Il Posto.

When I watched Il Posto recently I kind of felt a Planet of the Apes sense of revelation. You know how the Statue of Liberty was there the whole time? Well Il Posto has been here the whole time, through my ruminations on Bujalski and Bahrani, beyond the Italian Neorealism years which I often find so melodramatic, and existing even as a precursor to Kieslowski. Like Kieslowski, Olmi is a documentary filmmaker turned narrative filmmaker, and likewise Olmi brought into his narratives the sensibilities of his documentaries.

It's become obvious to me that if you focus your narrative intensely upon your subject with complete honesty and a passion for accuracy, and disregard purposefully whatever modern conventions of filmmaking are prevailing, you can create a film that's wholly engaging and dramatically convincing. When you strip the mechanics of storytelling from a film, your film can become truly alive. The protagonist of Il Posto walks among the living indeed: he walks in a real Milan, he applies to the actual Edison Company of Milan, takes real aptitude tests, converses with his bosses, and, most important to me, his emotions by way of Olmi's direction are depicted authentically and without exaggeration.

It's a mellow film, and I think the pace matches the personality of the mellow protagonist. I think it's edited so the story evolves in the speed of his thoughts. A really great unique quality of Olmi, compared to most other filmmakers in the same vein, including contemporary filmmakers, is that he allows poetry to escape into his frames. Take for example the first scene with the boss:

The camera is of course looking down on Domenico from the elevated perspective of the boss, which conveys his insecurity in this moment and also the boss' dominance, but the framing doesn't suffer from what I think could be an unnatural embellishment. Instead it heightens the sense of Domenico's anxiety, also achingly present in the actor's face, and compliments rather than overpowers the scene. What the camera does is act as a psychological additive, like was common from cinematography back in the day and is very uncommon today, but it does to an equal degree as the film's scene is operating, so that it blends into the narrative, suggests greater ideas existing beneath the scene, and builds on Olmi's true Milan. The camera is uncovering more truth without suggesting a falsely dramatic realm. That's a thine line I think, and it's really difficult to navigate.

What it is also means is that Olmi is interested in every aspect of his film's reality. The total experience of the Edison Company and not the singular experience of Domenico. His intentions and their execution allow me to understand what Domenico is entering into. I can understand 1960's Milan from 00's Portland. I can understand an entire room of 1960's Milan people.


In this scene Domenico has entered a room already mostly full of people waiting to take the Edison admissions tests. This view captures both the tension of the moment and the weight of the pressure, the sense of Domenico's isolation, and the feelings of everyone in the frame with him. The camera will move and more people are yet to arrive, but even in this one shot you can wonder what the two seated are thinking about, why the standing man is staring that way; you wonder about Domenico's fate, share his nervousness, and enter the politics of a waiting room, Edison Company, Milan, 1961. Olmi has Domenico acting, the rest of the room acting, and the camera acting: this is why his film presents a whole reality with a complete truthfulness.