Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Il Posto
1961 · Ermanno Olmi · Il Posto on Sightlines
A room full of young people sit at small desks, pencils ready, waiting to be tested. Later someone will time their reflexes and look over their bodies the way you would check a part before fitting it. Domenico is one of them. He is shy, from a town in the countryside north of Milan, and he does what he is told. He looks around. He waits. Ermanno Olmi's camera waits with him, and the comedy of these entrance-exam scenes, which is real and very dry, comes from how long the film lets us sit inside the process. Nobody makes a joke. The joke is the procedure.
That patience is the key to Il Posto, and it is worth asking where it came from. Before he made features, Olmi spent the 1950s in the film unit of Edisonvolta, the Milanese electric company, shooting industrial shorts about workers, machines and company routine. He knew the modern Italian firm from the inside. The film is widely described as drawn from his own entry into corporate work as a young man. So when the camera frames Domenico small inside a courtyard, or boxed by a doorway, it isn't making a cartoon of bureaucracy. It is reporting what the place looks like to someone who has stood in it.
Here Gilles Deleuze can help, because he gives us words for what Domenico is doing, which is very little. In the cinema Deleuze calls the movement-image, the classical cinema of Hollywood and of most storytelling, a character sees a situation and acts to change it. The chase, the fight, the decision. Perception runs straight into action. Deleuze argued that something broke after the war, and that Italian neorealism was where the break first showed: characters who meet a situation they cannot answer. He called this the crisis of the action-image. What takes its place is what he calls a pure optical and sound situation. The character, and we along with him, can only look and listen. There is nothing to do.
Domenico's family needs money. That is his whole situation, and he cannot fix it. He can only show up, sit the exam, take the errand-boy post while a clerk's desk opens up, and wait. Sandro Panseri, a non-professional, plays him with a watchful, withdrawn face that takes things in more than it gives anything out. Deleuze's name for this figure is the seer: a person who registers the world instead of acting on it. That can sound like weakness. It is the film's subject. A young man whose job, in every sense, is to be acted upon.
This is where Il Posto meets film theory. André Bazin loved neorealism for its respect for reality, for long takes and real streets that let the world keep its ambiguity. Deleuze accepted that and moved the emphasis. For him the point of neorealism was not only that it was more real. It made a new kind of image, one where the link between seeing and doing goes slack. His favorite example is from Umberto D.: the young maid's morning in the kitchen, small chores watched at length, nothing advancing. Il Posto belongs to that lineage, and the lineage spells out the debt. Its waiting rooms, queues and corridors descend from Umberto D.'s pension office and that kitchen. Deleuze has a term for these stretches: dead time, temps mort. It isn't empty. It's the everyday held long enough that you start to feel time pressing on a life.
Olmi's specific invention is to find that dead time in a new place. Bicycle Thieves, the bedrock of the tradition, built a drama out of one economic fear in the open street. Visconti's La Terra Trema put real laborers in front of the camera in their own surroundings, which is the documentary-of-labor approach Olmi had already practiced at Edisonvolta. Il Posto takes that ethic, the non-professionals and the found locations and the single mundane anxiety, and walks it indoors, into the glass-and-corridor offices of the economic miracle. The fear is no longer hunger. It is security, and what security costs.
The framing makes the argument. Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set, a system of everything it holds, and Olmi and his cinematographer Lamberto Caimi keep closing it: doorways, desks, windows, the rectilinear grid of the office. Figures sit inside frames inside frames. The debt there is to Antonioni, to L'Avventura's habit of dwarfing people inside architecture and to Il Grido's way of letting a working man's drift come through his surroundings instead of the plot. Then Domenico gets a day of waiting out in Milan, and the image loosens and breathes. This is close to what Deleuze calls the voyage-balade, the stroll that transforms nothing. Nothing gets decided out on the street, and that is exactly why it feels like life. It's here, in awkward silences and small talk, that Loredana Detto's Antonietta brings the film its warmth. Their tentative closeness lives in those open frames. You notice how different it feels once the walls come back.
Listen, too. Olmi mostly does without dramatic music. What we hear is the workplace: paper shuffling, the hum of an office. These are the sound half of Deleuze's pure optical and sound situations, sounds that don't cue an emotion and just surround a person who has nowhere to go.
There is one more concept that fits Olmi's staging. Deleuze writes of a cinema of the body, where everyday postures carry time and expose social relations. Watch how the company teaches bodies. The queue, the cloakroom, the assigned seat, the absurd aptitude test that measures a nervous boy as if he were equipment. Domenico is learning a posture he may hold for decades. Kurosawa's Ikiru had already found spiritual burial in a municipal desk and a stamp on paper. Olmi shows the burial starting, on a young face, on the first day.
What did this do to narrative? It gave up the crisis, the antagonist and the arc. The film moves in episodes, and its drama is the slow pressure of a structure no single person controls. That made it a hinge between classical neorealism and the modernist Italian cinema of the early 1960s. It showed that the time-image, cinema that makes you feel time instead of plot, didn't need ruins or epic landscapes. It could be found in the most ordinary modern place there is: an office.
So here is a question to watch with, not one we'll answer for you. What is Domenico trading away, and does he know? Watch his face when he waits. Count the doorways. Listen to the paper. The film's tenderness and its quiet horror are both there in plain sight, at the pace of a working day.
Concepts in play
- the seer (voyant) — Sandro Panseri's withdrawn, watchful Domenico, a face that reacts more than it asserts; a protagonist acted upon rather than acting
- crisis of the action-image — The family's financial trouble is a situation Domenico cannot act to resolve; the film withholds crisis, antagonist and arc
- pure optical and sound situations — The camera holding on Domenico's face as he waits; ambient workplace sound (paper, office hum) in place of dramatic scoring
- dead time (temps mort) — Entrance-exam sequences, bureaucratic procedures and awkward silences run at the pace of lived experience; descended from Umberto D.'s maid's morning and pension office
- the frame as closed set — Recurring enclosure compositions: figures boxed by doorways, desks, windows and the rectilinear office grid, dwarfed in corridors and courtyards
- the voyage/stroll form — Domenico's day of waiting in Milan, where the imagery loosens and breathes in contrast to the closed order of the office
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Staging of the firm as routines and thresholds (queue, corridor, cloakroom, assigned desk) shaping bodies; the psycho-physical aptitude test