Il pianeta azzurro

THE BLUE PLANET of Franco Piavoli is one of the great personal cinematic testaments to the beauty of planet earth. The movie has no dialog and is filled with the sounds of nature and the images of its wonders, selected in a very unique and idiosyncratic way but in a way that is more subdued than Godfrey Reggio's KOYAANISQATSI or POWAQQATSI. It casts a hypnotic spell as we watch glaciers, rushing of water, thunderstorms, the effect of wind on sand dunes, children at play, a farmer's domain. With the motif of the changing of the seasons, there are moments of everyday life…love, work, sleep, and the slow but relentless passage of time. It is a symphony of nature, not a documentary, but a love-poem to the planet, and it reminds us of how much reverence we owe it. The magnificent photography was by the film's director/creator, Franco Piavoli. Veteran composer Ennio Morricone provided the music. The movie has been highly praised by many critics and filmmakers. Ermanno Olmi, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Andrei Tarkovski were particular partisans of the work. The film won a top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and was shown for over a year at one Roman theatre, the Azzurro Scipioni, which takes part of its name from the film's title. The movie had its American premiere at the Lumiere in San Francisco in 1984.

Franco Piavoli's environmental visual poem is the cinematic equivalent of New Age music, presenting a gentle, meditative collage of ambient sights and sounds meant to be absorbed more than watched. It's an idyllic vision of peace and plenty synchronized to the cycles of nature, with no scripted dialogue and, except for a brief moment, no orchestrated music to interrupt the flow of imagery. The setting is an Italian farm where a full year of seasons pass over the course of a single day, but there's a chronology to Piavoli's editing which suggests an even grander scale of evolution, from the genesis of springtime to the winter of extinction: water bugs to amphibians to Homo Sapiens. The effect is not unlike watching ice melt or grass grow: a slow, calming experience that can nevertheless be the ultimate in tedium to viewers not prepared for what to expect.