The Tree of Wooden Clogs · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A clog breaks on the road. The boy, Minek, walks six kilometres to school and six kilometres back, and one day the wooden sole splits. His father cuts down a poplar on the landlord's land and carves him a new one. For that, the family is put off the farm.

That is the plot of a three-hour film. The rest is a year on a Bergamo cascina: sowing, harvest, a pig killed, a goose plucked, polenta made, cornhusks stripped by lamplight while somebody tells a story. Olmi wrote it, shot it and cut it himself, cast it entirely with peasants and labourers from the region, and had them speak Bergamasque, which Italian audiences needed subtitles to follow.

Most movies run on a circuit. Someone perceives a situation, acts on it, the situation resolves; the cutting exists to keep that chain moving. Gilles Deleuze called this the movement-image, and it is the engine of nearly all commercial cinema. Olmi's film hardly touches it. No protagonist. No villain you could point at. It is not formless, though, and that is the interesting problem: if the film isn't organised by action, what is it organised by?

Watch the pig. Olmi shows the killing, and the plucking of a goose, and the making of polenta, at their own length, correctly, start to finish. This is not texture and it is not authentication. It is the film's grammar. Deleuze's word for these stretches is dead time — temps mort, passages where nothing advances a story and the everyday is simply held open. In most films dead time is what gets cut. Here it is what the film is made of, and Olmi's editing follows one rule: hold the shot until the action inside it is genuinely finished, then move on without ceremony. He learned that from Zavattini and De Sica. Umberto D. had already filmed a maid waking, grinding coffee, wetting the floor with her foot, none of it elided, establishing the principle that a labour procedure filmed at its own length is enough. Bazin thought that principle brought cinema closer to reality than anything before it. Deleuze pushed further: once action stops organising a film, time stops being the measure of movement and becomes the thing you are actually watching.

Now the light. Every critic reaches for painting here, and rightly — the Le Nain brothers, Millet, Dutch interiors, the lamplit chiaroscuro associated with Georges de La Tour. Olmi shot in available light on fast stock, hearths and oil lamps and the grey diffuse daylight of the Po valley, the image grainy and pulled toward mud, ash and tallow. But notice what he refuses to borrow. A painting can only give you what Deleuze, following Bergson, calls the privileged instant: the posed, summarising moment, the gesture at its most legible. Cinema's real novelty was the any-instant-whatever, motion sampled continuously, every instant as good as any other and none of them the point. Olmi lights like de La Tour and cuts like a man with no interest whatsoever in climaxes. That combination is his invention. The dignity comes from the light. The truthfulness comes from the refusal to pose.

The people in that light are not acting. They are not performing manual competence, they have it, and Olmi's zoom works as a slow instrument of attention rather than emphasis, tightening onto a pair of hands or widening to disclose how many others are in the room. Deleuze called this a cinema of the body: a film carrying its meaning in attitudes and postures rather than in faces announcing an interior. Nobody projects here. Grief looks like continuing to work.

Structurally, Olmi braids four households and refuses to rank them. The old man growing early tomatoes, the widow fighting to keep her children, the miser and his lost coin, the boy sent to school — all of it accumulates at exactly the same rate. Deleuze's term for a set of weakly linked characters with no centre is a dispersive situation, and it usually marks a cinema that has lost faith in the single fate. Olmi turns it into an argument. Deciding whose story is the main one is already a political act, and he declines to make it. No thread here is a subplot.

Which brings us to the padrone, and to the film's real formal discovery. He owns the buildings, the land, the animals, two-thirds of everything grown. He is barely on screen. Power arrives as a piano drifting over from the villa, as an accounting of thirds, as an overseer's report. Deleuze separates two kinds of out-of-field: the relative, which is just the next room over, and the absolute out-of-field, a presence beyond the frame that cannot be located anywhere in space at all. The villa is relative. Whatever makes a single poplar into property, so that cutting it to shoe a child counts as theft, is absolute. It has no address. Olmi found that you film a system most exactly by not filming it, and this is precisely what the Italian left could not forgive: no villain, no thesis, no confrontation. The charge deserves a hearing rather than a smoothing-over. But there's a reason the eviction lands like weather instead of melodrama, and weather is what a structure feels like from underneath.

History does appear once. The newlyweds take a barge to Milan and see soldiers, a crowd dispersed, men marched away, and they do not understand what they are looking at and are not invited to. Deleuze's name for this is a pure optical situation, an opsign: an image a character can only look at, because no action is available to them. The socialist agitation of 1890s Lombardy is right there at the edge of a honeymoon, unreadable.

And then the shutters. When the family is expelled, the others watch in silence from behind their windows. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that exposes a social relation without stating it a gest. That one exposes everything. People who have shared fire, food, stories and labour all year turn out not to share action.

Is that quietism? Deleuze offers a better frame than the 1978 quarrel allowed. Modern political cinema, he argues, begins from the fact that the people are missing — not yet constituted, not available to be represented, which is why the political has to pass through an absence rather than through a rousing collective. His answer to that absence is fabulation: people caught in the act of telling themselves into existence. Olmi's cast are the descendants of the people the film remembers, speaking their own language, in stories that came down through his own family. A country that had gone urban and stopped speaking these dialects inside a single generation was handed them back.

The debts are exact. La terra trema gave him dialect, non-professionals, and a landlord who governs the story while hardly appearing in it. Farrebique gave him the agricultural calendar as architecture. The Naked Island proved that repeated labour can serve as a film's syntax with music carrying the affect, which is what Bach's organ does here, used sparingly and without underlining, music of enormous formal sophistication laid over people who own nothing so that peasant life never turns folkloric. His own Il tempo si è fermato and Il posto were the apprenticeship that made the cascina possible. Forward, the line is unbroken: Frammartino's Le quattro volte takes the attentiveness nearly to wordlessness, and Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro rhymes the mezzadria directly, with a fabulism Olmi never permitted himself.

What it did to the art is simple to state and hard to do. It demonstrated that duration is a form of respect, and that a film can look at extreme poverty for three hours without aestheticising it, patronising it, or converting it into an argument. Watch it once for the year. Watch it again for the cuts, and notice that a shot ends when the work ends, not when the meaning arrives.