Ermanno Olmi's filmography became a fixture at the Venice Film Festival almost immediately. The director was first at the Lido in 1958 with some of his earliest documentaries, created for the Edison Volta cinema section, Venezia Cittŕ Moderna and Tre fili fino a Milano, and the following year with his debut feature film, Time Stood Still, presented in the Informativa section of the 20th Venice Film Festival, and winner of the San Giorgio award from the Fondazione “G. Cini”. Since then, Olmi has received many awards in Venice: in 1961 The Job won the Critics' Week award and the OCIC prize from the Catholic critics; in 1987 Long Live the Lady! was awarded the Silver Lion; and in 1988 The Legend of the Holy Drinker received the Golden Lion as well as the Fipresci award.
To mark the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement being bestowed on Ermanno Olmi during the 65th Venice Film Festival, as part of the "Real Cinema" series, Fetrinelli will release the documentaries produced by the master during his first years of working at Edison. They are extraordinary auteur films, practically unseen, which were produced in the 1950s as industrial documentaries. They explore the transformation of Italy in a powerful and poetic manner, with its deep-seated rural past, and yet marked by industrial modernisation.
Biographical notes
Ermanno Olmi was born in Bergamo on the 24th July, 1931. His father was a railwayman, and in 1933 the family moved to Milan. He spent his childhood between the working-class world of the Milan suburbs and the rustic atmosphere of the Bergamo countryside. At the end of the war, he was taken on at Edison where, in 1951, he was behind a film report documenting the major feats of hydroelectric constructions (Olmi would return to the Edison Board Room to film a scene for the film Tickets over fifty years later).
In the following years (1953-1961), he made around forty documentaries, including La Diga del Ghiacciaio, La Pattuglia di Passo San Giacomo, Tre Fili fino a Milano, Michelino 1aB (with the script written by Goffredo Parise), Manon Finestra 2 and Grigio (with a script by Pier Paolo Pasolini), Un Metro Lungo Cinque which, during the award-giving ceremony at the Industrial Cinema Festival in Turin, led Rossellini to remark about Olmi: "This way of film-making means discovering the world." His scrutiny of the poetry of gestures and the faces of ordinary folk provided the inspiration for his debut fiction feature film, Time Stood Still (1959), the story of a friendship between a city-dwelling boy and the elderly guardian of a dam in the upper valley of Adamello, filmed with live sound recording and with non-professional actors.
In 1961, at the Venice Film Festival, he won the Critics' Week award and the OCIC prize with the film The Job (which also went on to win the David di Donatello for Best Director, as well as numerous prizes on the international festival circuit). The film tells of the aspirations and problems of two young men taking their first tentative steps in the world of work with a direct and pressing style thanks to the use of hand-held cameras. The writing of the screenplay was undertaken by Olmi with his friend and partner Tullio Kezich, who was also the “content manager” of the film production company, "22 Dicembre", founded by Olmi in 1961, which in the following years would go on to produce various films by Lina Wertmüller, Eriprando Visconti and the first TV film by Roberto Rossellini, The Iron Age.
In subsequent years, Olmi directed other films on the world of labour: The Fiancés (1963), presented at Cannes, on the industrialisation of southern Italy by the major northern companies, in which we perceive the initial hardships of a society undergoing change too rapidly due to the economic boom, and One Fine Day (1968), in which he explores bourgeoisie social climbing, a process that destroys all emotions, personified in an old man with a dissipated soul. These are all works which link him to the industrial literature of Volponi, Bianciardi and Ottieri. Besides labour-based subjects, Olmi directed a homage to Pope John XXIII, And There Came a Man (1965), with Rod Steiger and Adolfo Celi, a film that concentrated on the man rather than the pontiff, and that was presented out of competition at Venice. Without making compromises to the commercial cinema, he continued with his solitary reflections on the degradation of human relations and on the value of sentiments, even in his films made for the state-owned TV network (The Scavengers, 1969, from a story by his friend Rigoni Stern; In the Summertime, 1971; The Circumstance, 1974, which won a special mention at the San Sebastián Festival).
