At the center of Ermanno Olmi’s sophomore feature, Il Posto (1961), is Domenico (Sandro Panseri). He is a boy from a small Lombardian town who arrives in Milan with hopes of scoring a low-paying but secure job at a non-descript accounting firm. His age is never specified in the film, but he looks scarcely old enough to drive, let alone hold a pencil-pushing desk job. What makes his youthful demeanor so obvious is not how his small stature carries his slightly oversized suit, or perhaps how much older his colleagues look, but the naïve glint in his eyes. Though he executes all his aptitude tests and office tasks competently, his earnest farm-boy sensibility comes through in every action and reaction.
This early film may appear strikingly different from the rest of Olmi’s features, a body of work that includes religious peasant-centered narratives like in The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) and period war epics like The Profession of Arms (2001). But in the words of the late film historian P. Adams Sitney, for whom Il Posto is being programmed in memoriam at Anthology Film Archives, Olmi’s films generally “center upon an individual worker caught between employment and an individual quest to assert dignity through labor.” Il Posto confronts this conflict with much of the same cinematic language as neorealist luminaries like Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini did. Shooting on location around Lombardy and in Milan, Olmi unpretentiously captures the beats of midcentury Northern Italian life. An economic reality of non-stop reconstruction exists in conjunction with mundane fantasies of escape, in this case embodied by the brief interludes Domenico spends with his free-spirited co-worker Antoinetta.
However, unlike some of its neorealist predecessors, the film is divorced from most visual markers of wartime devastation. There are no children playing on bombed-out rubble, no lines of men clawing at day labor contracts, and violence—except for two gruesome headlines being read out at the café—is not a fixture in its urban quotidian. Here, the destitution that defined the Italian cinema of the decade prior has been replaced by a ceaseless industrial modernity. Tranquil village life quickly fades into the distance as the hulking steam engine rips Domenico from his native Meda, replacing the expansive pastures with rows of automobiles parked outside of sterile office spaces, cranes hanging over cement mixers, and stationary clerks hunched over piles of paperwork. Every now and again, moments of fleeting youth are allowed to slip through the cracks. Viewers are left to ponder if these small acts of rebellion will be enough to confront an oncoming future of empty corporate conformity.
Il Posto screens tonight, September 28, at Anthology Film Archives on 35mm as part of the series “P. Adams Sitney (1944 - 2025).”
