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The Tree of Wooden Clogs



A painterly and sensual immersion in late nineteenth-century Italian farm life, Ermanno Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs lovingly focuses on four families working for one landowner on an isolated estate in the province of Bergamo. Filming on an abandoned farm for four months, Olmi adapted neorealist techniques to tell his story, enlisting local people to live as their own ancestors had, speaking in their native dialect on locations with which they were intimately familiar. Through the cycle of seasons, of back-breaking labor, love and marriage, birth and death, faith and superstition, Olmi naturalistically evokes an existence very close to nature, one that celebrates its beauty, humor, and simplicity but also acknowledges the feudal cruelty that governs it. Winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1978, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is at once intimate in scale and epic in scope—a towering, heart-stirring work of humanist filmmaking.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K restoration, created in collaboration with The Film Foundation at L'Immagine Ritrovata and supervised by director Ermanno Olmi, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Alternate Italian-language soundtrack
• Ermanno Olmi: The Roots of the Tree, an hour-long episode of The South Bank Show from 1981, featuring an interview with Olmi on the film and a visit to the farm where it was shot
• New program featuring cast and crew discussing the film at the Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna, Italy, in 2016
• Archival interviews with Olmi
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Deborah Young

Are there two different Italian audio tracks?

I gather the main track is in a number of different dialects and there is an alternate track that is just straight-up Italian.

Swo's right. Burgamo is near Italy's German border and so their Italian is heavily accented toward German along with a few unique pieces of slang. It's a bit like the more heavily accented Cajun parts of the US in how it differs from the sort of President's english of the country.

No expert on Cajun English dialect, but Bergamasque is more distinct than that. It is a separate language and is little more mutually intelligible than French is with Italian. Of course most Bergamasque speakers will speak somewhere on a dialect continuum with Italian, which muddies the waters.

Cajun is basically French with bits of English thrown in on the level I was talking about.

knives wrote:Cajun is basically French with bits of English thrown in on the level I was talking about.

Cajun French is based on regional french dialect (primarily from Normandy) as imported to the New World (primarily Nova Scotia -- but generally "Acadia"). As dispersed (through force) to Louisiana, it became Cajun. As spoken in New Brunswick and Price Edward Island (people who fled before deportation from Nova Scotia -- or who later returned to these places from further away) it became Chiac (at least when mixed with Canadian English). This dialect is observed/celebrated in several films by Michell Brault (from Quebec, where an entirely different form of regional French, plus Parisian French, provided the linguistic foundation. In recent years, there has been an expansion of cultural ties between Cajuns and their Canadian relatives. Cajuns and Acadians seem to be able to understand each other's French. Cajun French is pretty difficult for Quebecois speakers to follow, however.

Why so wordy? Summer is folk music time for us -- and we encounter lots of music from all over "French America". BTW -- Brault and Andre Gladu made a whole TV series about music of French America in the late 70s -- alas this is available (unsubbed only, I think) only to institutions (at institutional pricing).

Thanks for the expansion.

Slight correction: Brittany, Picardy, and Poitou -- in addition to Normandy. No wonder the dialect in Dumont's Quinquin sounded vaguely familiar. (Double checking, I also see there is some overlap between the origins of the populations of Acadia and Quebec -- yet the two languages are quite distinct).

Languages, like race, are rather arbitrarily defined. Despite all attempts to squelch them, regional languages/dialects have tended to persist.

Delayed to 14 Feb 2017

Perfect, this film makes for ideal Valentine's Day viewing!

This is not a minor delay. Four months? What could be the reason?

Probably just an issue with the restoration or something. This has been happening a little bit more often than usual for Criterion (it had been years since it last happened when Moonrise Kingdom was pushed back, and since then there have been two more including this), but I really don't think there's anything nefarious, just it'll need another few months to be able to be the best possible release.

I'm blanking, what was the other?

McCabe and Mrs Miller.

I would much rather wait a couple extra months for the release than endure eternal complaints about color timing, etc.

sir_luke wrote:I would much rather wait a couple extra months for the release than endure eternal complaints about color timing, etc.

I'm sure we can arrange for both.

Are we sure it isn't because of the spine number problems? It might have been that this was the earliest date to which a spine wasn't assigned. It'll probably be something around spine #862 if it gets one.

"Spine number problems" aren't a thing. Criterion can do whatever they want with them. It's much more likely that they knew there'd be a long delay when they gave this film's number to another, and it's only now that they're comfortable announcing a revised release date.

For the record: Moonrise Kingdom's delay saw its original Spine Number moved to Mister Johnson, McCabe and Mrs. Miller's saw no change in the number.

Chatting with Charles Burnett tonight after a screening of Killer of Sheep at my local film festival, we talked at length about Neo-Realism and its influence on the film, and he mentioned that this is one of his All Time Favorite films. He also knew that the hold up on its release is due almost entirely to a conflict about the color timing, and that the non-Criterion party involved wanted to make it "too Blue".

ng4996 wrote:He also knew that the hold up on its release is due almost entirely to a conflict about the color timing, and that the non-Criterion party involved wanted to make it "too Blue".

Despite the Olmi supervision ? You'd think that Bologna + the Film Foundation combination should be enough to know their stuff, and that the director's supervision should be the final seal of approval...

Glad Criterion have forgotten to give this a spine yet again.

It's probably 854

Yep. The number is on the film's page now. I feel better.