker' (Olmi's film-adaptation from a story by Joseph Roth) is another superb example of the way in which music can (in Olmi's hands) tease out the most subtle of moods.

The great glory of this film is its ability to make us feel both relief and longing - relief at the material hardships we have escaped by embracing the technological advances of modernity, and longing for all the spiritual treasures we have lost or damaged in the process: faith, solidarity, tradition, love, restraint and, yes, even dignity.

This is not a typical film, even for European standards. Of course it's not a documentary either. So what is it? It's more a document than a documentary, because there seems to be no point of view, no story-teller. We are just there, seeing whatever is going on.

First of all, it is very long: three hours. It is filmed in rather long and slow-pace scenes.

Second: These are real folks, living their peasant lives in northern Italy, doing their daily chores with no tv noise in the background and all the dirt and realism you can expect to find if you were to live in an Albanian farm today.

Third: the classic music played for this film has been very wisely and appropriately chosen.

Fourth: The most important thing in this film are the faces of the people, worth the three hours, if only for that. Authenticity is hard to find.

I find this work very interesting, specially because most of us can see in these people our own ancestors, maybe to the time of my grandparents' youth in Spain (so much like northern Italy). But beyond the luck, or craftiness, of catching real folks doing their thing in situ, and catching it well enough, I don't see any "mastery of movement, color and imagery", bla, bla. And it won the Grand prize at Cannes Film Festival. Which, well thought, it is not surprising, since they always reward weirdness and extravagance under the label of originality. In my opinion the director, Ermanno Olmi, isn't any Orson Welles, but his good intentions got him a reward.

Nothing to say about the lives depicted here. We are only to watch and respect them. Whatever we may think of them, it will probably say more of us than of them.

As an award-winning Italian film, 'Tree of Wooden Clogs' examines a cross-section of four Italian peasant families during the turn-of-the-century. For nearly three hours we get the full deliberations of people who marry, work the land, and deal with their meager existence. Despite the adversity, they summon peaceful resolve with their Catholic faith while the winds of revolution blow around them with an agitation that garners nothing but their indifference.

The heart of the plot revolves around Batisti (Luigi Ornaghi) a family man whose wife brings forth another son. Bearing a fragile existence, Batisti cuts down a landlord's tree to replace another son's broken wooden clog. For side plots, one elderly man finds a coin on the ground during a holiday festival and hides it inside a neighbor's horse's hoof, while a newly married couple travels to Milan to celebrate their honeymoon in a convent.

For those who liked 'Into Great Silence (Two-Disc Set)' this movie classic will be comparatively moving. Almost identical in movie time, the deliberate pace is less slow, but equally beautiful to watch.

The tree of Wooden Clogs is an interesting film, which shows peasant life from the upper Po River Valley just before the end of the 19th Century. The 3 hour film tends to be a bit slow by today's expectations, but it graphically depicts life for the sharecropper family, and shows how life was at the mercy of the landlord. The filmmaker graphicly shows the slaughtering of several animals, so be prepared for this. Overall, I liked the film for its anthropological virtues.