Franco Piavoli’s 1982 film “Blue Planet,” which screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater Tuesday and at Anthology Film Archives over the last two nights as part of a retrospective of the Italian director’s hard-to-see and hard-to-forget nonfiction film poetry, opens Friday in a new print at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater. One hopes that this week’s prior screenings won’t have exhausted local interest in Mr. Piavoli’s paradoxically modest (in subject) yet extraordinarily ambitious (in scope) filmmaking tour de force.

When it was released 26 years ago, “Blue Planet” was showered with accolades in Europe, garnering praise from such filmmakers as Bernardo Bertolucci, the Russian cinematic transcendentalist Andre Tarkovsky, and Godfrey Reggio, the creator of the similarly lush, though considerably broader, more frenetic, and ultimately fatalistic documentary oddity “Koyaanisqatsi.”

Like “Koyaanisqatsi,” “Blue Planet” represents an updating of the “city symphony” films that emerged from the Continent between the world wars. Alberto Cavalcanti’s “Rien que des Heures” (1926), Walter Ruttman’s “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City” (1927), Dziga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera” (1929), and Messrs. Reggio and Piavoli’s movies all exuberantly celebrate film formalism in cresting and ebbing torrents of marvelously shot and edited images. But rather than exploring singular topics or social phenomena, as the aforementioned films did, “Blue Planet,” which was shot over three years in a single rural region of Italy, is a compendium of natural details captured through multiple seasons in a part of the world that, at least up to 1982, appears to have changed very little for thousands of years.

A grocery list of the visual schemes that evolve on-screen in “Blue Planet” makes the film sound like a fairly cut-and-dried nature documentary. Ice cracks and melts, water flows, breezes become gales, and rain falls. Caterpillars ascend silken threads, spiders feast on the prisoners trapped in their dew-garnished webs, and insects, amphibians, and mammals (including a human duo) alike all heed the call of spring and go about the business of propagating the species in the old-fashioned way. But Mr. Piavoli’s macro-lens scrutiny and expansive landscapes are so marvelously in tune with the spirit of the seasons, and the surfaces and motions of his subjects, that what begins with an almost Kubrickian, chilly, third-person remove evolves into an ecstatic and unconditionally loving caress of country life at all levels of the food chain.

The audioscape of “Blue Planet,” which is mostly dialogue-free (human voices are heard, but in non-subtitled Italian) and, until the final of the film’s three sections, un-scored, is itself a thing of meticulous beauty. Like the pictures it accompanies, the film’s collage of natural sounds is transporting in both its simplicity and its density. As sound romances image, impression walks hand-in-hand with expression and “Blue Planet” becomes a pure cinematic experience in which directorial choices and filmmaking manipulations generate a bountiful serenity rather than auterist bluster and technical fetishism. The film walks the line that separates cinema’s dual nature as both a recorder of reality and a tool for abstraction with glorious ease, confidence, and seemingly bottomless joy.

Though determinedly apolitical and nondidactic, in the two-and-a-half decades since “Blue Planet” made its premiere, its depiction of human life in harmonious balance with the rest of nature and a pre-European Union Italy in an apparently permanent state of agrarian workaday bliss seems alien when compared with the images of Continental floods, strikes, and sprawl that have become commonplace on European and American cable-news outlets. It’s odd and more than a little bit sad that a film of such delicate power could feel at once timeless and also dated.

Through Thursday (155 E. 3rd St., between avenues A and B, 212-591-0434).