Keep Walking

Cammina cammina

Italy

1983

171 Min

Color

1.33:1

Italian

Currently 4.5/5 Stars.
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DP Ermanno Olmi, Gianni Maddaleni

CAST Alberto Fumagalli, Egidio Martellacci, Antonio Cucciarrè, Renzo Samminiatesi, Marco Bartolini, Fernando Guarguaglini, Anna Vanni, Giulio Paradisi, Simone Migliorini, Caterina Zizi, Claudio Camerini

SOUND Amedeo Casati, Danilo Moroni

Cannes (Out of Competition), New York

Synopsis

“Keep your eyes on the ground instead of the stars—you’ll always find something to eat there,” quotes a famished pilgrim in Olmi’s neorealist biblical epic, a combination of genres that only Olmi would attempt, let alone succeed at.

The film begins in a modern-day Italian village as loudspeakers advertise a Journey of the Magi pageant filled with “soldiers and kings, wise men and fools,” to be “reenacted by ordinary townsfolk.” Seconds later, the reenactment becomes the film itself, with each ordinary citizen now a soldier, wise man, or pilgrim in a procession led by the magus Mel(chior) to find the newborn King. No stage or set-bound re-creation of the Bible here; Olmi dragged the cast and crew on a months-long trek across the countryside in search of maximum naturalism, filming with available light and sound and ultimately attaining a heat-baked, dust-coated realism that would be astonishing for a contemporary documentary, much less a costumed epic set in biblical times. —bampfa.berkeley.edu

Director

Ermanno Olmi

Though not among Italy’s most internationally renowned filmmakers, Ermanno Olmi ranks as one of his country’s finest. He is known for making realistic films about the lives of average people that are infused with an almost austere subtlety and rare ambiguity that is sympathetic yet not overly sentimental. A native of Bergamo, Italy, he was the son of peasant factory workers. Following his father’s death during WWII, Olmi and his mother supported the family working in the Edison-Volta electric plant where Olmi worked as a clerk. While there, he became involved in company-sponsored filmmaking and theatrical projects. Most of the films he made for the company had industrial themes. Eventually, he came to head the company film department and over the next seven years made many documentaries, notably his last Edison-Volta film, Il Tempo Si E Fermato (Time Stood Still), in 1959. It was with this film, a chronicle of the relationship that gradually developed between an elderly nightwatchman… read more

Though not among Italy’s most internationally renowned filmmakers, Ermanno Olmi ranks as one of his country’s finest. He is known for making realistic films about the lives of average people that are infused with an almost austere subtlety and rare ambiguity that is sympathetic yet not overly sentimental. A native of Bergamo, Italy, he was the son of peasant factory workers. Following his father’s death during WWII, Olmi and his mother supported the family working in the Edison-Volta electric plant where Olmi worked as a clerk. While there, he became involved in company-sponsored filmmaking and theatrical projects. Most of the films he made for the company had industrial themes. Eventually, he came to head the company film department and over the next seven years made many documentaries, notably his last Edison-Volta film, Il Tempo Si E Fermato (Time Stood Still), in 1959. It was with this film, a chronicle of the relationship that gradually developed between an elderly nightwatchman and his assistant while stationed at the construction site of an Alpine dam, that evidenced the sensitivity that would characterize Olmi’s later works. The success of the film led Olmi to become a feature filmmaker. To that end, he traveled to Milan and co-founded the Twenty-Four Horses, an independent film co-op where he made his semi-autobiographical feature-film debut with Il Posto in 1961. Both this and his subsequent effort, I Fidanzati (The Fiancés) (1963), quickly earned him a good reputation and led him to make his one mainstream film, And There Came a Man (1965), an epic biography of Pope John XXIII. Unfortunately, this film, the only one in which he did not use nonprofessional actors, was a box-office flop and after making one more feature, Olmi became a television director. He did not make another feature until 1978. The film was The Tree of Wooden Clogs, a complex interweaving of the lives of five peasant families struggling to survive, and is considered Olmi’s finest work.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:105064~T1)

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