Reflecting Reality--and Mystery: An Interview with Ermanno Olmi
by Bert Cardullo
Although thematically he inverts neorealism by studying the human accommodation to difficult external circumstances, Ermanno Olmi (born 1931) is perhaps the best exemplar after neorealism of the neorealist style, with its disdain (in theory if not always in practice) for dramatic contrivance and fictive invention. His films offer slices of life—of ordinary people’s unspectacular lives—with indefinite or inconclusive endings; they simulate documentary methods in staging and photography, as they are all shot in actual locations and almost all of them feature non-actors; and they aspire not to proposition or evocation but only toward accurate representation. Olmi’s later works depart from the neorealist style of Il posto (1961) and I fidanzati (1963), his second and third pictures, but even they are characterized by a kind of non-discursiveness.
As befits a master filmmaker, Ermanno Olmi is reluctant to give interviews; he prefers to let his films speak for themselves. Ever a shy, self-effacing man, Olmi was especially sparse with words when awarded the Golden Lion at the 1988 Venice festival for The Legend of the Holy Drinker, as well as the Golden Palm at the 1978 Cannes festival for The Tree of Wooden Clogs. And there hasn’t been a published interview with Olmi for quite some time. One reason for the reticence is his embarrassment at having to answer those all too frequent, nagging “how are you?” and “what have you been doing?” questions. For between the Cannes premieres of The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and Keep Walking (1983) lay five years of inactivity, then another four years until Long Live the Lady! (1987) won the Silver Lion at Venice. During much of this time, he had been wrestling with a long and sometimes paralyzing illness, from which he has since recovered; still, several years of inactivity continue to separate his feature films.
Before proper introductions could be made between us, Olmi queried why I had bothered to come to interview him at all: “You know my answers as well as your questions, so what’s the sense of it?” Nonetheless, speaking in rounded phrases with a sonorous voice, he began to muse philosophically in his Lombardy dialect about his profession, about how he seldom needed to go far from home to film a story that was “part of me,” about how the only measure of a film’s importance is its ability to reflect the human common denominator—or the need for spiritual values, for mystical tenderness between human beings, in a cold world. Genesis: The Creation and the Flood (1994), for example, is “about us,” not an homage to a distant deity in some picture-book. Like all his masterpieces, this portion of The Bible (produced by Lux), his feature-length episode in the series made for Raiuno and Lube-Beta Film, is meant to be a personal encounter, a film carved with a storyteller’s imagination from handed-down oral tradition that can enchant the hearts as well as minds of an audience.
In the same room with us sat Loredana Detto, Olmi’s wife, taking it all in with the same wistful charm and anchoring attention that captured the heart of the youth Domenico in Il posto, perhaps this director’s most important film. Il Posto is the story of a Lombard peasant boy who applies for an available office job in a large Milan company, and at the same time falls shyly in love with a young secretary, Magali (Loredana Detto). The core of the film is a reflection on work—a reflection in this case drawn from Olmi’s own recollections of himself as an eighteen-year-old looking for and finding employment at the Edisonvolta company. (The Tree of Wooden Clogs is also autobiographical, in the sense that it was drawn from stories about country people told to him by his grandfather.)
The following interview took place in August 2008 at Ermanno Olmi’s home in the Lombardy region of northern Italy, northeast of Milan. My plan was to get the director to open up a little more than usual both by avoiding the subject of his individual films themselves—the circumstances surrounding their making, the people in them, the amount of money they made, their critical reception, etc.—and by scrupulously avoiding questions about his personal life. In order to accommodate me, Olmi spoke in high Italian (as opposed to his native Lombardy dialect) as much as possible.
Cineaste: I’d like to focus today, Signor Olmi, on a general or theoretical discussion of the cinema, of your cinema, as opposed to a specific discussion of your individual films themselves. Is this acceptable to you?
Ermanno Olmi: Yes, that’s fine. It also makes for a nice change of pace.
Cineaste: Nothing much happens in an Olmi film—that is, if you require the equivalent of a roller-coaster ride with all the requisite thrills and chills. Instead of giving your audience a boldly defined series of actions moving the story along at a furious pace, you share with the audience small moments that gradually build into the powerful understanding—emotional as well as cognitive—of an experience. Using real people instead of actors, you follow your subjects as they live in real time, gently shaping their lives into fiction with your authorial hand. Why do you work in this way?
