Il pianeta azzurro

«In 1978, the Agosti-Bellocchio-Rulli-Petraglia group had made La macchina cinema for RaiDue, which showed how, outside institutional venues, there were free, independent authors. Agosti, who is from Brescia, knew my short films, which were included in the program. So the then director of Rai2, Massimo Fichera, proposed that I work again. Silvano Agosti seized the opportunity and brought me a 35 mm Arriflex and a moviola, forcing my fears and reluctance. I would do what I wanted. And I wanted to remake Stagioni, which had remained my first love: the plants, the stones, the waters, the geometries of the ice, the mystery of the inorganic world around us, the continuity between non-life and life. Obviously with an articulate discourse, incorporating my naturalistic and scientific readings, classical memories, Democritus, Lucretius, their organic vision of matter, and a complex composition using my pictorial and musical interests».

«I started with the idea of feature length and exclusive use of visual sensations, natural sounds and noises. The “field” work, however, was part of a definite expressive design. I wanted to pursue three narrative planes. On the one hand, the path of a day from sunrise to sunset. Il pianeta azzurro opens in the morning and closes with dusk and mists. But, also, summer corresponds with noon, spring with sunrise, winter with early morning, and autumn with sunset. I wanted to give, that is, the feeling of the passage of a year. So: overlapping two narrative planes, two temporal planes: a day, a year. At the same time, I wanted to suggest cosmic time. Exactly, the passage of millennia, the hypothesis of dilated time that we have, without being able to affirm it because we go astray. We do not have the necessary parameters, however, we have the feeling, the sensation or at least the need for it. This was the underlying structure.

I am not a scientist, nor do I want to be a documentarian. When there is the battle between the spider and the dragonfly, the squeals, very high-pitched, almost pained squeals are not theirs, but those of a peacock. Because no matter how much you use a very powerful microphone, you would never pick up “authentic” screeches of that kind. I try to express certain things by the means that I think are most functional and consistent with the underlying discourse and an underlying ethic. By resorting to that sonority, that “dialogue,” I was pressing to express a situation of aggressor and aggressed.

Just as then, taking a proceeding to paroxysm, to emphasize human aggression, I cut out some syllables to the screams of the squabbling peasants. They are not understandable: their sound expressiveness counted. It should be added that all the human situations in the film are not documentary situations in the strict sense, but are reconstructions. None of those men, those peasants were caught from the real thing. They all lent themselves to repeating the gestures of their own lives or interpreting situations that did not belong to them. There was from the beginning a connection of the documentary technique and that of fiction. There is, in my opinion, a situation of continuity between one genre and the other, even if the film industries impose bulkheads. Sometimes the choice has to be precise, at other times it can continually trespass from one channel to another, without even posing the problem. It was not a problem whether I was making a documentary or a feature film or science fiction or poetry or science fiction: the only problem was to convey this little philosophy of mine, this experience of life, of history».

«The Einaudi Encyclopedia, under the heading of landscape states, “nature as seen through a culture,” I think it is an interesting definition, although it is a summary of a vision. I start from the consideration that the distinction between nature and culture is a relative distinction, because culture is also a natural product. Nature in itself already modifies the landscape, through geological evolution, earthquakes, erosions, etc., and nature also produced evolution from the inorganic world to the organic world, all the way to man, who is a natural product himself, one of the natural products that continue to modify nature in profound ways.

Thus, for me, there is no clear distinction between nature and culture because culture is a manifestation of nature. However, it is true that for the sake of simplicity and an inability of our mind and language, for convenience, we maintain the distinction between the two terms. I would say that landscape is given by nature modified by culture, it is a synthesis of culture and nature. In Il pianeta azzurro undoubtedly there is landscape. In fact, I would say there is this particular landscape: the transition from a natural landscape in the strict sense to a man-made, cultural landscape. The first shots are images on ice that are also meant, in their ambiguity, to evoke images of galaxies. We start from the inorganic world and move on to the plant world, then the animal world. We are within what is meant by nature, only when man intervenes do we speak of culture. It is no coincidence that I show man the moment I introduce agriculture into the film, that is, a human modification of the environment...»

(Franco Piavoli)