Il tempo si è fermato

In winter, there are only two guardians who have the task to check a huge dyke near the Adamello. One of them has to go back to the valley for a few days and the man who has to take his place needs to go back to his family because he became a father. A young student offers to go, so he can study for his exams in the tranquillity of that place. That is how two completely different men find themselves there, in the loneliness of the mountains. Their relationship is at first based on mutual awkwardness, but then they start to feel at ease. The boy listens to what his colleague has to teach him from his long life experience. The story is carried out by little daily events, by gestures, smiles and never ended words. The boy is hit by a sudden fever, because of a snowstorm, and the older guardian takes great care of him. In the peace of the mountains, the two of them find the chance of a friendship that would have never been possible in any other circumstance.
Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

I discovered cinema through something that was quite upsetting for me: the contrast between two forms of cinema, the American cinema that used to put the audiences on their feet and Neorealism. I discovered Neorealism during a screening of Paisà by Rossellini. I was impressed. (...)
I started shooting documentaries on free time activities: fishing contests, skiing, trips... Those documentaries were my gym. After this phase I moved on to something more challenging: I filmed the different phases of the construction of a dyke, of a power station and so on. Little by little, I realised that I was more interested in the faces of those men at work than in the research phase. (...)
I learnt the job by standing at the editing machine, going to the cinema, looking around.
First I felt the need of talking about the environment, the noises, deleting the music that used to be all over a documentary, it used to fill them with rhetoric. In some of them, for example Tre fili fino a Milano, there is already the human voice, apart from that of the speaker. So I got to make Il tempo si è fermato, which is the first and I think the only film completely live-recorded. (...) The story comes from several experiences. These construction sites gave me the chance to meet extremely different human beings. So I used this situation, which seemed appropriate for those years, to compare not only two kinds of Italians, the North and the South, or the working class and the middle-class, but above all two generations that have to meet to exchange their experiences. (...)
It was the time of the “cinemascope”. The American cinema was triumphing with this huge screen, in which thousands of horses were running, a screen that was always full of things. So I accepted the alliance with the big screen, which gave me more possibilities in terms of choice of the landscape, the mountains, the dyke, those big spaces and huge horizons. But at the same time it was, maybe with a little arrogance, a challenge: filling the screen with a different kind of substance, not with a quantity of objects, but with the quality of people. (...)
In Il tempo si è fermato, how could the meeting between those two men happen? It was 1959, the years of “economic recovery”, there was a rush towards work, the markets were increasing, Italy was back in the flow of the industrial countries of the world, there was wonderful manpower, we could produce a lot: there were no breaks. So how could they meet? Occasionally, in this strange game of work that, like a river that flows, sometimes creates counter-currents near the shore... where the water stops for a moment, while in the middle there is the impetuosity of the current. They meet in this peaceful area, an old man and a young boy, whose father is probably an old labourer, a young proletarian with the seed of the culture, who’s headed to university, the worker who wants to become part of the middle-class.
He reads an economy book, while the old man reads “Cuore”, a book he had already read at school. What kind of meeting is it? Is there a winner, a loser? No, there isn’t. If you want, the winner is the conscience of those two men who finally respect each other for who they are, who feel that they both have something to give. Not a comparison between generations, but an exchange of experiences.

Traduzione in inglese Francesca Sala – English translation Francesca Sala

Regia, soggetto e sceneggiatura: Ermanno Olmi.
Director of photography: (totalscope): Carlo Ballero.
Editor: Carla Colombo.
Music: Pier Emilio Bassi; suono in presa diretta.
Collaboratori artistici: Walter Locatelli, Gian Piero Viola.
Cast and characters: Natale Rossi (il vecchio), Roberto Seveso (il giovane), Paolo Quadrubbi.
Production company: Sezione Cinema Edison Volta.
Organizzazione generale: Alberto Soffientini.
Italian distribution: Lux.