We watched *Love and Death *last night. I don’t think I’d seen it since it came out in the theaters in 1975. It’s still pretty durned funny.
Amidst all the references to Ingmar Bergman, Liebnitz and Dostoyevsky, I wondered if the dream Boris describes – a field full of coffins standing upright, from which emerge a bunch of waiters – was a film or literature reference that I didn’t get. It just seemed so specific!
Anybody know?
I don’t know of anything.
I seem to remember there’s another movie in which Allen’s character has a dream of a funeral procession walking down a street bearing a coffin and then getting into a dispute with another procession while trying to back the coffin into a parking space. I don’t remember what it’s from, though.
–Cliffy
feckafree writes:
> . . . the references to Ingmar Bergman, Liebnitz and Dostoyevsky . . .
Liebnitz? Who is that and what references are you talking about? I don’t recall any references to the philosopher and mathematician Leibniz, and I don’t know of anyone else famous with an even vaguely similar name.
Oh, there was a reference to Liebniz in one of those long, convoluted philosophical exchanges between Boris and Sonja. Or maybe it was Spinoza. Or both.
My apologies for misspelling your name, freckafree. Incidentally, I had assumed you meant a visual reference. I’m not sure what a visual reference to Leibniz would be - a calculus equation? I don’t offhand recall if various philosophers were name-checked, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the movie.
And yet Spinoza didn’t believe in the Holy Trinity.
AFAIK, it wasn’t referring to anything in particular. Woody Allen loved that sort of absurdist joke, where something very deep and philosophical was juxtaposed with the mundane.
It was, in any case, a far more enjoyable film than the whinefest called Annie Hall.
Perhaps a vision of the Best Of All Possible Worlds?