Neorealism's faithful proponent Ermanno Olmi (b.1931) has long been considered a pessimist and unsurprisingly so - as the director has always held a special affinity for depicting the bleakness of life so vividly and oft implied in his works that Christian resignation will console the sufferer for everything he shall bear in this world. A dictum that proves a schematic as well as dogmatic way of looking at the content of his cinema. Olmi is at heart, the archetypal optimist, a believer in life's mysteries; mysteries that lie within the old and the very young.
He was born in 1931 in one of the most clerical regions of Northern Italy - the Bergamasco, the frontier between Lombardy and the Veneto. His first job. an entry level clerk's position with the Edison Volta electrical firm in Milan, where ultimately he had made 16mm shorts, at first simple footage of company outings and captures of other extra-curricular activities before moving on to documentary filmmaking which would gradually earn him his reputation. Olmi would persuade his employers to permit him to make a feature length documentary titled Time Stood Still (1959); shot in black in white but in 'Scope about a country mouse/city rat connection between a mature man of mountain peasant stock and an enlightened young student who winter together as watchmen over a half-built dam.
 |
| Il Posto always rings twice, From the 1961 feature, Sandro Paneri pictured above |
His first fiction film was Il Posto (1961) a semi-auto-biographical comedy that focuses on a teenager's first job in a dingy office, beautifully portrayed by non-professional actors - Olmi later made an honest woman out of his leading lady, Loredana Detto the pair would wed in 1963 and at the time of my writing are still very much happy together.
 |
| Rod Steiger and Ermanno Olmi on the set of A Man Named John (1965) |
Olmi established his professional reputation as a creative filmmaker in Milan only being tempted once towards the alluring Roman film scene. Even this was something very much according to Olmi's vision of things; a film centering on Pope John XXIII who like Olmi had been born in the Bergamasco peasantry fringe. The film E Venne en Uomo ( A Man Named John,1965) produced by Harry Saltzman, was not by any means, a success. Partly because Olmi let himself be convinced for the first and only time to use a professional actor, and a meaty one at that with Rod Steiger (afterall Rossellini himself commited the very same misdemeanor casting Anna Magnani) although Steiger's presence however well intended in the film would never quite gel - even if the idea of telling the Pope's story through a contemporary intermediary made for compelling cinema.
Olmi would venture south in only one film, his third feature, 1963's I fidanzati (The Fiances). This was to Sicily where we find his hero, a welder (Carlo Cabrini) from a Milan factory had been transferred with a good contract, though obliged to leave behind his fiancee.