
The International Writers Magazine: A Woody Allen Primer
Deconstructing
Woody:
Identity and Selfhood in the films of Woody Allen
Robert Cottingham
Paddy
Cheyevsky said years ago that all the characters are the author.
And I found that true.... I find myself all over the place. It's
very hard for me to pick one over the other. They all reflect
me. Woody Allen.
(Bjorkman Ed., 2004,p. 86)
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Although it is always
dangerous to suppose that there is a comparison between an artist's
work and their life, Woody Allen constantly draws us in this direction.
Ostensibly his films continually make connections between his private
and public screen lives fostering the perception that goes back to his
earliest cabaret performances - that his films are autobiographical.
He freely admits that the character he created for himself as a stand-up
comic was essentially a development of his own personality, exaggerated
for comic effect: ''I just went up and talked as myself.'' (Cited in
Bjorkman. 31) As his career has developed Allen has been reticent to
accept that such parallels between his life and his films exist.
Given the difficult and complex nature of autobiography, indicated by
the wealth of material attempting to explain and identify the genre,
Allen's stance is understandable, although perhaps contradictory. Allen
is correct, however, in discouraging viewers of his work from drawing
the simple parallel between his life and his art both the general public
and scholarly studies have frequently perceived. Autobiography operates
in a far less clear manner than can be accounted for in simple comparison
between Allen's work and unreliable impressions of his private life.
Further the medium of film poses its own questions of authorship intrinsic
to its form.
Central to the common perception of Allen is the familiar nebbish persona
that Pogel terms 'the little man' (Pogel, 1987, p.57). This vehicle
for Allen's stage comedy is clearly present in his early films, from
Annie Hall onwards, however, we see a shifting of emphasis away from
pure comedy to work of a more dramatic nature that effects a change,
resulting in the persona developing a more sophisticated characterization.
As Allen's persona has evolved within the widening sphere of his films,
however the common view of Allen has not. The underlying themes and
anxieties have been with Allen since Take The Money And Run.
The persona that Allen originally created has become resilient instilling
itself in the minds of the public such that it is the commonly perceived
as the real Woody Allen, rather than the construction that it is. Reductively,
Allen is regularly seen as the cartoon caricature of himself as presented
in Annie Hall to the extent that the character traits of nervousness,
physical ineptitude and fears of women are readily understood through
Allen's visual appearance of square rimmed glasses, unkempt hair and
baggy beige wardrobe. This image of Allen could be seen to act as a
myth in the sense produced by Barthes in his work Mythologies.
The use of the cartoon sequence in Annie Hall seems to act as
a microcosm to the whole problem of the public's generally simplified
reception of Allen. Allen appears to understand the difficulty well
enough to respond, mocking his observers in the production of the exact
caricature they see as him, yet in doing so he encourages them. Further
this pattern has continued throughout his career, constantly prompting
unprofitable avenues of discussion as the temptation to conflate Allen's
life with his screen existence becomes even greater. Perhaps now, however,
after Deconstructing Harry (1998), this type of approach has
reached its logical conclusion, and we may finally examine what Allen
has achieved in the arena of autobiography.
As I have indicated, the frequent juxtapositions of Allen's real and
screen lives rely upon representations of Allen's real life derived
from many, frequently unreliable, secondary sources. This approach is
therefore essentially antagonistic and reductive to Allen's actual work.
The frequent readings of Allen's relationship with Diane Keaton into
Annie Hall overlook the real aims of the film's narrative structure,
that is, as we will see, not a study of relationships per se, but rather
how Alvy perceives and recalls his with Annie Hall. That even this reading
is complicated by fact that the single perspective of Alvy is arrived
at through a collaboration of workers producing the film clearly reveals
the difficult territory, and inherent instability in suggesting any
film is autobiographical. Perhaps then, this example suggests that the
most profitable approach to Allen's work is not explicitly his own autobiography,
but rather his body of work which examines autobiography, and, implicitly,
film itself.
Etymologically Olney tells us autobiography is the study of life, or
''bios'', by the self, hence autobiography. Allen's films can be said
to reflect that this if we consider his dominant themes; love, morality,
death, and the border between fantasy and reality that he examines in
the constant manipulation of the little man myth. These are exactly
the areas of thought that affect us all, and indeed appear in a great
many artist's works, thus Allen's work can come to be seen as an attempt
to understand the type of life he experiences, an aim common, though
not exclusive to, autobiography. Naturally the environments Allen presents
us with, where he examines these issues, are those he understands, thus
his work is in a sense infused with his own life. Allen's interests,
as we can understand from his early love of magic, his tenure as a stand
up comic, his love of New York, his Chekov, Tolstoy, and Dostoeveky
whose works have influences in, any of Allen's films and writing in
terms of ambitions, tone and structure. Allen's interests can be seen
as his tools, he uses what he has learnt from his admiration and experience
of them to enhance his own work; sometimes transparently as in the use
of Gershwin in Manhattan, or Tolstoy in Love And Death;
more often, however, Allen's approach is of a more subtle nature as
the application of Bergman's camera style in Crimes and Misdemeanors
suggests.
