The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen

by Bailey, Peter J.

• ISBN13: 9780813190419
• ISBN10: 081319041X
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780813139241
• Additional ISBN(s): 9780813128399
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-04-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kentucky

Summary

For three decades, no American filmmaker has been as prolific -- or as paradoxical -- as Woody Allen. From Play It Again, Sam (1972) through Celebrity (1998) and Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Allen has produced an average of one film a year, yet in many of these films Allen reveals a progressively skeptical attitude toward both the value of art and the cultural contributions of artists. In examining Allen's filmmaking career, The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen demonstrates that his movies often question whether the projected illusions of magicians/artists benefit audience or artists. Other Allen films dramatize the opposed conviction that the consoling, life-redeeming illusions of art are the best solution humanity has devised to the existential dilemma of being a death-foreseeing animal. Peter Bailey demonstrates how Allen's films repeatedly revisit and reconfigure this tension between image and reality, art and life, fabrication and factuality, with each film reaching provisional resolutions that a subsequent movie will revise. Merging criticism and biography, Bailey identifies Allen's ambivalent views of the artistic enterprise as a key to understanding his entire filmmaking career. Because of its focus upon filmmaker Sandy Bates's conflict between entertaining audiences and confronting them with bleak human actualities, Stardust Memories is a central focus of the book. Bailey's examination of Allen's art/life dialectic also draws from the off screen drama of Allen's very public separation from Mia Farrow, and the book accordingly construes such post-scandal films as Bullets Over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite as Allen's oblique cinematic responses to that tabloid tempest. By illuminating the thematic conflict at the heart of Allen's work, Bailey seeks not only to clarify the aesthetic designs of individual Allen films but to demonstrate how his oeuvre enacts an ongoing debate the screenwriter/director has been conducting with himself between creating cinematic narratives affirming the saving powers of the human imagination and making films acknowledging the irresolvably dark truths of the human condition.

Author Biography

Peter J. Bailey, professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
That Old Black Magic: Woody Allen's Ambivalent Artistry	3	(16)
Strictly the Movies: Play It Again, Sam	19	(14)
Getting Serious: The Antimimetic Emblems of Annie Hall	33	(14)
Art and Idealization: I'll Fake Manhattan	47	(12)
Strictly the Movies II: How Radio Days Generated Nights at the Movies	59	(12)
Life Stand Still Here: Interiors Dialogue	71	(14)
In the Stardust of a Song: Stardust Memories	85	(16)
Woody's Mild Jewish Rose: Broadway Danny Rose	101	(12)
The Fine Art of Living Well: Hannah and Her Sisters	113	(18)
If You Want a Hollywood Ending: Crimes and Misdemeanors	131	(14)
Everyone Loves Her/His Illusions: The Purple Rose of Cairo and Shadows and Fog	145	(16)
Poetic License, Bullshit: Bullets Over Broadway	161	(12)
Let's Just Live It: Woody Allen in the 1990s	173	(10)
Because It's Real Difficult in Life: Husbands and Wives	183	(16)
Rear Condo: Manhattan Murder Mystery	199	(12)
That Voodoo That You Do So Well: Mighty Aphrodite	211	(12)
And What a Perfect Plot: Everyone Says I Love You and Zelig	223	(18)
How We Choose to Distort It: Deconstructing Harry	241	(14)
From the Neck Up: Another Woman and Celebrity	255	(12)
Allen and His Audience: Sweet and Lowdown	267	(12)
Notes	279	(32)
Bibliography	311	(6)
Index	317