As a bonus for the Piavoli faithful (not to mention those who've never seen his extraordinary work), Blue Planet will also be shown April 21 at the Boulder Theater--one night only.
Like its predecessor, which has attracted a sizable cult following since its release in 1982, Voices disdains spoken language--it contains fewer words than the average Italian restaurant menu--in favor of a purely cinematic fluency. The film's subject, if it can be said to have one, is nothing less than the passage of humankind through the seasons of life--infancy, adolescence, adulthood, old age--complete with the large and small dramas that unfold along the way. That Piavoli can handle such a seemingly unwieldy subject without getting overwhelmed (or overwhelming us with mere ideas) is tribute not only to his skills but to his temperament. He has the painter's gift for exquisite observation--the seams on an old farmer's neck, say, or the rapture in a young woman's face as she dances--and the deep thinker's good sense to let such images speak for themselves. His collaborator is his wife, Neria Poli, and their sensibilities are clearly in harmony.
Everything we experience in Voices Through Time happens among the people of one sleepy Italian hill town--that's all Piavoli needs to express the universal rhythms of life. A short-legged toddler and, later, a wheezing old man, struggle to the top of a steep staircase. Boys kick a soccer ball in a sunlit piazza. In springtime, apple trees burst into glorious bloom. In early summer, crickets chirp in the moonlight. Watchfully, dark-eyed teenage girls and uncertain boys circling on motorbikes enact mating rituals at once shy and bold. In midsummer, a quiet young couple gets married, and we are invited, briefly, to the banquet at the edge of a cornfield.
Church bells toll. A painterly smudge of clouds begins to obscure the hilltops. We physically feel the chill that comes over the fields, now fallow. As fall wanes, a weary pensioner lies alone on his poor bed, gazing at a yellowed photograph of his wife, listening to the big clock in the corner tick away the moments. In the dead of winter, delighted children glide across a frozen pond on their sleds, the circle of time completed.
These are only a few of the classic Piavoli observations we see here, linked not so much by reason as by innate sense--like the images of verse. The film's most vocal champion, a transplanted Italian film distributor named Bruno Bossio, now living in Boulder, explains that neither Blue Planet nor Voices Through Time has subtitles because neither film needs them. He's absolutely right. In fact, Franco Piavoli's work--as simple as it is profound--doesn't require Bossio's words, either. Or these.
Voices Through Time.
Written and directed by Franco Piavoli. Collaboration by Neria Poli. For information call 303-442-1944.
