Schubert in Pop Culture

[virginia]

Saw The Avengers this weekend, an execrable movie partially saved by a brief excerpt of Schubert's String Quartet No. 13, Rosamunde. It reminded me of the piece that got me interested in Schubert, String Quartet No. 15 (see separate thread), which Woody Allen used to great effect in Crimes and Misdemeanors.

What other instances of Schubert's music in pop culture -- movies, ads, anything -- can you cite?

[Philidor]

[Zeitblom]

Schubert is a great favourite in French film. The movies of Agnes Jaoui (who trained as an opera singer before becoming an actor, writer and director) uses Schubert (and indeed other classical composers) copiously in Comme une Image (which is about a singing student, with Jaoui playing her teacher) and in Le Gout des Autres, her best known film, in which a wealthy, philistine Parisian businessman seeks to acquire culture with disastrous results.

No Schubert in this trailer for Comme une Image - just Handel and Mozart - but it's such a glorious film I'll post the trailer anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDz5Q...eature=related


Trop belle pour toi, a film about a wealthy Parisian's adultery with his secretary (and a meditation on beauty and ugliness - very French) is suffused with Schubert to the point where the music almost becomes a character in the film - so much so that, in the final scene, as the hero (played by Gerard Depardieu) walks along a rain-drenched street having been dumped by both wife and mistress, Schubert's G-flat impromptu starts up for the last time, he calls out a curse on Schubert's music.

Trailer for the US release here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAk8ZeThSkc

La tourneuse de pages is a subtle and clever psychological thriller about a former piano student who gains revenge over a teacher for a perceived slight at a piano competition. It's a film which will mean that you never see a cello spike in quite the same way again. At its heart is a performance of Schubert's Notturno that goes disastrously wrong. Sadly that isn't on Youtube but the trailer is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fANWrJPhqWw


Closer to home, Inspector Morse - often

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rU3j...eature=related

[Philidor]

Originally Posted by Zeitblom

Closer to home, Inspector Morse - often

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rU3j...eature=related

Of course! Plus The West Wing....

[Despina41]

Obligatory Withnail and I mention here....

[Zeitblom]

I should have mentioned - Michael Haneke's extraordinary Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon). A film about a series of unexplained occurrences in a small closed German community in the years before the First World War. It's an extraordinary film, shot in black and white. Schubert features prominently, as this trailer shows:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aaapMYGBJs

English but Schubert-free trailer at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4iwMY7RxLw