The need to restore Il Posto arises from the fact that the original negative materials (picture and sound) are affected by the vinegar syndrome. It was thus necessary to take immediate action to preserve the original materials, seeking to maintain the extraordinary photographic quality of the original film. Currently, the few defects which the film possessed from its outset, such as several deep scratches made during shooting, have been left intact. It’s an initiation: he’s from farm country, because he still lives in Meda on his father’s farm, who continues to live in the country despite the fact that he works in a factory. In front of his house, where stalls had stood until just a few years prior, people have now starting parking their mopeds and Fiat Seicentos. So, this boy from Meda, with the odor of the stalls still clinging to him, goes to Milan to work in an office, he arrives in the big city, the city with the metro, and he sees a beautiful Milanese girl… it’s an initiation.

Ermanno Olmi

Through the hazy framework of his story, Olmi attains a crystal clear vision, he traces a tenuous yet sure pathway, through which he arrives at the full representation of a lovingly studied world. The film proceeds by rapid signs, slender brush strokes which almost seem carelessly placed, but which instead respond to a premeditated conceptual construct, to which the affectionate participation of emotions is not however foreign. The film’s most enchanting surprise – though relative for those who know Olmi’s documentary work, his constant search, through great industrial mechanisms and elaborate technical structures, for the simple heart of man – consists in the naturalness and, we can say, the happiness with which the light and sparsely diffused outlines of the design come together into a single portrait; the infinite, almost furtive remarks, many of which seem to belong to the sphere of psychotechnics which the director good-naturedly satirizes, reveal themselves as essential elements in the narrative composition. The gray hero of the film emerges through a similar process, gaining an identity and an importance to the degree that his individuality comes into contact, and clashes with, the anonymous automatism of the world he wants to become part of, but which he will ultimately allow to absorb him; yes, he appears fully defined in the same moment in which his flattening is complete, he becomes totally familiar and brotherly right when his placement within a tiny box of the entire workings becomes inevitable.

«Bianco & Nero», n 9, 1961