Rent The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)

A totally absorbing film of everyday life in a small community - The Tree of Wooden Clogs review by KH

This is a wonderful film, slow, serious, sympathetic, funny, humane and question-raising. I watched it in two sessions because it is 3 hours long, but this was not a problem since it is not plot-based but community-life-based. The actors were non-professionals who were absorbed in their task and clearly understood what it must have been like to live in their grandparents' world. Perhaps not so different from their own, forty-odd years ago. 

  I particularly liked the warm relationships between fathers and children. Many scenes included lots of  taken-for-granted physical affection which is not normally shown enough on screen, and lots of practical work in which the children are taught about how to live in a very matter-of-fact but affectionate way. 

a masterpiece - The Tree of Wooden Clogs review by MG

This film is nearly 3 hours long and refuses to have any sort of narrative, so it is like watching life in real time... but what a life: peasants living together with an uncaring landlord through harsh cold winter in northern Italy.  We were transfixed by it and completely believed in the 'actors' (all local people - not trained actors at all), including young children who looked as if they had lived like that - run in their clogs, played around in the puddles in the courtyard, etc. - all their lives.  It is a haunting, beautiful and moving film. I would recommend this very highly indeed.

Admiring From a Distance - The Tree of Wooden Clogs review by griggs

There’s a version of this film I suspect I’d love in theory and struggle with in practice — and sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.

Ermanno Olmi’s three-hour portrait of late nineteenth-century Lombard peasant life is the real thing: non-professional cast, Bergamo dialect, farming rhythms that feel documented, not reconstructed. The faces have weight; so do the silences. You’re watching people who seem to have existed before the camera showed up, which is no small achievement.

The problem is that three hours of rural hardship and seasonal repetition is still three hours of rural hardship and seasonal repetition. The slowness is a committed choice, not a failure of nerve, but I spent most of it admiring the joinery rather than living in the house. The film kept me at arm’s length, whether it meant to or not.

The wooden clogs carry the film’s sharpest moral charge: one act of quiet parental love becomes a punishable offence. The ending lands as an argument more than a gut-punch. The injustice is clear, but I felt it from a distance.

A major film, clearly. Just not one that made the case for itself to me in anything under geological time.