35mm

The Circumstance

La circostanza
Ermanno Olmi
Part of

Ermanno Olmi

June 14 - 26, 2019

The modernist tendencies that Olmi flirted with throughout the 1960s and ’70s reached their most intense and abstract in this fractured family portrait about the unraveling of a well-heeled Milanese family over the course of a fateful summer.

DIRECTOR
Ermanno Olmi
YEAR
1973
COUNTRY
Italy
RUNTIME
97 minutes
LANGUAGE
Italian with English subtitles
FORMAT
35mm
ORIGINAL TITLE
La circostanza

The modernist tendencies that Olmi flirted with throughout the 1960s and ’70s reached their most intense and abstract heights in this fractured family portrait. Told in an elliptical maze of flashbacks and jagged edits, The Circumstance charts the unraveling of a well-heeled Milanese family over the course of a fateful summer when, after witnessing a near-fatal motorcycle accident, the mother becomes obsessed with the young victim. Applying his keenly observant eye for social details to an upper-middle-class milieu, Olmi crafts a trenchant and empathetic look at the search for meaning amid the empty alienation bourgeois existence. 35mm print from Istituto Luce Cinecittà.

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