The Tree of the Wooden Clogs

Joseph Frederick Koerner in his great book on Bosch and Brueghel (it adapts his 2008 Mellon lectures), surveying the latter painter's works such as "The Battle between Carnival and Lent," "Children's Games" and others, tells us that Pieter Brueghel was a "great maker of lists".  The same can be said about Ermanno Olmi's Tree of the Wooden Clogs, a movie that I have been meaning to see all my life, and have, nonetheless, successfully avoided -- my aversion to the film may be related to an early embarrassment involving the picture that I briefly document in my essay "On Anderson Cooper's New Years Eve 2018."  After a brief opening sequence establishing one element of the film's minimalist narrative, Olmi sets about documenting as many aspects of  19th-century Bergamo peasant life as he can cram into the picture.  He shows fields being plowed in subtle but luminous colors that look like a fading 14th century Book of Hours.  Men sow seeds.  Hay and wheat are harvested.  Groups of singing peasants, both men and women, husk corn (they call it maize) and, then, transport the stuff to a noisy, rickety-looking mill on a nearby stream to have it ground.  A goose is beheaded and, then, in a more clamorous and chaotic scene, a pig is butchered.  People cook mountainous heaps of polenta and make soups and stews.  The peasants live in great industrial-sized tenements with exterior stairways and ancient field-stone granaries -- these places seem to be ruins leftover from Roman times.  Old men sit by the fireside telling stories about demons and ghosts. (And there are community gatherings for ghost stories told, strangely enough, in the farm's stable.) Small children are bathed in buckets of hot water. A woman tirelessly washes laundry in the river, slapping the cloth violently on time-smoothed stones.  Suitors arrive in cautious groups of three to woo girls in long rustic rooms where, it seems, that the whole community is gathered.  Dogs bark and growl.  A half-crazed beggar wanders the fields, his face distorted by tics -- the old women say that the man must be fed and treated kindly because he is "simple" and the "simple are close to God."  A priest preaches about a miracle that saved the local village, describing events as if they occurred just yesterday -- but, then, we learn that what he is telling his congregation dates back 350 years.  The film's documentary reconstruction of peasant work puts The Tree of the Wooden Clogs into a past that Virgil would recognize -- indeed, some of the images of pollarded trees, irrigation ditches, carefully manured fields and blazing hearths reminds me of material in the Latin poet's Georgics.  But the real influence on the film's imagery seems to me to be Brueghel. Men carrying huge sacks on their backs is a recurring image -- and these pictures show the peasants as faceless, hunched-over, workers with their heads covered by enigmatic, shapeless hats that conceal their features.  The weather is closely characterized:  there are rainy days that fill the peasant farm's huge courtyard with mud, paths through the fields and thickets decorated with pools that reflect the dark sky, snow storms and sunny days in early spring when the fields are vibrant with fresh green buds and leaves.  Winter is appropriately dark -- it's shown in the somber tones of Brueghel's "Return of the Hunters," shadowy, anonymous men wading through the snow and early spring is stormy like the great painting showing a windstorm, men driving cattle through a barren forest while little ships struggle with the tempest.  Natural light is used -- in some scenes, we can barely ascertain what is happening.  On other occasions, Olmi uses expressionistic lighting:  when a poor peasant finds a shiny coin dropped in the mud at a political meeting (a communist is speaking about the future), he picks it up and, then, runs crazily away from the meeting to his home, the man's face illuminated as if with a sense of guilt or doom, as he runs through the dark fields.  In many scenes, Olmi establishes multiple zones of interest.  When a flamboyant fabric salesman pulls his handcart into the peasant's courtyard, he sings in a beautiful tenor and the women, all of whom seem to distrust the man, are obviously fascinated both by him and his wares.  The young woman whom one of the peasants has been very shyly courting approaches and someone mentions that she needs fabric for her wedding dress.  The fabric salesman has sales patter in which he compares his female customers to monkeys -- it seems unflattering, but there is something faintly simian about the women's helpless curiosity.  The salesman has a pet crow in a wicker cage and it is reputed that the animal can speak -- we hear the creature croaking a couple times and the little girls interpreting the animal's cry as "he's saying hello to us." 

From this apparently chaotic material, arranged primarily as a "book of hours" -- that is, a seasonal chronicle of the works and deeds of the peasants -- several narratives gradually emerge.  There is the courtship of the girl by the young peasant who tirelessly tracks her and arranges ways to encounter her as she modestly hurries from errand to errand.  Widow Runc's husband has died and she can't support her six children; the local priest suggests that the smaller girls go to an orphanage, although the mother and her eldest son work themselves to the bone to try to keep the family together.  A cow becomes sick and seems about to die.  The woman who owns the cow goes to the stream, fills a jug, and, then, takes it to a small chapel, a place too poor to have a cross on which to repose the emaciated and bloody wooden image of Christ -- she pleads with God to heal her cow and, in fact, after drinking the water from the jug the cow gets better, standing up again.  The smarmy local priest (he wears little granny glasses with tinted spectacles) has decided that one of the local boys is highly intelligent and must go to school.  But he's not willing to support that endeavor in any way.  (Almost all of the peasants are illiterate -- the only printed items in their lives are cheap rotogravure engravings of Saints posted over their beds or by their fireplaces or in their barns among their animals.)  So the parents commit to paying for the boy's education even though the woman is pregnant with another child.  An old man has contrived a secret way to force tomatoes to grow more quickly than his neighbors -- he uses chicken shit to keep the seedlings warm and works his fields at night.  Other peasants cheat the landlord by loading hidden compartments in their wagons with before they are weighed.  The landlord himself is a melancholy man who listens to opera on a gramophone.  In one puzzling scene, a peasant sees the landlord standing outside a lit window and listening to a young man, presumably his son, playing Mozart's Turkish March (Rondo a'la turk) on a harpsichord - why doesn't the landlord go inside the warm room where the boy is playing to the delight of his relatives, mostly female aunts it seems?  On Christmas Eve, the landlord hires a band of bagpipers to serenade the manor house and the peasants stand in the courtyard reverently listening to the remote music.  Underlying some of the scenes, Olmi uses Bach organ music to emphasize the sacramental aspect of the labor that we see. 

