“Of Body and Soul: from Pirandello to the Taviani brothers”

Kaos, the film directed by the Taviani brothers in 1983-84, is the work with which the film-makers began their very personal, intense and intimate dialogue with Luigi Pirandello. They initiated this particular dialogue not by choosing the Sicilian author’s best known, most celebrated and cited works, that is to say his great plays and novels, but by deliberately identifying in his short stories, and in particular those which are linked to the Sicilian peasant culture, a fertile ground on which to build the personal overcoming of the first stage of their artistic, cultural and even ideological development. Significantly, in abandoning that stage which was declaredly more marked by political and ideological fervor, and defined by many as ‘cinema of utopia’, the Taviani brothers chose to turn to Luigi Pirandello, one of the greatest exponents of the bourgeois Weltanschauung as it developed in nineteenth century Italy and Europe. He is an author who, amongst other things, had reflected extensively both on the role and condition of the bourgeois subject and on the role and condition of its stories, but also on its many representations – artistic, social, cultural and so on. Not only had he reflected on these matters, but he had also extensively used all these modes of representation and story-telling that eventually led one to overcome nineteenth century sensibility, and realize the practice and theory which were to define theatrical and literary Modernism.