Olmi: Shooting freely with a handheld camera, never selecting anything in advance, I find that everything happens almost spontaneously. It doesn’t happen by design, by planning. Why do I work in this way? Because it is important that the operative technical moment be enveloped in the many emotions that are in the air at the moment one lives in the scene. There must always be a participation, a collision with the moment; this is what determines the choice of image. Otherwise, it’s like going up to a loved one and first thinking, “When we meet, I’ll touch her hand, and then kiss her like this, then say these words . . .”
Cineaste: Working in such a way, do you get frustrated by the limitations of the frame?
Olmi: The frame is not a frustration to me, perhaps also because I work without pre-planned shots. The frame becomes a way of focusing, not a composition in itself, because it corresponds to the things I want to look at in a particular moment. It’s good that there is, outside the frame, “a discussion that continues,” as it were—something I can imagine and even desire. The same is true in literature, where there are phrases that let you think of an infinity of other words which are even more beautiful because they aren’t said.
Cineaste: In pre-packaged movies of the Hollywood kind—which are planned by the art director and all the technical staff—the camera merely establishes a framing angle selected in advance, and all the things written in the script occur within this fixed frame.
Olmi: My own procedure, as you know, is different. At the beginning, I don’t think about the camera. I think about the ambience and all the events that are to be presented: place, lighting, people, color. I construct the fiction I need. When I feel that this fiction corresponds to my needs, then I go to the camera and let myself be dragged along by the event without establishing beforehand that “here” I’ll do a close-up, a long shot, or a camera movement. With each shot I participate in the event almost instinctively, gathering up what happens and responding accordingly. It’s rare that I decide anything in advance. I invent the action at the moment it takes place.
I almost always work with a handheld camera and, having to get direct sound when there is dialogue, I need a very heavy camera since I shoot in 35mm and therefore have to put it on a tripod with wheels. I never do dolly shots or tracks; I never put the camera at a level higher or lower than a horizontal line drawn at eye-level, though sometimes I go out on a balcony or shoot through a window. The camera is on this wheeled tripod, but I move it as if it were part of me, and always at my own height. I always use the camera in this objective way.
Cineaste: What’s the difference between your method of filming and the one used in documentaries?
Olmi: The difference from the documentary isn’t so much in the techniques of shooting because, for example, as in my films, in a documentary there isn’t any elaborate lighting, to name just one technical element. For me, the technique of shooting is almost the same. The difference is that in a documentary I shoot a reality from outside my will; thus my critical participation in the event lies only in choosing with the camera the image that, at that moment, I find most interesting in a documentation of the event. In the case of a fiction film, reality doesn’t happen outside my will, but is organized within me, inside my consciousness. Thus, my critical judgment and my suggestion of content lie above all in the organization of the event. As for my approach to the shooting, I do it just as in a documentary, such that I do not deceive the viewer with a suggestion made through certain acrobatics of the camera or through the use of a redundant little touch in the lights or the atmosphere. In sum, even when the camera is objective in this way, the subjectivity is my own.
Cineaste: Doesn’t this make you feel all alone, as if you are creating a world to the exclusion of everyone else?
Olmi: I never feel alone. I’m convinced that participating with me in the action, in this event, are many others. It’s not my personal point of view. Certainly it is, in the sense that I decide. However, the sensation I have is that these choices of mine are not only mine but that others have them, too. I really don’t feel exclusive, that I exclude anybody. There is a certain type of intellectual who, either out of presumption towards himself or contempt towards others—which is the same thing—has the ambition to be so subjective, to be the only one, to observe life and events from such an isolated perspective. My ambition, instead—perhaps because of my peasant/worker extraction—is to look at the world with others, not as an aristocratic intellectual, an elitist, but as someone who mixes with other people as much as possible.
The bleak reality of the office in Il Posto (1961)
Cineaste: But there are excellent directors who, unlike you, work with camera operators. As you have been saying, you yourself are behind the camera.
Olmi: Well, everyone makes love the way they want to, in the way that they themselves feel. Again, conventional shooting is like going up to a loved one and first thinking, “When we meet, I’ll touch her hand, and then kiss her like this, then utter these words . . .” Certainly we go to this intimate meeting with a whole series of motives, but it is only during the meeting itself that these motives assume their final expressive physiognomy. There is another reason I am behind the camera. Because otherwise it would be like going up to a girl and saying, “I love you but now he’s going to kiss you for me.”
Cineaste: Why do you use non-professional actors in your films?
