“Woody Allen, Filmmaker”

“Woody Allen, Filmmaker”. By Brian McIlroy [Delivered as part of the “Signs of the Times: Creativity in the 1990s” Free noon-hour series, UBC Centre for Continuing Education, at the Robson Square Conference Centre, Vancouver, March 24th, 1993] I notice that I am giving the last of these talks in the series “Signs of the Times: Creativity in the 90s.” Program Director Marcie Powell’s blurb that these lectures are in celebration of artists who have been fortunate to straddle both the serious and the popular is a provocative statement when we consider the subject of Woody Allen’s films of the last fifteen years or so. Woody Allen is unquestionably popular, but is he serious or worth talking about seriously? In preparing this talk (I think “lecture” is too formal a word for Woody Allen), I have been haunted by the imposter syndrome. I await Woody Allen to appear at the back of the auditorium and remark with vigour that I know nothing about his work, and how I managed to become a university professor teaching film courses is a scandal. You might recall that this is the fate of one professor in a movie line- up in Annie Hall, when Woody Allen’s character Alvy Singer drags out the real Marshall Mcluhan to back up his opinions and reveal the obtuseness of the smart- assed professor. I might well be saved from this humiliation, as I’m sure Woody Allen is too busy making another film than to be bothered to argue with critics from and in another country. But I cannot be saved from your good selves because it is genuinely hard to find someone who has not an opinion on Woody Allen’s work, whether as fans or as detractors or artistic enemies. Woody Allen has been involved, mostly as director or star, in up to thirty feature films. You undoubtedly have seen many of them, and have formed a view concerning his artistic position and/or importance. When I ask people to describe their first reactions to the name “Woody Allen,” the following words and phrases usually arise: Neurotic….comic….Obsessed with sex, death and God. The “neurotic Jewish comic” is not generally what attracts us to the work of Woody Allen: rather, it is the continual obsession with sex and human relationships, death, and the existence or otherwise of God. These topics ensure Allen’s work a universal quality, outside the New York Jewish intellectual humour which is his trademark and strength. Of course, the proverbial meaning of life is Allen’s constant quest, and this pursuit attracts us all. Nevertheless, for many people the jury is still out on Woody Allen. One would not think so, given the vast amount of critical work on his films. Here are some of their titles: Woody Allen On Location; Woody Allen, New Yorker; Woody Allen: An Illustrated Biography; Woody Allen: His Films and Career; Woody Allen: The Clown Prince of American Humour; Loser Take All; The Woody Allen Encyclopedia; The Woody Allen Companion; Fun With Woody: The Complete Woody Allen Quiz Book; The Movies of Woody: A Short Neurotic Quiz Book; Non- Being and Somethingness ( a collection of comic strips based on Woody Allen’s jokes); But We need the Eggs: The Magic of Woody Allen; and, finally, (drums must roll here): I Dream of Woody (a compilation of people’s dreams about Woody Allen). Woody Allen is a cultural phenomenon there is no doubt. That his one-liners are funny, and that his short scenes often marvelously crafted for humour, there is also no doubt. But is he the serious artist that it seems he so strives to be? Is Woody Allen living under a terrible shadow of other filmmakers, particularly Ingmar Bergman, one his great loves? I think the answer must be YES. The purity of Bergman’s visual and thematic artistry is best exemplified in The Seventh Seal (1957), Persona (1966), Winter Light (1963), Wild Strawberries (1957), and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). These films of the 1950s and 1960s seem to have been influential on Woody Allen. Others might wish to point to Cries and Whispers (1972) and Autumn Sonata (1978) from the 1970s as pivotal in pushing Allen to try to make serious films. The films I would include in this serious category are Interiors (1978), September (1987), Another Woman (1988) and, although with some reluctance, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). But before looking at these films, I’d like to focus on what Woody Allen seems to do best, and that is to make a humorous film. Perhaps his most successful (four academy awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress) is Annie Hall (1977), a film worth some examination to get at the core of the Allen formula. Speaking of formulas, that of the romantic comedy