After the artistic triumphs of Il posto and The Fiancés, Olmi’s career took an unexpected turn with this dramatization of early passages in the life of Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Roncalli to a family of peasant farmers in northern Italy. One of the most neglected and misunderstood of Olmi’s films, A Man Named John is central to his work, revealing his spirituality and his feeling for peasant life as an infinite source of values. Olmi treats the task of bringing the life of a beloved spiritual leader to the screen with the same freedom he brings to all narrative cinema. Crucial to the film is Olmi’s use of Rod Steiger as a “mediator” between Roncalli’s world and the audience, appearing on screen in modern business attire as a polite witness to the early 20th-century events being reconstructed. When Steiger steps into the role of Roncalli, it is to widen the range of his mediation (for Olmi, perhaps, the essence of what cinema does) rather than to reclaim this radically unusual work for conventional narrative cinema. – Chris Fujiwara