For Roland Barthes the fact that the culture surrounding the artist
will emerge in his work is inevitable. In his groundbreaking essay ''The
Death of the Author'' he suggests that a ''text is made of multiple
writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations
of dialogue, parody, and contestation. (Barthes, 1973, p.148).'' For
Barthes then, a text is made from the language that is all the life
that surrounds the author. The author can build his own utterance from
nothing original, he merely assembles the words of that language into
a new combination. Transferring this theory to Allen's work, however,
does not reveal the ''tissue of quotations'' (146) Barthes would lead
us to expect. Allen's persona is resilient enough to resist Barthes
claim for the death of the author, as its power seems to place his work
as the origin of one man. Allen is, because of the popularity of the
little man persona, commonly seen as the single source of explanation
of the films he is involved in making. Through the manipulation of his
persona he is able to transcend his influences producing an expression,
which whilst not being entirely his own creation appears to be. What
we find in Allen's work is, then, a series of approaches to autobiography,
Allen does not tell us his own story, rather he shows us how some stories
operate; that is, we see variously in his works, the unconscious filmic
exploration of the subjects of the modern theoreticians of autobiography.
From Gusdorf's considerations as to what constitutes autobiography,
to Renza's examination of the narrative reordering and perspectivism
of the genre. If, as is inevitable, something of Allen himself emerges
through these examinations it is perhaps only then that Allen's own
autobiographical position should be considered.
CHAPTER
1: The myth of the Autobiographical Auteur.
Which attempts to place Allen within the auteur policy, and separates
the man from the films
The commonly held notion that Allen's films are a partial attempt to
express his own life upon the screen is intrinsically linked to the
powerful notion of the cinematic auteur. The idea of 'the auteur' is,
as John Caughie observes, essentially the installation of the Romantic
artist into cinema. (10) This notion developed from the desire in the
'50s to claim that cinema was an ''art form liker painting or poetry,
offering the individual the freedom of personal; expression'' as Edward
Buscombe observes. (Caughie, 1981, p.23) Developing the concept of the
auteur was essentially a convenient method for raising the status of
cinema, employed by the influential French publications Cahiers and
its predecessor la Revue du Cinema. (22) Its terms were indefinite,
Buscombe explains that Truffaut characterized what has become known
as the ''classic auteur'' ''as one who brings something genuinely personal
to his subject instead of merely producing a tasteful, accurate but
lifeless rendering of the original material... instead of merely transferring
someone else's work faithfully and self-effacingly, the acuter transforms
the material into an expression of his own personality.'' (Buscombe.23).
Allen surpasses Truffaut's criteria in that his work is self-conceived;
Allen generates his own ideas and writes his own scripts. Obviously,
however, this type of approach is limited by many factors, not least
of which is the fact that, as Elisabeth Bruss is correct to remind us,
film is essentially a collaborative medium. Thus we cannot treat the
whole of a film as the singular output of any one artist. It takes more
than a director and screenwriter to realise a film. We can't overlook
the contributions of the actors, cinematographers and musicians involved.
Moreover, films do not, as Kochberg indicates, "exist in a vacuum:
they are conceived, produced, distributed and consumed within specific
and economic and social contexts. (Nelmes, Jill Ed. An Introduction
to Film Studies, p.8)" These two key points, then, indicate the
most fundamental difficulties in ascribing the contents of a film to
one authorial figure, which is the essence of the notion of the auteur
as defined by Truffaut.
The circumstances that have surrounded the production of Allen's films
for at least twenty-five years are liberated in contrast to much of
Hollywood's production, the most significant factor being the nature
of Allen's contract. Allen's films are produced in an environment where
he is the principal source of ideas; his only constraints are of budget
and production schedule, within these limits he is free to produce whatever
film he chooses without the need to have his scripts authorized by the
studio financially backing his work. (Lax 11, 337-8 and Bjorkman. 259)
He has managed to plough his own furrow in an industry notorious for
restraining creative autonomy.
It is Allen who writes, occasionally in collaboration with Marshall
Brickmann (Sleeper, 1973, Annie Hall, 1977, Manhattan,
1979), directs and often acts, further, his influence is key in choice
of music, casting and editing. His control is thorough if not absolute.
Allen operates within an environment of trust; through his career he
has developed an ensemble of camera operators, designers, actors and
technicians who return again and again to his productions, such that
he could be seen to have developed a reasonably consistent opus upon
which he can influence the film in the direction he wishes. (Bjorkman.
