Tuesday’s beauty goes far, all the way back to the bing bang, in fact. I picked the creation of the universe – scene from Terrence Malik’s 2011 film The Tree of Life since it, too, like yesterday’s film, combines the most beautiful visuals with intensely yearning music. The musical piece is called Lacrimosa. 

Rather than choosing the famous Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem, the director settled on one that was written by a contemporary Polish composer, Zbigniew Preisner. It is part of the Dies Irae sequence of the Latin mass, thoroughly modern, and goose-bump producing, if only for fear of overextension of the soprano’s vocal cord… You can hear the best version here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOOELmx7-R8

 

And here is the film clip from a movie that traces a family history with flash-backs to the creation of the universe – visuals are stunning:

The film maker was keen on having visual effects that were not predominantly computer generated, so they came up with this:

“Working with visual effects supervisor Dan Glass, Trumbull used a variety of materials for the creation of the universe sequence. “We worked with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO₂, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be,” said Trumbull. “It was a free-wheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business. Terry didn’t have any preconceived ideas of what something should look like. We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.”

Epic it is. And beautiful.

Photographs are from the Oregon Coast as it has existed for millennia now.