If anyone were asked to list some of the greatest and most important directors in the history of Italian cinema, some common replies might include: Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Pier Paolo Passolini. All of the aforementioned people have become household names among film enthusiasts as some of Italy's (and the world's) greatest directors - and rightfully so. If, however, you mentioned Ermanno Olmi to even someone of a wealth of cinematic knowledge, there is a strong possibility that they have not even heard of him, let alone seen his work. It is a travesty that Olmi has not entered the list of the most well known of Italy's greatest directors.

If you are unaware of his body of work (and I bet that would be most people, so don't feel ashamed), his films include I Fidanzati, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, and Il Posto. I myself admit that I was only introduced to his films a little while ago and these so far are the only films of his I've seen. When I watched them, however, I had the same feeling of finding a lost treasure as I did when seeing Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep. The reason Burnett's film resided in obscurity for so long was due to music rights. The reason for Olmi's lack of notice would be... honestly, I'm still trying to find that out.

I suppose the best way to express my appreciation of Olmi would be to simply go through each of his films that I have seen. I will begin with the first film of his that I was exposed to: I Fidanzati. A very simplified synopsis of the film would be that a factory worker goes away on business and constantly ponders over his strained relationship with his fiancee back home. Thinking back on the film, what struck me most of all was Olmi's poetic layout of the storyline, which I can best describe as dreamlike. I found a strong resemblance to the timeless, fluent style of Alain Resnais' Last Year At Marienbad. Every single shot has a composition that seems to have passed through the brain of a poet and likewise the editing elevates the stream of the film to the level of a thoughtful dream. Unlike Marienbad, I Fidanzati focuses almost purely on an emotional level rather than cerebral. Olmi shifts to any moment in time he feels like, flashing back to scenes that we may not be able to understand. Intellectually understand, that is; on an emotional plane every shot is put in the perfect place chronologically.

In a shift from the world of dreams to the world of rural Italy, Olmi's The Tree of Wooden Clogs has its heart in the same place Rossellini had his with Open City. Wooden Clogs documents a year in the lives of several families living on an Italian farm at the dawn of the 20th century. Nearly three hours long, Olmi spends a majority of his time simply viewing the daily chores and moments of the people. He does not enforce any strong message or moral at any moment through this epic as Rossellini did with Germany Year Zero, but lets us make our own opinions on the bittersweet lives of these people.

Then comes Il Posto, which I consider to be Olmi's greatest work and one of the best works of Italian (and world) cinema. The film tracks a young man just out of school and reluctantly applying for a job. In the testing phase of applying, he meets a young woman likewise after a job who catches his eye. Although it may seem like a contradiction, the film perfectly blends the unsentimental views of the Italian neorealists and the French romanticism of the likes of Truffaut. Even more unbelievable would be that Il Posto can easily stand as one of the best in either of those categories. The world in which the protagonist inhabits is presented so thoroughly that, to put it simply, it seems as though we are living in it. Unlike most of the other neorealist films (with the possible exception of de Sica's), there is a true emotional force just as persistent and important as the literal matter, if not more.

After writing about these three films, I feel that they do no justice to the mind of Ermanno Olmi and he can only be truly appreciated by seeing his films. With the recent passing of Antonioni and Gillo Pontecorvo, the masters of Italian cinema for the most part seem to have become deceased. There is still one, though. The only problem is that people need to seek out his films.