Kaos, Pirandello and the mother: questions of Identity in the Tavianis Sicily.(Critical essay)

This paper is the fruit of my teaching at Yale and particularly of the undergraduate course "Italian Literature and the Mediterranean." I intend to propose a reading of Kaos (1985), an episodic film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (1) which is freely adapted from Luigi Pirandello's Novelle per un anno (2). The fulcrum of my interests is the question of identity and ethnicity as represented in the film narratives. In my analysis I address the subject of memory and self-representation for the Italian-American community of Sicilian descent and more generally the theme of migration and exile from one's motherland. I will consider 3 segments of the film: the prologue, the first episode, and the epilogue, in which the Taviani brothers establish an etiology of the trauma of migration and exile and then propose a cathartic and positive direction away from that trauma.

In an interview conducted in 1985, the Taviani brothers speak of the film's prologue, which is inspired by the novella Il corvo di Mizzaro (The Raven of Mizzaro):

> (3).

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Through the flight of the raven the Taviani brothers introduce the themes of magic, superstition, and the primitive within Sicilian popular culture, which will be developed throughout the film and described as an essential element of Sicilians peasant life and mores (4). The Taviani brothers use the flight of the raven to actually connect the events of the four central episodes: L'altro figlio (The Other Son), Mal di luna

(Moonache), La giara (The Jar), and Requiem (5). Finally, in the epilogue, they turn their attention to the journey and the gaze of Pirandello himself, as played by the actor Omero Antonutti. What is the significance of the final substitution, in which the gaze of Pirandello replaces the flight of the raven? The explanation of the directors, from the same interview cited above, seems somewhat precious and underlines an important issue related to class difference and class struggle. Pirandello a bourgeois Sicilian--is imagined as somehow crossing the social boundaries of class difference thanks to the biological-nourishing bond with his wet-nurse, the peasant Maristella:

> (Ibid., p. 18)