“De Santis’s work offers above all a decisive key for the decodification of the entire neorealist universe, and allows us to orient ourselves in the molten mass of so many diverse poetries which seemingly take turns at dominating the movement”
- Carlo Lizzani
When Non c'è pace tra gli ulivi released in the fall of 1950, the standard language of neorealism had already been (critically) fortified, introduced as a new guardian for a cinema of fact, of which the former would prove a veritable disruption, which even the most superficial of glances at the on-screen drama would confirm. An arduous, and consequently futile, investigation into the specious uniformity of neorealism - coincidentally described by De Santis himself as definitively anti-fascist - this shall not be; nevertheless, what remains important of Olive Trees’s, and by extension, De Santis’, relationship with the avowed, is that it betrays a multifacetedness of the so-called movement hitherto thought coherent.
The summary is a short one: young shepherd Francesco Domencini returns home to the hills of Ciocara, in the Fondi regio, after having been held a prisoner of war during World War II. He finds a new hierarchy; local landowner Bonfiglio dominates the area and has stolen both Francesco’s sheep and girlfriend Lucia, with fellow shepherds silent about the matter. When he goes to steal his sheep back, he is sentenced for the crime, seeing as Bonfiglio has suborned all witnesses and is in cahoots with the judge. Francesco eventually escapes, seeking revenge, in which he is aided by other shepherds and peasants, who grow slowly conscious of their position as exploited. Bonfiglio is forced to run, but the grandeur of the landscape eventually catches up with him.
As he himself professed in an interview, with Olive Trees, and its conspicuous form, De Santis had “ennobled” the traditional peasant drama, not terribly unlike Visconti’s operatization of I Malavoglio just 2 years earlier; Olive Trees is inspired by Sicilian folk tales of exceptional, near statue-esque characters, delineated into good and evil according to popular retellings. Accordingly, characters usually eschew eye contact in favor of direct communication with the camera, speaking toward it in highly solemn, direct dialogue that, intentionally, leaves little room for speculation. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in Vallone and Bose’s first (re-)encounter; a beautiful ballet, whence both partners briefly alternate between object of desire and agent. The camera, as Adriano Apra writes “ places itself purposely as a character between the other characters.”, characters who move toward the edges of a sharply defined cinematic frame, but never outside its reach, as if, in some Homeresque digression, tying itself only to what is visible. Aligned with its bucolic origins, the frame pairs characters with a wide landscape, shots in which the two appear as inseparable: the person, here the shepherd exists as an integral part of the nature he inhabits, a symbiosis only broken by the villain Bonfiglio, who almost hides inside of close-ups, or within his shack, ignorant of the above, but ultimately affected and undone by what Antioni Vitti observes as a “mythical atmosphere” in which “the improbable and the forces of nature that come to the aid of the hero””.
Implicit in the narrative of Olive Trees are the then contemporaneously brooding land disputes that had beleaguered farmers all throughout the post-war period, which led to so-called reverse strikes, “Sciopero a rovescio”, where farmers, as a response to unyielding landowners, occupied, and cultivated, land without prior agreements or contracts, thereby forcing a reaction, one later ruled in favor of the farmers. In this context, Bonfiglio is all but a clear allusion to the avowed. A direct telling of the scriopero a rovescio this is however not; De Santis intended it for a different, never fully materialized film, the remnants thereof still visible in his sole Yugoslavian film “La strada lunga un anno”.
Beyond the mere arrangement of characters along the frame like notes in a symphony, De Santis creates a cinema that adheres to ideas of montage, Welles and Renoir’s crisp depth of focus, and Gramscian thought appertaining to popular culture, a cinema Andrea Martini describes as a crossing between Renoir with Pudovkin, and Sternberg with Lang. Olive Trees, in particular, is quite musical in its editing, musical not in the same way of flawless Hollywood counterparts, but rather the Cavalleria rusticana of Pietro Mascagni, tantamount in intensity and lilt to a campfire concert, which returns us to the opening postulate of an ennobled peasant drama. The late 1950s saw the eventual demise of the peasant film, with the definite arrival of the bourgeois subject - alienated and inert - courtesy of Fellini and Antonioni, Bologini and Bertolucci, Risi and Salce. Still, the lineage of the peasant drama may be drawn from Visconti, over Germi, to De Santis, and eventually Olmi, a line in which Olive Trees forms a crucial, if presently forgotten, entry; a cinema of anti-fascism, of anti-exploitation, of the possibility of combining sublimis with hublimis.