Ermanno Olmi, a noted Italian neorealist director whose 1978 film The Tree of Wooden Clogs won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, has died at age 86.
No cause of death was given. Italian officials confirmed the passing of Olmi, whose films also include Il Posto, Walking, Walking, The Legend of the Holy Drinker and Long Live the Lady!
Tree of Wooden Clogs, which was the unanimous choice of the Cannes jury, depicts the rough-edged beauty of late-19th-century agrarian life in Italy. Unfolding in long, impressionistic takes, it tells the story of four families living and working on an estate run by a greedy landowner.
The Legend of the Holy Drinker, which starred Rutger Hauer, won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1988. The Venice festival also awarded Olmi a career Golden Lion in 2004. Initially, he refused it, saying he “still had feature films to make,” but he relented four years later.
No cause of death was given. Italian officials confirmed the passing of Olmi, whose films also include Il Posto, Walking, Walking, The Legend of the Holy Drinker and Long Live the Lady!
Tree of Wooden Clogs, which was the unanimous choice of the Cannes jury, depicts the rough-edged beauty of late-19th-century agrarian life in Italy. Unfolding in long, impressionistic takes, it tells the story of four families living and working on an estate run by a greedy landowner.
The Legend of the Holy Drinker, which starred Rutger Hauer, won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1988. The Venice festival also awarded Olmi a career Golden Lion in 2004. Initially, he refused it, saying he “still had feature films to make,” but he relented four years later.
- 5/7/2018
- by Dade Hayes
- Deadline Film + TV
De Sica characters in Antonioni landscapes, that’s Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto. The larva-like protagonist (Sandro Panseri) is introduced under a cocoon of bedcovers in his parents’ provincial home before heading off to apply for “a secure job for life” in a Milanese corporation, the post of the title. The test, which consists of a mathematical exam (one hour in a palace’s cavernous storage room to solve a single fraction problem), a physical checkup (squatting and stretching before the company doctor) and a psychiatric interview (“Do you suffer from frequent itching?”), offers the first of several keen adumbrations of Kafka. Suggesting a bull calf in an oversized coat, the lad shyly comes to life while window-shopping and sharing expresso cups or perfume droplets with a fellow candidate (Loredana Detto) during a tentative lunchtime flirtation. He becomes a messenger’s apprentice and she a typist, but separate departments and...
- 2/20/2010
- MUBI
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