The outgoing employee. Ermanno Olmi’s “Trilogy of Labor” (1959-1963) and its relation to Edisonvolta’s corporate cinema

Abstract

Ermanno Olmi, one of the key filmmakers of modern Italian cinema, began his career as a commissioned filmmaker for one of the country’s most important hydroelectric companies, Edisonvolta, for which he made many promotional films between 1952 and 1961. During those years, he also took his first steps into auteur cinema, with three fiction feature films set in the corporate world, which quickly became known as the “Trilogy of Labor” (1959-1963). Using the tools of historiography and textual analysis, this article argues that Olmi’s corporate films are the fundamental creative basis for his trilogy. The comparative analysis of the three feature films will be cross-referenced with that of the corporate films in order to trace Olmi’s authorial evolution, highlight the stylistic and discursive differences between these two overlapping stages of his filmography, and to gauge the filmmaker’s ambivalent relationship with Edisonvolta.