["Tree of Wooden Clogs" is one of those…]

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"Tree of Wooden Clogs" is one of those films which by painstakingly avoiding overt political statements, manages to charge itself in every pore with class positions.

It is Elmondo Olmi's brilliantly moving spectacle of Italian peasantry in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, a film which demonstrates the material weakness of the peasantry in its ability to confront its exploiters; the stranglehold of the Catholic church and, like a distant scent of gunpowder, the newly emerging strength of the proletariat.

Lombardy The film follows the lives of four peasant familiesliving in a midway stage between extended families and single units-in a single farm complex through a six month period.

The film is set in Lombardy, and Olmi makes full use of the lush countryside and the stark contrast in the weather between summer and winter to produce a strikingly photographed backdrop.

The film undoubtedly romanticises the peasantry.

The four families are shown, for all their poverty and exploitation, to be full of a kind of indomitable spirit which prevents them from wallowing in their own misery.

This joy through nature has more material basis in Olmi's psyche than in the realities of the lower peasantry.

Inevitable

But this is an almost inevitable concession-and it is the only one that Olmi makes.

The church is represenbenign genial priest who is DHl. ready to bring comfort.

The skill of the film is that it uses this method yet still manages to show how the church exploits the peasants and keeps them in backward ignorance.

Even this takes a contradictory form. It is the priest who insists that one family send their child to the local school (twelve miles away) because his intelligence is a "gift from god'.

Pair of hands The family thus loses an extra pair of hands to help bring in enough food.

Another of the families, left without a father, struggles to survive.

The priest offers to take two of the younger chil dren to a nunnery, a 'solu tion' treated by the family with complete hostility.

Prayers

Almost everything is preceded by some kind of incantation or prayer. But Olmi shows that the line between this orthodox religion and all other forms of superstition is a very unclear one for the peasants.

When one of the old men is thought to have fallen ill (in fact he is apoplectic with rage because he has just lost a gold coin he had hidden) the local witch doctor. is brought in with equal amounts of religious chants and pagan rites.

'Holy water'

It is only the power and authority of the church which gives Catholicism the edge over other superstitions.

This scene of the woman with her 'holy water? is immediately followed by one in which the newly schooled child explains to his dumbfounded family that the water they drink is full of living organisms.

In the background hovers the image of the landlord. Taking two thirds of everyThey travel on moving barge narrow river and approach the CESHY thing the peasants grow, he is leaving more and more of the work to his bailiff.

Slowness

Again Olmi uses a few simple images to portray the changing face of the Italian landowning class-more interested in listening to his phonograph than checking in the crops.

Despite the apparent slowness of the film it never becomes boring. Incidents such as the ritual killing of the pig have the same stunning. impact, as they would if the blood. was splashing onto the audience's shoes.

The one real 'event' in the film is the visit on honeymoon by young couple to Milan.

La swiftly along as they city the peasants see smoke rising from the nearby towns.

Someone remarks that it is the military firing on demonstrators.

Immediately one of the peasant women whispers sympathy for her proletarian cousins, while the priest next to her tutts impatiently about those who no longer have respect for other people's property.

When they arrive at Milan the couple are almost mown down in the street by the galloping horses of the army and stand in silence as armor and stand in cilanna na the demonstrators are brought in in chains.

Nunnery:

Again the church is brought in in the shape of a nunnery where they stay, which makes up a bridal suite in the middle of a deserted children's ward.

But again its real material face is to force the newlymarried couple to take oné of the foundling children back home with them, which they do, accompanied by a book of instructions as to how little the church will help out with its upkeep.

The climax of the film is the eviction of one of the families for having chopped down one of the landlord's trees to make a pair of shoes.

Averted As the bailiff comes to remove two-thirds of everything the family possesses, and as the father packs their few belongings onto the back of the cart, the other families urge their children not to stare out of the window at them.

Unable to offer any material help, the peasantry is reduced to averting its eyes.