In the film's last third, its vestigial narratives come t0 climaxes of a sort.  The young man weds the girl that he has been wooing and they travel to Milan for their honeymoon.  (At the wedding, the priest asks for the congregation's prayers for the couple who are "embarking on a long and dangerous journey to Milan" -- in fact, the trip is accomplished in a half-day and seems to encompass be less than 30 miles.  Olmi's point is that people lived their entire lives within a ten mile radius of their birthplace and the rest of the world was incomprehensible to them and deadly -- recall that no one knows  how to read.)  In Milan, the young couple see men marching in chains under the supervision of mounted soldiers -- some sort of riot is underway and cavalry dashes down the streets, scattering the people.  Some shots are fired.  The young couple spends the night in the convent where the girl's aunt lives.  The convent is also an orphanage.  The nuns set up a bridal suite for the young people and the next morning, in an astonishing scene, foist a baby boy upon them.  The old man and his daughter surprise everyone in town with their fat and ruddy tomatoes, at least two weeks ahead of everyone else's crop.  The peasant boy who attends school in town discovers that his wooden clogs are broken.  In an act of desperation, the boy's father cuts down one of the trees along the irrigation ditch and fashions some of the wood into a shoe.  The peasant who has put his purloined coin in the hoof of his dray horse finds the precious object missing.  Irrationally, he accuses the horse of theft and punches it.  The horse isn't about to put up with any abuse and so the beast chases the man around the courtyard and corners him -- indeed, you get the impression that the aggrieved horse would have finished the peasant off if the small room into which the man had fled was large enough to accommodate the wagon the beast was dragging around.  This sequence leads to an exposition of folk remedies for madness (since the peasant is accounted insane) that are both fascinating and utterly bizarre.  The landlord discovers that one of his trees has been cut-down.  He sends the bailiff to repossess the livestock in the possession of the offending family and, then, evicts them, including the mother, her new-born child, and the little student who wore the clogs to church school in the next village.  On this depressing note, the film ends.

Olmi's point, probably unfashionable today, seems to be that the peasants are, by and large, helpless, pawns in larger economic games in which they have no stake.  A Communist rants at the local carnival, but none of the characters in the film show much interest in what he is saying -- human greed is a constant and the agitator's speech is undercut by the peasant eying the gold coin dropped in the mud.  (The coin that he foolishly hides in his horse's hollow hoof, the loss of which  results in his bout of madness -- with this episode, Olmi almost seems to be illustrating some kind of folk proverb in the vein of Brueghel's large painting of Netherland proverbs).  In Milan, there is some kind of civil unrest, but we see it through the eyes of the honeymooners and can't comprehend what is happening.  The painful scenes involving the eviction of the Batisti family for cutting down the tree are all shot from the perspectives of the other peasants -- they stare at the eviction from behind their windows, fearful and inert.  Each shot emphasizes the status of the onlooker as inactive, as witnesses only to the injustice committed in front of them.  The peasants are ashamed of their fear, and, it seems, equally ashamed of their supine complicity with the system that has destroyed their neighbor.  Only after the eviction do the neighbors appear abashed and silent in the courtyard to watch the wagon containing all the worldly possessions of the evicted tenants vanishing in the darkness.  Olmi implies that the peasants live in a world that is ahistorical, a world bound to timeless cycle of the seasons and that they are not agents in that world -- rather, they are passive and helpless victims of a polity and environment that God has ordained as just and inevitable.  When the infant from the orphanage is adopted, someone says that the baby might be the offspring of a nobleman -- "but he will be peasant now," the priest says, "raised by a peasant father and he will be happy as a peasant."

Critics generally regard The Tree of the Wooden Clogs as a masterpiece.  Certainly, the film is exceptionally beautiful and well-crafted -- it's dark palette and natural lighting give the movie a look comparable to Jan Troell's equally well-regarded films like The Emigrants.  I'm a little less certain about the film's greatness.  There is no acting in the film -- the movie subscribes to neo-realist doctrine to the utmost:  instead of actors, a credit announces that the parts are "interpreted" by people from the Bergamo district where the movie takes place.  Some of the actors look great, but barely speak -- presumably, because they would have no idea  how to "interpret" their lines:  this is exemplified by the young bride:  she is as beautiful as a renaissance Madonna but has nothing to say, and, after a while, her serene silence begins to get on your nerves.  A number of sequences are very hard to explain:  why would the avaricious peasant hide a gold coin in mud plastered on the hoof of his horse?  Would peasants really spend their honeymoon in a convent?  And why do the nuns use this opportunity to coerce them into bringing an orphan home?  The families are all related and Widow Runc looks almost exactly like Mrs. Batiste, the lady whose family is evicted.  This leads to confusion. Why is the orphaned child called "Batiste"?  The nuns call him by that name before anyone agrees to take him home.  Were late 19th century peasants really as apolitical and cowardly as these folks?  Not only do the speeches seem improvised, but, also, the entire narrative or system of narratives seems oddly arbitrary.  The movie doesn't have any narrative arc at all -- it just begins in media res and ends the same way.  I am a great admirer of Olmi and mourn his death (he died in 2018) but I'm not wholly convinced that this specific film, often said to be his magnum opus, is as good as its reputation.