Blue Planet

Directed by Franco Piavoli

Franco Piavoli’s is a cinema of synecdoche: brief snippets of life – farmers fighting over a foot of land, a traveler conjuring memories of home – stand for all human experience, and massive narratives boil down to an economic symbol. In the director’s feature-length debut, the 1981 pastoral documentary Blue Planet, water becomes shorthand for the resilient cycle of life. It carries Piavoli’s minutely ambitious film through the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, beginning and ending in a frozen riverbed.

Shot over three years and brilliantly honed in editing booths and mixing studios, Blue Planet combines epic aspirations and storytelling restraint in a way subsequent micro-documentaries like Microcosmos forgo. Blue Planet unfolds in tight close-ups and delicate pans shot in and around a farmhouse. The location (near Piavoli’s Italian hometown) is virtually irrelevant: snapshots of nature and agricultural life resonate universally.

Still, the film’s intimate yet objective style provides a quaint charm that keeps it from lapsing into longing for a sentimentalized past. Moments after capturing the otherworldly (and rubbery-sounding) mating rituals of snails identical rhythmically paced close-ups show the film’s first humans, a couple having sex in the same field. The poetic transition from microscopic to human scale establishes a basic natural connection, but Piavoli wisely keeps up the pace, moving on to more distinctly human rituals.

Despite modestly beautiful cinematography, Piavoli’s editing and sound design set him apart. Often, watching his films is like hearing a great DJ: catchy samples from disparate synchronous sources build on one another, pleasurable connections are laid out for the viewer to make, and a cyclical rhythm runs through.

A similar review appeared in The L Magazine.