Olmi: I use non-professionals for more or less the same reasons I choose a real landscape over one reconstructed in the studio. For Barry Lyndon, for example, Stanley Kubrick looked all over Europe to find the pastoral landscape and atmosphere that corresponded to his expressive needs. Onto this countryside—this choice that he made from the real—he grafted his professional actors. I prefer to continue such a relationship with reality, but not with professional actors. The real tree is continuously creative; the artificial tree isn’t. The fake tree responds to the creative needs of a fact (let us call it) already laid out and defined, and stops there. The real tree has continuing virtues: it responds to and reflects light in ever new ways. When you shoot in the studio, you’ve set up the lighting in advance; the lights are the same from beginning to end. You can shoot the same shot a hundred times and it will be the same. The real tree, on the other hand, is in continual evolution, modifying itself inside the situation, so much so that you become anxious lest you not be able to capture a particular moment when the light is changing. This, too, is very beautiful, because between the first shot and the fourth and the fifth there are variations—the shot is continually palpitating, in a manner of speaking. Thus it goes with actors, as well.
Carlo Cabrini and Anna Canzi as the newlyweds in I Fidanzati (1963)
Cineaste: So you’re saying that you can never get this same effect—of “palpitation”—from a professional actor.
Olmi: I have always felt in professional actors a bit of cardboard with respect to the great palpitating authenticity of the real character, who was not chosen, as professionals are, for their beautiful looks, or because they characterize a certain type. For instance, in a film about peasants I choose the actors from the peasant world. I don’t use a fig to make a pear. These people, these characters, bring to the film a weight, really a constitution of truth, which, provoked by the situations in which the characters find themselves, creates palpitations—those vibrations so right, so real, so believable, and therefore not repeatable. At the twentieth take the professional actor still cries. The real actor, the character taken from life, won’t do more than four repetitions. It’s like capturing a light: either you get it at that moment or you don’t get it at all. But it isn’t that he exhausts himself; he becomes something else. And my emotion lies also in following these things, at the moment they occur.
Cineaste: What’s the relationship of your non-professional performer to the reality from which he is drawn?
Olmi: Since all manifestations of life are life, it’s not that there is more life in a man, in one of my non-professionals, than in a frog or a tree. Life is life represented in all forms of expression. It’s so extraordinary and mysterious that we cannot know all these forms of life. Truth is the same thing. It’s not true, for example, that there is more truth in dialogue between real persons than in a poem or a piece of fiction. This depends on the presuppositions that have generated the words or the dialogue, the truth of one’s authentic emotions. False emotions are always discovered for what they are.
Some would say that the raw material of film is the image, but it’s not just the image. Today we have the image, sound, rhythm. All that is so simple, and at the same time it is complex, just like the unwinding or playing out of life itself. While sound is one moment here, and the image there, cinema is this extraordinary instrument that allows you to reproduce—but “reproduce” isn’t the exact word—to repropose some of those moments, some of the fractions of life, to select and compose them into a new mosaic through the editing. This operation consists of choice, image, sound, rhythm, synthesis.
In the case of my films, they contain a reality that is entirely taken from the real. Within this reality there is the echo of the documentary, but this is documentation that is critically penetrated and put at the service of the content presented.
Cineaste: Unlike many commercial directors, then, you see the cinema as a whole art, as an art unto itself.
Olmi: Yes, for in a certain sense, it’s a contradiction to use cinema as a substitute for literature, for music, for the theater. Even when we want to make a film full of conceptual ideas, it’s obvious we must make choices of representation from life—choices embodied in image, sound, and rhythm—to express those ideas. This means that the image, the music, the action aren’t by themselves sufficient vehicles to express a concept. They become significant, if at all, all together. And this is why I must express a concept or an idea through the dialogue between the main characters, shots of their faces, shots of how they move, in what situations, in what light, with what rhythm.
It’s not that one element repeats the other; but, just as in literature I choose this word rather than one that closely resembles it, so too in film I choose precisely that word because only that word can express the particular thing I want. Then I choose this image because it can say something better than anything else, and that sound because . . . You see? It’s as if the cinema were a language that, instead of having only words, has words, images, sounds—a language, in short, that is the language of life itself. We speak with gestures, with looks, with the very sound of the word as well as with its meaning. If I say “Good evening” to you in three different ways, the sound is different each time, as is the facial expression and therefore the meaning. This is cinema: nouns, adjectives, parts of sentences that belong to a special syntax and organization.
Cineaste: How does lighting figure in everything you’ve said so far, in your approach to the filming of reality?
