Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Tree of Wooden Clogs
1978 · Ermanno Olmi · The Tree of Wooden Clogs on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch a full task done start to finish: butchering, plucking, making polenta. (staging)
Olmi shows each process at its actual length and correctly, nothing skipped, so labor becomes the film's actual content rather than its background.
Payoff: You are watching real competence, not a montage standing in for it. In the reading: Dead time (temps mort). Deleuze calls these unhurried, unresolved stretches dead time, moments the film holds open instead of cutting past.
Watch how far back and level the camera stays from the work. (camera)
Olmi shoots from a plain, frontal, middle distance, giving figures room and never looking down on them from above.
Payoff: The camera never turns poverty into a picturesque view of someone else's hardship.
Listen for Bach's organ arriving sparingly over scenes of daily labor. (sound)
Formally sophisticated liturgical music is laid, without underlining, over the lives of people who own nothing.
Payoff: The music refuses to turn these lives into folklore, which is a kind of respect.
Notice the film crosscut between four households with none singled out. (structure)
The old man's tomatoes, the widow's struggle, the miser's coin, and the boy's schooling all accumulate at exactly the same rate.
Payoff: Deciding whose story matters most is a choice the film refuses to make for you.
Watch how little the performers seem to be performing at all. (performance)
The entire cast is non-professional, people who already possess the physical competence their roles require rather than actors imitating it.
Payoff: Grief in this film looks like continuing to work, not like a performed emotion. In the reading: Cinema of the body (attitudes & postures). Deleuze calls this a cinema of the body, meaning carried in posture and gesture rather than in a face announcing feeling.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch a task get done from start to finish. The film trusts labor itself to carry the story.