Time for beauty. Visual beauty, musical beauty, literary beauty, natural beauty. It must be possible to escape this worrisome world for a few moments each morning: so here goes!

We start this Monday with Kaos, a 30 year-0ld film by the Taviani brothers. It contains one of the most uplifting scenes ever, a happy childhood romp paired with one of the saddest songs from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, creating a sense of physical freedom and wistfulness that practically vibrates. Watch this! You will thank me.

 

Here is the cavatina sung in full.

 

 

And here is Maslin’s 1986 review of the movie which she calls “effortlessly poetic”  and showers with praise. The film is based on 4 short stories by Luigi Pirandello, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1934. He is praised for his ability to convert deep psychological insights into magnificent theatre, paving the way in his often bitterly ironic farces for the theatre of the absurd. (Click on the Times logo)

 

Today’s clip shows a scene from the epilogue of the movie, where the author visits his childhood home, with his mother long deceased, and inquires about her reminiscences of a childhood visit to Malta where her father was exiled. For me it triggered gratitude (independent of awe at the film makers’ craft and the insane beauty of the landscape) since it reminded me of my own glorious memories of past events in my life – something that cannot be taken, even if the actual surroundings no longer exist. So a focus on what remains, rather than what was lost – Mozart’s aria non withstanding.

A raven connects the disparate episodes of the movie – photographs today, then, of crows, the closest approximation.