Olmi: Beauty, emotions, must be revealed by indications that most resemble reality, not by artificial ones; and this certainly includes lighting. Why? So that the viewer’s approach to the screen isn’t protected or even deceived by devices, but that instead he succeeds in discovering by himself certain values, certain atmospheres, certain states of mind, through indications on the screen that are more those of life than those of theatricality, in the sense of spectacle.
When I do use artificial illumination, it’s because such illumination is necessary for the effects of the film stock; otherwise, sometimes the light doesn’t reach the film. But I also do this at the same time that I respect the natural environment as much as possible.
Cineaste: What about filters?
Olmi: I never use special filters to alter or in some way modify the tonalities of the natural atmosphere. For instance, when I shoot a close-up of the female lead in a romantic situation, I don’t use filters that normally a script would call for in order to make her seem commercially beautiful or alluring. To give you a technical example from shooting, when I film in a particular place, I don’t set up the framing and then, on the basis of that framing, establish the lighting. I first set up the kind of lighting that will allow me to shoot anywhere in that location.
Since I do the camerawork myself—again, I operate the camera, which is not the same thing as doing the lighting, for that is the job of my cinematographer—I know exactly what I have shot, so much so that often I don’t even have to look at the developed film, the rushes or the “dailies.” I just call the developer and if he says the negative is okay, it’s fine for me.
Cineaste: I am assuming you do your own editing.
Olmi: Of course. I am one who still works a great deal at the Movieola. For The Tree of Wooden Clogs, I was there for a whole year. The editing is the moment when all the emotions I felt when I began to think about the film, to conceive it, to choose the locations, the faces—all these things—the editing is the moment when everything comes together. You could say that during this time, I total my bill, I work out this choice or that synthesis, I sum up the emotion of all my emotions concerning this particular film. It’s not administrative work in the sense that I look at the script and say, “Okay, for this scene we need such-and-such a cut. And for that scene a close-up is required.” It’s a new creative moment, an extraordinary moment. This is because I rarely write systematic, organized screenplays; instead, I scribble lots of notes. When I’m shooting, I arrive on the set with all these notes—little pieces of paper filled with jottings about dialogue, atmosphere, faces—and there, on the set, I begin a new critical-creative phase—not critical-executive—as I think about the shots I want to take. The editing, naturally, is a continuation of this critical-creative process.
Cineaste: Where, or how, does you writing begin?
Olmi: First I write down the suggestion or indication of a subject or a story, then I divide it up into many chapters, many moments, like the movements of a concerto. And everything that comes into my mind regarding one of these chapters—at any moment when I am scouting locations or the like—I write down on pieces of paper and incorporate them into the chapter in question. Then, when it comes time to shoot, I organize the fraction of the story I am shooting in the most specific way possible. But when I’m there, shooting, I am often, let’s not say ready to change everything, but to add or to subtract as I see fit. That’s why I never have a “completed” script. This is how I like to shoot, how I frame my shots and film the action.
When I’m at the Movieola, I don’t look at any of the written stuff again. It’s a new event that is occurring at the editing table. So artistic creation, like romantic love, is always in the act of becoming; it’s always in motion, with no real stops. For when there are stops, one isn’t making love.
Cineaste: What do you think of the manipulative aspect of filmmaking, of how movies manipulate their audiences—all movies, possibly including your own?
Olmi: Everything is manipulated in a sense, everything: not only the cinema but the economy, religion, any of man’s activities can be corrupting—or saving. It really depends on the moral basis upon which you do these things, both in producing and in consuming them. Even the automobile can be corrupting or saving. If we use it to dangerously pass others, to give us a sense of power through the engine’s horsepower instead of through the horsepower of our own minds and imaginations, then the automobile can be a negative thing. For example, even neorealism degenerated at a certain point because it had become a fad, a fashion, a slick operation, and suddenly it was enough to qualify as a “neorealistic” director if you made a certain type of film, in a certain way—never mind its substance. This also happened to the French New Wave after a while, where if you didn’t make the camera jiggle when you were shooting a subject, somehow it didn’t seem “real.” But it’s real if you are real in front of what you are shooting, if the things that you are filming have an authenticity of their own. If not, you may as well work in the theater, which has its own aesthetic and reason for being apart from those of the cinema.
So unmasking the illusion is fine, if that’s what it takes to keep realism from degenerating into artifice. For, clearly, resemblance to reality is not reality. This is obvious—or it should be.
Olmi's Palme d'Or winning Tree of the Wooden Clogs (1978)
Cineaste: You are beginning to sound like a Brechtian in the cinema.
