IN ABSENTIA -- the Brothers Quay

First, a word about the Brothers Quay, who are filmmakers. They are interested in Polish and Czech stuff. They are interested in the surreal, the aesthetic, the literary, the rapturous, the forlorn, the nightmarish. They've made things inspired by the writer Bruno Schulz and by the composer Leoš Janáček. Bravo! Someone needs to be thinking about this gloriously deep shit.

Emma Hauck  (1878 - 1920)

She was confined to a mental asylum in Heidelberg. She wrote letters to her non-visiting husband. Sheets of paper on which the phrase "sweetheart come" is overwritten dozens of times. Until the sheets are nearly illegible:

This film is a tribute:

"Le secret" -- Fauré

Barbara Bonney

"Aurore" -- Fauré

Barbara Bonney

Arleen Auger -- coloratura soprano

Queen of the Night aria -- Mozart's The Magic Flute

"Rose on the Heath" -- Schubert

"Rosamunde" -- Schubert

some Szymanowski

Piano Sonata No. 3

Violin Concerto No. 1

The Unanswered Question -- Ives

A quiet metaphysical musing of strings alternates with the perplexity of brass and the gnomic hysteria of woodwinds.

If this isn't eloquent and profound...

...then I don't know what is:

Both in the dream and in the wall, floor, and ceiling analogies of existence, that is, in the anthropomorphic similarity of the air and hour -- you were Tsvetayeva, that is, you were the language found by everything to which the poet addresses himself his whole life without the hope of receiving an answer. 

       ~ Pasternak to Tsvetayeva, from Letters: Summer 1926