In La Notte, Vittoria is reading Hermann Broch's novel "The Sleepwalkers". I highly recommend it. It's so popular here in an upscale New York City suburb that one time in the late 1990s I found a copy of it on the local library's deaccessioned book (i.e., discard) table. in 2023, I would presume that both Broch and Antonioni are dead white males. I myself am old enough to be an atheist existentialist. I thought (and felt) postmodernism was bad and now has come along wokism....
Thank you for pointing that out. I think it was Valentina (Vittoria is in l'eclisse) who picked up the book and Giovanni says it would be one way of getting closer.
I read this comment : Broch's own obsession with the death of values and the decay of humanity echoes La notte's central preoccupation with mortality as it related to love and art (as Eros)." Gwendoly Audrey Foster. February 2015.
Give me the timestamps for "i sonnambuli" if you disagree with me so I can correct myself. La Notte 51:14, 57:54, 1:11:18 (this last one uncertain and does not show the book). I see no strong relation between what I know of Broch's books and Antonioni's films. The ending of "The Virgil" is a kind of transcendence, and The Sleepwalkers ends with what I think is Brosh's answer to the disintegration of values. But the kind of disintegration of values I understand him to be interested in was not existentialist alienation but (citing from imperfect memory) "a society devoide of force but filled with evil will that drowns in blood and chokes on its own poison gases", like Ukraine today (or, obviously, WWI), not the italian intelligentsia of the 1950s. But I may be wrong and you are welcome to help me understand better. I just now found free copy of "Red Desert" on YouTube (not that this realates to Broch). And do you know Werner Herzog's film: "Lessons of Darkness"?
I only found two scenes where the book appears - at 51:14 and 1:11:18 . At 57:54 where Giovanni is at the party socialising I found none. It is certainly interesting to understand why Antonioni should highlight the book in two scenes. I still have to read Broch's book so cannot really comment on any parallels. I did find this quote though: "This gradual, imperceptible langour which saps life silently without producing even the bang of a great, imposing catastrophe is the experience - as Thibaudet remarks-on which A Sentimental Education and the majority of modern novels are centered. For Antonioni, such a view of art and life,expressed competently for the first time in Flaubert's novel, is therefore the
starting point for arriving at the experiences of the literary avant-garde, to
the chronicles of crisis, to a new structural form of the soul that is also in
Musil, Broch, and Doderer."Aristarco, Guido, and Luciana Bohne. “Notes on Michelangelo Antonioni.” Film Criticism, vol. 9, no. 1, 1984, pp. 4–7. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44018764
I am a big fan of Musil and Doderer.
I look forward to seeing "Lessons of Darkness" as I am an admirer of some of Herzog but not of Klaus Kinski.
Werner Herzog. I think the man is either insane or has no conscience. I think he does not care if getting a scene right means persons literally are killed in the process. I would not want ot work for him. I liked his Kaspar Hauser film and now his memoirs or whatever they are are titled the original German title of tha tfilm with which I personally identify: "Every man for himself and God against all" -- I had an intrusive mother. How intrusive? She forbade me to squeeze my teenage acne pimples. When I came home from school each evening she would press my fragile little body up against a sink in the bathroom and squeeze my acne pimples. And I guess enemas are not anal rape, are they? She outsourced that to my father to do.
I confirmed 57:34. Monica Vitti is sitting on a step at the bottom of a flight of stairs reading the book wile everybody else if partying.
Musil is interesting for me. I read both translations in full and have forgotten them. My dissertation advisor and his wife are so much involved with "The man without qualities" that he photocopied the whole 1000+ pages for reference (or had somebody do it for him). I recall only two things about it. (1) When Ulrich goes to work in the engineering office and he is disgusted that the engineers do not carry the spirit of precision into their personal lives but wear tie tacks with little horses heads on them. I worked for half a century in computer programming offices. (2) Volume 3: I take that to be a prescription for a laboratory exercise in building for oneself with a soulmate who just might be your sister (taboos do not impress me) a life beyond "qualities". It's a lab exercise for the reader to get on with if the reader has the financial and intellectual and "spiritual" means to be up to the challenge.
As for "Broch", did I write that his son told me: "It's a good thing my father did not know you because he would have wasted a lot of time on you." And what did he mean by that? That he felt his father's kind heartedness led him to "waste" a lot of his life doing good, esp. for The United Nations, that other people could have done but nobody will write the books thatt consequently went unwritten. There is a book of Broch's letters with his son when the son was in preparatory school: at that time the boy was a massive disapplointment to his father for not having intelletual interest but just sports and fast cars. How I wish Hermann Broch had been my father!!!! But as the son matured he really did mature and the old man I knew would, I beieve, have much pleased his long deceased father. Alles komt terecht (Imprint of now defunct Martinuus Nijhoff publisher to which I got legal right to use from Brill Publisher a few years ago).
I should add: I was a friend of Hermann Broch's son. He died now 30 years ago. I miss him much. He wondered exactly what film had "The Sleepwalkers" in it but alas I got the information too late for him. And I "blew" it the first time I went looking for it because I did not write down the timestamps, but now I think I have them. "Would you like to read some pages with me?"
