The spectacular scenery of the Italian Alps provides the backdrop for Olmi's debut (crisply shot in 'Scope), ostensibly made to profile a new hydroelectric dam for the Edison-Volta power company where he started his career. Dwarfed by snowdrifts and sprawling mountain peaks, two older men trudge through their daily tasks as caretakers and watchmen at an isolated dam, with little to do besides wait for the spring thaw. After one is called back to “civilization,” the other must grudgingly break in his replacement, a varsity sweater–clad youth oblivious to quiet rhythms and far happier blaring a radio or hammering things into walls. Olmi turns this generation-gap profile into a treatise on the economy of work, speech, and movement, his attention to the quiet details of everyday tasks soon opening the audience's eyes, like those of his young hero, to the silence, stillness, and beauty of man in-not against-nature.