The Tree of Wooden Clogs · reception & legacy
1978 · Ermanno Olmi
How The Tree of Wooden Clogs has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It won the Palme d'Or in 1978 and was hailed instantly, though some left-leaning Italian critics grumbled that its peasants were too pious and patient — the anti-1900, basically. The 4K restoration and Criterion release settled the matter: it's now firmly canonised as one of the great humanist epics.
What's debated
The eternal split: is three hours of farm chores, prayers and seasons a transcendent act of attention or a beautiful endurance test — and was Olmi's devout, patient view of peasant life a corrective to Bertolucci's 1900 or a cop-out?
Its footprint
It's the touchstone people reach for whenever a new slow, rural, non-professional-cast epic appears — every review of films like Le Quattro Volte or Happy as Lazzaro seems contractually obliged to mention it.
Where it stands
A 'quiet masterpiece' with a fierce following — a slow-cinema rite of passage that Letterboxd devotees treat as a you-haven't-really-watched-movies-until credential.