Cinema: Peasant Soup

THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS Directed and Written by Ermanno Olmi

On the evidence of this movie, the 1978 Grand Prize winner at Cannes, it seems safe to say that Italian Director Ermanno Olmi is no fan of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900. Like 1900, The Tree of Wooden Clogs is a lengthy (three hours), luxuriously photographed film about Italian peasants, but after that all similarities end. 1900 was a didactic epic that attempted to merge the florid drama of opera with the tenets of Marxism; Clogs is pointedly a tranquil, nonpolemical attempt to describe...

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