Spoilers ahead.
An unusual film and a definite change of pace from the rapid-fire filmmaking that Americans are used to. This film follows a year in the life of rural Italian peasants living at the turn of the century. There is a central plotline, a family who wants their son to know a better life then they have tries to send him to school. However the clogs that carry him on the long and hard journey to school are broken, making the path impossible. The central message of the film is that God will provide. It is a sermon on the virtues of simple faith.
However, this central plot, very similar to a fairy tale is only a device to allow the film to devote three and a half hours to showing in great detail the lives of the Italian peasantry during this period, the way they worked, loved and lived. It's a slice of life film like Fellini's Roma, or Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, but it's much less frenzied and sensationalistic then those works. Like most Italian cinema that I have seen it is more focused around intense images then around plot of dialogue, I will never forget the shots of the landscape, or the scene of the peasants preparing a pig for eating. Central to the film is the beautiful sermon that we hear the village priest offer.
Interestingly, the film focuses on the lives of those people that Pasolini glorified in his films and novels. Pasolini died a few years before the film was released, during most of his life he considered the values of the peasants to be sacred, an antidote to the fierce and brutal ethic of the modern world. By the end of his life, he had given up hope in the peasants, believing that the mass media had exterminated their native culture and way of life. It would be economically and culturally impossible to revive in the modern world the system of living that the peasants shared.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a requiem for a dead way of life, released at precisely the time that that culture was drawing its last breath. Watching it is a beautiful and melancholy experience. It's a wonderful film, but one cannot escape a feeling of irrevocable loss.
An unusual film and a definite change of pace from the rapid-fire filmmaking that Americans are used to. This film follows a year in the life of rural Italian peasants living at the turn of the century. There is a central plotline, a family who wants their son to know a better life then they have tries to send him to school. However the clogs that carry him on the long and hard journey to school are broken, making the path impossible. The central message of the film is that God will provide. It is a sermon on the virtues of simple faith.
However, this central plot, very similar to a fairy tale is only a device to allow the film to devote three and a half hours to showing in great detail the lives of the Italian peasantry during this period, the way they worked, loved and lived. It's a slice of life film like Fellini's Roma, or Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, but it's much less frenzied and sensationalistic then those works. Like most Italian cinema that I have seen it is more focused around intense images then around plot of dialogue, I will never forget the shots of the landscape, or the scene of the peasants preparing a pig for eating. Central to the film is the beautiful sermon that we hear the village priest offer.
Interestingly, the film focuses on the lives of those people that Pasolini glorified in his films and novels. Pasolini died a few years before the film was released, during most of his life he considered the values of the peasants to be sacred, an antidote to the fierce and brutal ethic of the modern world. By the end of his life, he had given up hope in the peasants, believing that the mass media had exterminated their native culture and way of life. It would be economically and culturally impossible to revive in the modern world the system of living that the peasants shared.
The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a requiem for a dead way of life, released at precisely the time that that culture was drawing its last breath. Watching it is a beautiful and melancholy experience. It's a wonderful film, but one cannot escape a feeling of irrevocable loss.