Details
Movie Description
Dramatizing a year in the life of northern Italian peasants at the turn of the century, Ermanno Olmi's THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS pays loving tribute to both the neo-realist style of filmmaking and a rural way of life that no longer exists. Hoping to create a better life for themselves, a poor family decide to send their young son to school despite the crushing sacrifice involved. When the boy's wooden clogs break on the long journey home, the seemingly minor incident sets into motion a series of tragedies that reverberate throughout the peasants' lives. Olmi's slice-of-life film--which he wrote, directed, shot, and edited--uses this central story as a launchpad to document, in moving detail, rural life under oppressive poverty. As the camera lingers patiently over women handwashing laundry on the banks of a river or farmers preparing a pig for slaughter, the quasi-documentary images transform these mundane tasks of peasant life into an almost sacramental epic of grace and beauty.
Film Notes
DVD Features:
Region [unknown]
Keep Case
Full Frame - 1.33
Audio:
Dolby Digital 5.1 - Italian
Dolby Surround - Italian
Additional Release Material:
Trailer
Interactive Features:
Scene Access
Interactive Menus
Industry Reviews
Included in the New York Times's "10 BEST FILMS OF 1979"
New York Times - p.II:1 - Vincent Canby (12/30/1979)
"...It may well be a masterpiece....A profoundly serious film that stands outside time and fashion."
New York Times - Vincent Canby (06/01/1979)
"...A slow, lovely, three-hour Ermanno Olmi movie about Italian peasants..."
USA Today - Mike Clark (11/30/1990)
"...The non-professional cast gave veracity to scenes of hardship and enterprise during the course of a year, with a particularly moving performance from Luigi Ornaghi..."
Sight and Sound - Lucy Neville (05/01/2002)
4 stars out of 5 -- "Ermanno Olmi teases irresistible turns from the non-professional cast and sifts through a world astonishingly rich with detail and beauty."
Total Film - Jonathan Crocker (11/01/2007)
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
All rights reserved.