Olmi: Yes, but sometimes, even in Brecht’s aesthetic, this attempt to “disenchant” the spectator, to remind him that what he is seeing is theater, in itself reinforces the magical component of theater. When the grandmother tells her grandson a fairy tale, the story of Little Red Riding Hood with all the emotions inherent in it—the girl, the woods, the wolf—the grandmother’s face continually reminds the grandson that between the reality of the fairy tale and himself there is always his grandmother’s face. Nonetheless, sometimes the grandmother increases, by her very tone and expression, the fairy tale’s power of suggestion, its forcefulness. So this attempt to mediate between the magic of theatricality, or the illusion of reality, and the experience of the spectator—to disenchant or distance—can be reinforcing instead of the opposite.
In my opinion, however, neither takes away from or adds very much to the need man has to experience both the emotion of fear, at a child’s level, and the satisfaction of recognition, at an adult level, through the telling of the fairy tale. This is because we all want to share the feeling of not risking our safety, of not being in direct contact with the frightful event, but instead in the comforting arms of Grandmother, in the armchair at the cinema, or in our living rooms in front of the television set, which protects us and guarantees our safety. We even protect ourselves to the point that sometimes authentic reality—television news or documentary film, for instance—becomes transformed, in the safety of our homes, into its own kind of fairy tale, by means of which we see real events far removed from our consciences and our responsibility. In such a fairy-tale atmosphere, these events do not touch us physically or morally; we participate in them neither in body nor in soul. What we see “enchants” us, and we want to see it in the context of this enchantment. Indeed, we enjoy the fact that, yes, theater and cinema—especially the cinema—remind us of reality, but they remind us even more of the fairy tale. This is why we can watch with total concentration and excitement as people fight and kill each other on the screen, at the same time as we self-assuredly stir our coffee or eat our popcorn.
Cineaste: These things are hard to talk about in terms of classifications or designations—fairy tale, reality, disenchantment, empathy, etc.—this is something I have learned.
Olmi: Yes, and let’s take Brecht again as an instance. What does Brecht try to do? To “disenchant” us so that our critical faculty is always active. Thus he says, “Don’t be taken in by this. Be careful, I am acting; watch carefully so that you won’t be taken in.” I understand this critical distance. The spectator in the cinema or the theater feels fear; he tells himself that what he’s seeing is not real so that he can feel defended against it; and then he returns back to his fear. Such critical distancing is like Grandmother’s face: it’s Grandmother who is telling the story, and this is why her grandson can comfortably feel his fear. Such a theory as Brecht’s is important for the viewer, but what happens? Brecht doesn’t always achieve the result that he intended—in fact, he rarely does. Why? Because if you come with your own ability to critically distance yourself from an aesthetic event, to analyze it by yourself, sometimes you can be disturbed by someone who wants to “cue” your distancing or to distance you from what you’re seeing even more than you ordinarily would be. If, on the other hand, you don’t have any ability, on your own, to critically distance yourself from an aesthetic event—if you are over-emotional, let us say, and feel immediately stirred just by the exterior aspect of characters kissing or horses galloping—you can feel equally disenfranchised by someone who wants to pull you back from what you are seeing. Or the opposite: an emotional spectator can take the distancing devices so seriously that he becomes nothing but distanced from the artistic event, to the point that he has completely, and misguidedly, suppressed his emotional involvement in that event.
Participation in an artistic event, in short, is many-sided and more complex than most theorists make it out to be. One can participate in an emotion, for example, but, at the same time, one can force a series of “postponents” on one’s emotions that cannot be seen with the eyes and may not even be acknowledged by the conscious mind. People are different, and so is the camera: the same camera in the hands of ten different people shooting the same picture will, without question, take ten different pictures.
Cineaste: Could you speak a bit now about your early experiences of the cinema and your contact with American movies?
Olmi: I would very much like to do so. When, as a child, I went out to the cinema, I always felt good, and I felt especially good when I started seeing the differences between Hollywood cinema—global Hollywood cinema, if you will, not just the American variety—and the cinema of Italian neorealism, particularly the first films of Roberto Rossellini. I was between fifteen and seventeen years old at the time, and in those years I passed from the loving arms of my grandmother, who told me wonderfully suggestive fairy tales, to the bitter embrace of my father, who began to introduce me to life’s complexities and disappointments. The films of Rossellini mark this turning point for me. I remember leaving a screening of Paisan—there were only seven or eight of us in the audience, although the cinemas were always packed when they showed popular American movies like I’ll Be Yours or The Man I Love. I went to see Paisan probably because I had already seen all the other movies around. And strangely enough, this picture made me realize that it was time to tear myself way from my grandmother’s bosom. Leaving the movie theater after Paisan, I continued to experience the strong emotions I had felt while watching this film, because it was life that I had seen up on the screen—not movie formulas. And the cinema began to fascinate me, the idea of making films from a unique perspective but always in collaboration with others. Film, for me, is a way of being together with other people, both when I make films and when my films are in the company of their audience, the viewers.
