Il posto shows what magic can happen when a good documentary unit with an imaginative director try shooting a feature film using non-actors in their natural settings.
Protagonist Domenico Cantori (Sandro Panseri) is a ringer for Franz Kafka. The large, impersonal interior spaces of the company where he is trying to land his first job, no less its many eccentric employees, are like something from Kafka’s imagination.
However, the camera respects Domenico’s point of view—it is hard to imagine a more alien world to a teenager than that of the middle-aged adult—and takes it all in as the world of wonder it must be to this eighteen year old taking his first tentative steps into what he seems slowly to suspect could become permanent adulthood.
One senses Domenico’s mood as he sits at the window of a commuter trolley car on the way to work, a devil etched in the glass over his left shoulder. Photographer Lamberto Caimi’s camera has the good documentary qualities of being in the right place at the right time, watching steadily, carefully, attentive to detail, and respecting its subjects’ space.
The story line is simple. Domenico is among a group of applicants selected to compete for entry-level positions at a Large Company. It is a chance at secure, lifetime employment that his unsophisticated parents strongly encourage because they never had it. In their view, Domenico would be set for life if the company hired him.
Domenico meets another applicant, a young woman, Antonietta ‘Magalì’ Masetti (Loredana Detto), during the testing process. Both are hired: Domenico starts in the mailroom, Magalì in the secretarial pool. Domenico’s scenes with Magalì intimate an up side for adulthood, but this is no less tentative and uncertain to him than the prospect of spending the rest of his life working at this company.
During the lunch break on testing day, Domenico and Magalì window-shop and slowly get farther away from where they are supposed to return before 3 p.m. When a bystander remarks to another that it is 2:30, Domenico takes Magalì’s hand more as a child than an adult, and they run hand-in-hand all the way back. It is a lovely little scene, fresh and easy to believe—just one of many scenes which show that director Ermanno Olmi knows where to look to find the qualities he wants.
In contrast, Domenico goes to the company’s New Year’s Party—Magalì told him that she was not sure her mother would let her go out and is not there—where he is surrounded by older adults drinking and starting to misbehave. When he is promoted to an office job, he sees people older than his parents behave more childishly than he and his younger brother.
Olmi said that he based the film on his own experience of coming to work for The Edison Company/Edisonvolta S.p.A. at its Milan headquarters at age eighteen in 1949. But rather than the clerical worker Domenico portrays, Olmi was hired as an actor. In the early 1950s, Olmi persuaded management to let him start a film unit to make documentary films about the company and its electricity-generating projects.
Edison provided the space, camera equipment and film stock. Between 1952 and 1964, Olmi made documentaries for the company that featured its activities and projects. He also told the stories of Edison’s people working on its projects.
But he wanted to do more than this. On weekends and evenings, the filmmaker, with the company’s permission, shifted his emphasis from the company to the workers, using company locations as a backdrop to the lives of real people. He shot several feature films out of his shop using his regular film crew and non-actors.
Il posto was released initially in the United States in 1963 as The Sound of Trumpets, referring to a moment in the film when Domenico’s mother tells him to turn out the light and go to sleep because if he stays up too late, ‘not even the trumpets will wake you’—an Italian idiom probably derived from Scripture.
In addition to a high definition digital transfer of the original print, The Criterion Collection DVD set released in 2003 includes Reflecting Reality: Making Il posto, a 2002 interview with Olmi and Tullio Kezich, a friend and occasional collaborator.
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