is well known: (a) man meets woman; (b) man and woman dislike/conflict with each other ; (c) over time, they both learn to respect each other; (d) they fall in love at the end. Woody Allen works another way: (a) man meets woman; (b) they like and respect each other and fall in love; (c) they break up; (d) they psychoanalyze their breakup. So Allen takes up the genre, reworks it, “makes it new” in a modernist sense, and challenges us in so doing. Annie Hall is a reflexive film; it draws attention to the film medium as part of this psychoanalysis. The split screen is used to show the painful disparity between Annie’s family and Alvy’s family, and the disparity between themselves—most famously when both attend psychoanalysis: one thinks sex three times a week a lot; the other not enough. We are constantly aware of the documentary narrative of Alvy, while watching his attempts to show his story in a nondocumentary fashion. Similarly, we see that another representational world is brought to our attention by the cartoon sequence, placing Alvy and is friend Max into a fairy tale. Other splits are apparent: he uses film to show up the inanity of television comedy (and yet Alvy is a TV personality) ; Alvy is a stand-up comedian, the personification of words spoken and standing still, and yet Allen’s medium of choice is focused on movement and visuals, including a complex mise-en-scene to convey how the past and present meet. Finally, near the end of the film, a montage memory sequence distills from the relationship “The Eggs”, as Alvy calls them, the reasons why he suffers his splitting headache. It is in the thematic and technical splits that Annie Hall achieves its uniqueness. Whereby the techniques do not so much reflect the thematic splits, but mediate them. Form here is content. Another film where Allen seems to succeed in bringing formal and thematic elements together is one not well received in terms of popularity: Zelig (1983). The film is a pretend documentary which immediately suggests to us that the notion of split or division within a genre is again operative in Allen’s mind. Just as instead of a romantic comedy we have an unromantic comedy in Annie Hall, here instead of a bona fide documentary, we have a pseudo-documentary. All of the traditional features of a documentary are present: a controlling voice-of- God narrator, who seems to have been imported from the newsreel narrator in Welles’ Citizen Kane, and compilation archival footage of the 1920s and 1930s, including an amazing matching of the Woody Allen character on the left side of Hitler who is busily giving a speech to the assembled masses. We are also presented contemporary interviews with real-life authorities, among whom are Susan Sontag, Dr. Eudora Welty, Bruno Bettelheim, Saul Bellow and Irving Howe. They all present analyses of one Leonard Zelig, the human chameleon. Zelig has the unfortunate tendency of turning into whomever he talks to, whether a rabbi or a black person. He is a man without substance, wanting to please, to be filled by more sturdy identities. If nothing else, this conceit allows Allen to rip apart the seriousness of psychoanalysis, and in finding love with Dr. Fletcher, Zelig is able to overcome his condition. But does the film Zelig not take the easy way out? Is there a sustained critique of documentary practice? I think the answer must be NO. The one-liners and visual gags come hard and fast, so that you are not invited to think for long how documentary is a constructed reality or, indeed, how the social construction of documentary lies within our viewer response. In moving on to the serious films—Interiors, September, Another Woman-- however, we note first of all that Allen does not appear in these films, although this absence alone does not distinguish them as serious, for Husbands and Wives with Allen has a number of serious moments, and Alice and Radio Days seem whimsical even without Allen centre stage. What does Allen attempt to do in these three films? To my mind, they are a reworking of specific Bergman productions. Cries and Whispers informs Interiors, Smiles of a Summer Night informs September, and Wild Strawberries informs Another Woman. Take the earliest film Interiors. It is a film that concentrates on the effects of a marital breakdown on the two elderly partners, but mostly focuses on the results it has on the three grown up sisters Renate, Joey and Flyn. The mother Eve has just returned from a stint in the sanatorium, fresh from electro-shock therapy. Despite the fact of the presence of others, the film seems to revolve around the mother and her three daughters.

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