I loved Hollywood movies very much at the time, but if today my grandmother came back and wanted to take me on her knee and tell me the story of Little Red Riding Hood, I wouldn’t like it, of course. This is what we call becoming an adult viewer.
Cineaste: I guess television didn’t enter into the picture for you in the late 1940s.
Olmi: No, not at all: I was too young and the medium was too young. But I do think that if people today would turn off their own television sets, film could still hold great value for them. In fact, if it weren’t for the cinema, contemporary society would be very disorganized. The cinema is a kind of comfort, especially when it’s a false mirror like that of Snow White’s grandmother. We want the cinema, that representation of ourselves which somehow says we are all fine and good, even when it presents the negative aspects of life. We are saved, you could say, by this filmic mirror that continually deceives us; we are its ultimate beneficiaries, we as a society, as a people, as individual human beings.
As far as I am concerned, however, I could live without cinema if they took it away from me. But I couldn’t live without my wife, my children, my friends—without people, especially those near and dear to me. This may seem like an infantile choice—your family or the flicks! (as you Americans like to call the movies)—but it’s worth keeping in mind in an era where much writing about film, and many movies themselves, seem to have less and less to do with human life as most of us experience it from day to day.
Cineaste: Well, there are a lot of businessmen who would disagree with your choice of family and friends over the cinema.
Olmi: Naturally. Since ours is a society—a global or international one at this point—that strains to achieve certain objectives, among which profit towers above all others, it’s obvious that the cinema as a mass medium, as a means of popular communication, is strongly and even intensely utilized to such an end: the attainment of profit, which need not be of the exclusively monetary kind. It could be ideological “profit” as well. Whole economies themselves initiate their own strategies for profit, by means of which the masses, within a grand design constructed by just a few, fall into a financial trap. But there comes a time when the economy revolts and turns against not only its protagonists, the industrial giants, but also against the workers themselves. Then there must be some kind of reckoning, some taking into account, if not a revolt itself, and this must involve everyone, including the “organizers of profit.” So it is with the cinema. At the beginning, when the audience saw a train on the screen rushing towards them, they hid under their seats; they were afraid, given film’s power of visualization.
Today, to give only an inkling of what has happened since, you have to stab a man in the stomach nine times to get the same effect. And everyone is paying a very high price, figuratively as well as literally, for this kind of exploitation. But I think that any event—social, political, economic, or artistic—produces certain negative effects that were meant to be produced by betraying certain ideas or principles. The only question is how long it will take for a revolt on the part of those who produce as well as those who consume such cinema. I am not an optimist at all costs, but I do believe in the will to survive of life itself, and that when we have come to the end of our cunning and cleverness to trick the good earth, and with it Saint Cinema, into producing more and more, the both of them will rebel against us. Film art—cinematographic suggestion, if you like—will refuse at a certain point to participate in its own corruption and even prostitution. This is not just a discussion involving the cinema, however, as I have tried to make clear, because the cinema is only one element in the general economic noise that surrounds us.
Cineaste: It is certainly true today that many an auteur—one who has the talent to make quality films—is strongly influenced by an anxiety for commercial success.
Olmi: Yes. For example, if their film doesn’t make millions more than another movie released at the same time, lots of directors feel inferior and even disconsolate—so much are they influenced by this logic of exaggerated profit. But the moment will come when we become so pained by the economic and artistic choices we have made that we will go back to looking at ourselves in the mirror, to looking into each other’s eyes sincerely, and finding there the reality we have sacrificed to the bitch-goddess of capitalistic success.
Bert Cardullo is Professor and Chair of Media and Communication at the Izmir Universiy of Economics in Izmir, Turkey. He is the author, editor, or translator of over thirty books, among them In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art and Vittorio De Sica: Director, Actor, Screenwriter. He writes regularly on contemporary cinema for such journals as the Yale Review and Cambridge Quarterly.
To buy Ermanno Olmi’s films click here
Cineaste,Vol.XXXIV No.2 2009
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