“I Came into the World out of Emptiness”: Tragic Nihilism and Pantheistic Creation in Primavera by Damiano Michieletto

Abstract

This essay examines Primavera, the debut film of the acclaimed opera director Damiano Michieletto, an adaptation of Tiziano Scarpa’s Stabat Mater set in eighteenth-century Venice. Through the intertwined figures of Antonio Vivaldi and a gifted orphan violinist, the film develops a complex poetics and a profoundly nihilistic vision, shaped by a spectral dialogue with the maternal figure. The motif of traumatic separation from the mother, inherited from Scarpa’s novel and reworked cinematically by Michieletto, establishes the work’s emotional and symbolic framework from its very opening images.