There is the ginkgo of Hiroshima, re-sprouting from its roots three years after the atomic explosion, although calcined like the Buddhist temple in which it grew. And there is the war herbarium left by Captain Bruno Ugolini, who fell in 1917 in Val Camonica, on the front of the Great War which he had crossed without giving up collecting plants to catalog them. Here, if as a whole Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari, the magnificent “encyclopedia documentary” by Massimo D'Anolfi and Martina Parenti presented in recent days in Italy after having left its mark at the Venice Film Festival, is an essay on resistance
of existing in nature, his second chapter, the one dedicated to plants, is a true ode to the persistence of life.
Placed there, between the first part dedicated to animals and the last offering to stones, the 70 minutes of Erbari are the most emotional ones of the film, they are at the heart of a work that in almost three and a half hours you watch with the calm of thought to the vital system with which we relate daily. That is, historically, since D'Anolfi and Parenti certainly cannot give up the long-term perspective, the one that historicizes Man's relationship with the entire sphere of existence, his transition from coexistence with the entirety of Life to connivance (“connivere”, close one's eyes…) with the partiality of Death, contemplated in animal experimentation, in wars, in genocides…
Bestiaries, Herbariums, Lapidaries is a flow of images pushed in progression from the film archive, which from Muybridge onwards studies the movement of animals, up to the inanimate matter of minerals, passing through that true fulcrum of life and persistence which are the plant. D'Anolfi and Parenti immerse themselves in the apparently static quiet of the Botanical Garden of Padua, the oldest in the world, founded in 1545, and look at it as a space for containment, conservation, cataloguing, reproduction of plant existence in all its forms . The approach they adopt is that of a poetic documentary
of observation, in which the strength of existing and resisting becomes the object of a gaze that compares itself with the complex structures of botany: from the minimal dimensions of seeds and spores to the gigantic dimensions of trees, passing through the galleries of herbariums , pages of plants and leaves cataloged ab aeterno…
In the complexity of the film, Erbari's focal point is exactly what concerns time, the duration of life and the very concept of existence: the immanence of the images filmed by D'Anolfi and Parenti, their being a crossing of the space of
conservation of life guaranteed by the Botanical Garden, dialogues with the reflections offered by Stefano Mancuso's voice-over. The images observe the almost still time of the garden, between the care of man and the colors that transition from the pale autumn tones to the lively ones of the flourishing avenues, while here and there we can hear the distant voice of the well-known botanist who warns about the relativity of our relationship with the vegetal universe: remember that 99.7% of the biomass on the planet is vegetal and underlines that in geological terms the existence of man on Earth is residual and, unlike that of plants, not
necessary…The repositioning of the relationship between nature and culture that Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari offers is the result of a rethinking of the relationship between Life and Time from a perspective that is not the human, limited and restrictive one. It is about filming the time of Man, which is the “animated” time of the Animalis, a being concluded and indivisible in itself (even physically, if not to the detriment of life), and of relating it to the time of Plants and Stones. Which appear inanimate to us only because they belong to another chronology and do not respond to our concept of life because they exist in a physical form that is not complete in itself, but capable of surviving its own disintegration. Like the ginkgo of Hiroshima…