In La Notte, Vittoria is reading Hermann Broch's novel "The Sleepwalkers". I highly recommend it. It's so popular here in an upscale New York City suburb that one time in the late 1990s I found a copy of it on the local library's deaccessioned book (i.e., discard) table. in 2023, I would presume that both Broch and Antonioni are dead white males. I myself am old enough to be an atheist existentialist. I thought (and felt) postmodernism was bad and now has come along wokism....
Thank you for pointing that out. I think it was Valentina (Vittoria is in l'eclisse) who picked up the book and Giovanni says it would be one way of getting closer.
I read this comment : Broch's own obsession with the death of values and the decay of humanity echoes La notte's central preoccupation with mortality as it related to love and art (as Eros)." Gwendoly Audrey Foster. February 2015.
Give me the timestamps for "i sonnambuli" if you disagree with me so I can correct myself. La Notte 51:14, 57:54, 1:11:18 (this last one uncertain and does not show the book). I see no strong relation between what I know of Broch's books and Antonioni's films. The ending of "The Virgil" is a kind of transcendence, and The Sleepwalkers ends with what I think is Brosh's answer to the disintegration of values. But the kind of disintegration of values I understand him to be interested in was not existentialist alienation but (citing from imperfect memory) "a society devoide of force but filled with evil will that drowns in blood and chokes on its own poison gases", like Ukraine today (or, obviously, WWI), not the italian intelligentsia of the 1950s. But I may be wrong and you are welcome to help me understand better. I just now found free copy of "Red Desert" on YouTube (not that this realates to Broch). And do you know Werner Herzog's film: "Lessons of Darkness"?
I only found two scenes where the book appears - at 51:14 and 1:11:18 . At 57:54 where Giovanni is at the party socialising I found none. It is certainly interesting to understand why Antonioni should highlight the book in two scenes. I still have to read Broch's book so cannot really comment on any parallels. I did find this quote though: "This gradual, imperceptible langour which saps life silently without producing even the bang of a great, imposing catastrophe is the experience - as Thibaudet remarks-on which A Sentimental Education and the majority of modern novels are centered. For Antonioni, such a view of art and life,expressed competently for the first time in Flaubert's novel, is therefore the
starting point for arriving at the experiences of the literary avant-garde, to
the chronicles of crisis, to a new structural form of the soul that is also in
Musil, Broch, and Doderer."Aristarco, Guido, and Luciana Bohne. “Notes on Michelangelo Antonioni.” Film Criticism, vol. 9, no. 1, 1984, pp. 4–7. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44018764
I am a big fan of Musil and Doderer.
I look forward to seeing "Lessons of Darkness" as I am an admirer of some of Herzog but not of Klaus Kinski.
Werner Herzog. I think the man is either insane or has no conscience. I think he does not care if getting a scene right means persons literally are killed in the process. I would not want ot work for him. I liked his Kaspar Hauser film and now his memoirs or whatever they are are titled the original German title of tha tfilm with which I personally identify: "Every man for himself and God against all" -- I had an intrusive mother. How intrusive? She forbade me to squeeze my teenage acne pimples. When I came home from school each evening she would press my fragile little body up against a sink in the bathroom and squeeze my acne pimples. And I guess enemas are not anal rape, are they? She outsourced that to my father to do.
I confirmed 57:34. Monica Vitti is sitting on a step at the bottom of a flight of stairs reading the book wile everybody else if partying.
Musil is interesting for me. I read both translations in full and have forgotten them. My dissertation advisor and his wife are so much involved with "The man without qualities" that he photocopied the whole 1000+ pages for reference (or had somebody do it for him). I recall only two things about it. (1) When Ulrich goes to work in the engineering office and he is disgusted that the engineers do not carry the spirit of precision into their personal lives but wear tie tacks with little horses heads on them. I worked for half a century in computer programming offices. (2) Volume 3: I take that to be a prescription for a laboratory exercise in building for oneself with a soulmate who just might be your sister (taboos do not impress me) a life beyond "qualities". It's a lab exercise for the reader to get on with if the reader has the financial and intellectual and "spiritual" means to be up to the challenge.
As for "Broch", did I write that his son told me: "It's a good thing my father did not know you because he would have wasted a lot of time on you." And what did he mean by that? That he felt his father's kind heartedness led him to "waste" a lot of his life doing good, esp. for The United Nations, that other people could have done but nobody will write the books thatt consequently went unwritten. There is a book of Broch's letters with his son when the son was in preparatory school: at that time the boy was a massive disapplointment to his father for not having intelletual interest but just sports and fast cars. How I wish Hermann Broch had been my father!!!! But as the son matured he really did mature and the old man I knew would, I beieve, have much pleased his long deceased father. Alles komt terecht (Imprint of now defunct Martinuus Nijhoff publisher to which I got legal right to use from Brill Publisher a few years ago).
Sorry: "photocopy" is wrong word: He probably used a kurzweil machine: the text is plain ascii and is searchable, not "photocopies".
I should add: I was a friend of Hermann Broch's son. He died now 30 years ago. I miss him much. He wondered exactly what film had "The Sleepwalkers" in it but alas I got the information too late for him. And I "blew" it the first time I went looking for it because I did not write down the timestamps, but now I think I have them. "Would you like to read some pages with me?"