“Haze around the moon, snow is coming soon ”

Written and directed by Ermanno Olmi, Tree of Wooden Clogs is an understated and meditative drama set in a small Lombard community in 1898. The film follows the fortunes of four peasant families as they work through the year, raising animals, growing crops and looking after their children. Each family has its particular trials and the complications faced by the villagers, whilst seemingly small to us, turn out to have great import: an ill cow, a young couple falling in love, a child who needs wooden clogs to protect his feet on the long walk to school. This last situation provides the title of the film and perhaps its most poignant narrative thread: to make his child a pair of clogs a farmer cuts down a small tree, the act of which has, months later, cataclysmic results.  The film is similar in tone and tempo to Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies or Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, but instead of the long and languidly unbroken shots that Tarr is known for, Olmi opts for a snappy, fragmented editing style that builds atmosphere through suggestion and generated a feeling of immersion as powerful as any other director. There are a number of reasons for this: the use of real farmers in the region instead of professional actors, the use of natural lighting, the minumum use of non-diegetic music. All these serve to place you inside the village with the characters and, ultimately, to make you think of them as people rather than fictions.

Tree of Wooden Clogs is a strage blend of mystical folk memory and documentary that draws you in and makes you care for the people on screen. Watch it in a double bill with The White Ribbon, or, for contrast, Miklós Jancsó’s Red Psalm, a film that tells a similar story but entirely symbolically.