#Fanny tunesmith movie#

In this roiling melting pot of ideas, money, and ethno-cultural hubris, was concocted the spe cial sauce that would be spread on everyone’s sandwiches for roughly the next century, the sauce that still comes standard issue with anything you order from an academic English or Sociology department, the sauce we must to this day on occasion discreetly scrape off our intellectual buns before chowing down. When you and your best friend are yoked to a cart and the woman you love is holding a whip, you know it’s time to bail. The infamous Wagon picture: the real Lou Salom é, Paul Rée, and Friedrich Nietzsche. This Vienna was the absolute high water mark for Western culture (or so Oswald Spengler and some other heady German apocalyptics would have us think). This Vienna was the social playground of such artistic dabblers as Richard Wagner and Gustav Klimt, such lightweight scribblers as Rilke and Carl Jung. This is the Vienna of Freud, Breuer, and Nietzsche of course, but it is also the Vienna of none other than steel tycoon Karl Wittgenstein, european counterpart of Andrew Carnegie, whose wife Fanny assembled nightly dinner parties of geniuses, eccentrics, aristocrats, and Bohemian vagabonds in a mad scramble to find the Next Big Thing, who hired an obscure tunesmith known as Brahms to teach his young son Ludwig piano- Ludwig Wittgenstein, manic genius and soon to become, arguably, Mind of the 20th Century.

Josef Breuer (Ben Cross), his upstart protege Sigmund “Siggy” Freud, and poet/flirt/genius collector, Lou Salome, set in the culturally pregnant atmosphere of late 19th century Viennese high society.įirst off, Vienna, especially the Vienna of this age, bears some words of introduction. Yalom- yes, these people are still running around) is a surprisingly deep, intellectually involved, and curiously probing period piece centering around philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (Armand Assante), father of psychoanalysis Dr. When Nietzsche Wept (Based the eponymous book by modern psychoanalyst Irvin D. I lay down on my couch, bid my sanity farewell, and took the plunge.

#Fanny tunesmith movie#

I decided to set When Nietzsche Wept at the end of my queue, and did my best to repress any memory of it.Īfter roiling about in my subconscious for a few months, the dubious movie washed up on my mental shores last night, demanding attention.

However, my superego firmly insisted that it was my duty to view any and all films bearing a philosophical title, so I had to compromise. It seemed too good to be true, and as I mused on the title and examined the box art online (obviously pandering to the lowest common denominator, painting the famed genius as a love-sick sop, a mere pretense for some romantic roller-coaster), I began to doubt. I had added When Nietzsche Wept to my account for two reasons: one, Nietzsche was in the title, and two, Nietzsche would be played by the legendary, reclusive, highly selective actor-extraordinaire Armand Assante.

As anyone who has used Netflix will attest, the DVD comes when it wants to, not when I want it to. While the philosopher was getting at how ideas, intentions, and passions come into our conscious field without our effort or direction, and often despite our wishes, it also applies to this movie. Nietzsche once said, “A thought comes when it wants to, not when I want it to.”