Sunday surprise — two women walking

[ by Charles Cameron — Tarkovsky, Nostalghia, Vivaldi, Mingardo ]

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I trust you are in no hurry. Watching a film by Tarkovsky invites a certain stillness, permeated with wonder. It is in that stillness that the birds..

…in this case, Nostalghia, are born from the Madonna.

I was reading my daily quota of Three Quarks Daily and found Leanne Ogasawara‘s Dreaming of the Madonna — interesting, indeed beautiful — but when it closed with that video clip I was — transported, transfixed. Such luminous beauty.

The woman painted, the woman carried, and the woman walking.

**

And then to recall another woman walking, in a clip no less beautiful: the exquisite Sara Mingardo, who has been holding back, listening to and absorbing conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Ialiano performing Vivaldi‘s Gloria from the start of Philippe Béziat‘s movie of that great work, and moves slowly forward to join them to sing her agonized opening notes, “Domine Deaus, Agnus Dei” — “Lord God, Lamb of God”:

**

It is entirely possible to be lifted from this world into another world — without the necessity of leaving this one.

To be lifted from beauty to beauty.