/ Director
Ermanno Olmi
/ Cast
Loredana Detto, Sandro Panseri
/ Length
93 min.
/ Year
1961
/ Sponsor
San Diego Italian Film Festival
Date :: Thursday, March 25, 2010
Time :: 7:30 pm
Location :: UltraStar Cinemas Flower Hill
Cost :: $7.50
Tickets :: Advance tickets available at the Box Office
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Date :: Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Time :: 7:00 pm
Location :: MoPA
Suggested donation :: $5.00
Language :: Italian with English subtitles
Il Posto
The Job
With Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto, the second film in our series, we remain in Milan, where Il Generale della Rovere ends. Il posto, however, opens at the outskirts of the city, where the protagonist, Domenico lives with his family, in a rural house that is still in the countryside but that we sense will soon be eaten up by the inexorable urban development of Italy’s economic boom. Il posto, though, refers not so much to a place, as to a position, a job, the in/famous “posto fisso,” or secure “job for life.” Young Domenico is headed to the city center to participate in a job selection on the part of a giant corporation with few openings available. Olmi is skilled at following his character through the labyrinthine meanders of the company with its long and anonymous corridors, and at observing the seeming senseless tasks that the candidates are required to perform, a foreshadowing of the repetitive years that lie ahead for the lucky ones who will be hired. The director’s attention to details of sight and sound, and to the movement or stillness of the environment also comes from his autobiographical experience as an industrial director. Indeed, Olmi began his career, like so many other Italian filmmakers, as a documentarian. In the 1950s he worked for Edisonvolta, a major electric corporation, as director of its on-site theatre company. It was Olmi himself to recommend to Edisonvolta that they acquire film production equipment to document their work. Il posto was shot in the real location of the company’s headquarters during the weekend, using a cast of non-professional actors. Needless to say the company had second thoughts about the film and its portrayal of the work environment once they got to see it.
In Il posto, Olmi poetically captures the epochal changes that Italy was undergoing in the early 1960s, from a mainly agrarian country, to an industrial one. As Domenico observes in wonderment the attractions of the city, its shopping windows, cafes and dance halls, he also has the time to fall in love with a co-worker – played by Olmi’s wife – during the span of a brief encounter. While Olmi details the mechanical and tedious tasks associated with a job in a giant corporation, he also pointed out that life, and not simply work, was really all conducted inside the industry, including socializing, love, entertainment, like in a big extended family. In capturing the fragments of Domenico’s job-hunting experience, Olmi is never condescending nor his cinematic style assumes that this will be the protagonist’s fate forever. Rather, the subtle gaze of Domenico, his careful observation of his co-workers and of the environment, not only testify to a veritable “poetry of life” and attention to detail, but also imply that more may be in store for him. Olmi shows us that far from being dull, ordinary lives are in many ways extraordinary. It is no wonder that his black-and-white photography was so influential on other directors, including Martin Scorsese, who quotes Il posto indirectly in Raging Bull.
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