24, 259 -60)
Allen, however, cannot alter the environment in which he has grown both
physically and intellectually, he is subject to the cultural influence
that Barthes identifies as the ''Death of the Author''.' Barthes dismisses
the longheld cultural practice of seeking the ''explanation of a work...
in the man or woman who produced it, (Image - Music - Text, 143)'' suggesting
this ''totalitarian'' approach impoverishes the potential of art, for
it reduces the possibility of a work to a single point of explanation.
Instead Barthes seeks to establish the view of an author's work as ''a
multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them
original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn
from the vocabulary of everyday life. Barthes, then, views the artist
as a writer utilising the language of his culture to form new meanings
through new combinations. These meanings are, however, not limited but
are as potentially varied as any other language. Meanings produced may
be unconscious and independent of the author, derived from the reader/viewer's
cultural associations rather than any deliberately produced by the author.
This linguistic analogy can clearly be applied to Allen. Taking a broad
view of Allen's work we can immediately identify the prominent influences
of his Manhattan-led life, the mass media, literature's structures,
earlier cinematic comics such as Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, and
later on the psychodramas of Bergman all merging into one oeuvre. Additionally,
Barthes would suggest that there are many other external influences
that Allen is interacting with on an unconscious level permeating his
work.
Barthes' theory essentially extends the understanding of these various
strands of influence to a quite different single focal point from the
author, that is the reader: 'a text's unity lies not in its origin but
in its destination (148).'' The application of this theory to the viewer
of an Allen film creates immediate difficulties alerting us to the complex
relationship between Allen's audience and his creations. Barthes' improbably
argues that, for 'the death of the author' to occur the reader must
be ''without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone
who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written
text is constituted.'' (P.148); With Allen, however, this is clearly
not the case. The little man persona that Allen created initially for
stand-up has come to infiltrate his audience to such an extent that
they bring a persistent impression of him to all of his work. Ignoring
what contradicts this ''myth'', and readily accepting all the parallels
between the man and his work they can. Further, the residual impact
of the little man of Allen's earliest works has been so great that,
despite the continual development of the persona throughout his work
the audience continue to view Allen as the powerless, inept schlemiel
of his early films, even to the extent that actors who take on the role
of the surrogate Allen are conflated with this persona.
The reasons for the development of this situation can be understood
in reference to Barthes work Mythologies. Both Allen himself,
and his creations, specifically the little man persona have become,
as Leak describes, sucked in ''by the organs of mass culture... and
transformed into modern myth (12)''. Barthes conceives of myths operating
in society as a language (Mythologies. 109) Myths articulate
common cultural ideas; they are usually an image applied to an idea.
Barthes describes understanding myth as ''dealing with this particular
image, which is given for this particular signification (110)''. The
relation between the signified and the signifier, to use Saussure's
terms, in myth is frequently arbitrary, governed by the proximity of
the idea and the image, rather than any direct relation between the
two (109-111). Barthes cites the example, amongst others, of Abbie Pierre,
whose mythologised status operates in a similar way to Allens.
Pierre instigated a charity drive to relieve the frozen homeless from
the harsh French winter of 1953-54, and became a media figure in the
process, whose life inspired the production of a film. Like Allen, Pierre
had distinctive physical qualities, which were attached by the public
to his behavior. Pierre's saint like eschewing of fashion in favor of
a neutral appearance characterised by his benign expression, a Franciscan
haircut, a missionary's beard'', became as Barthes identifies a sign
of neutrality in itself. (Mythologies.47) Barthes comments in
wonder at the apparent ease with which these physical attributes became
so closely linked to Pierre's actions; ''it is indeed surprising that
the attribute of goodness should be like transferable coins allowing
an easy exchange between reality (the Abbie Pierre of the film)'' (Mythologies,
p. 48). This process is, however exactly that that has occurred with
Allen and the little man persona. Mass culture has produced a perspective
whereby Allen's appearance has become conflated with the persona Allen
presents us, such that when the relationship between his life and work
are considered this is the Allen model on which assumptions are based.
Returning to Barthes for a moment, we see the conclusion of his examination
of Pierre is one of concern: 'I get worried about a society which consumes
with such avidity the display of charity that it forgets to ask itself
questions about its consequences, its use and limits. (48)'' These concerns
are exactly those pertinent to Allen. The ready acceptance of the myth
prevents proper examination of the autobiographical nature of Allens
work, because the ''real'' life that is compared to Allen's films and
produces the conclusion that they are, indeed, autobiographical, is
in part a construction of those films.
Barthes is able to see beyond the constructs of society because he places
himself in what Leak describes as a typical ''critically distant'' perspective.
His perspective, though subjective, is designed a Leak clarifies, to
be ''isolated'' and ''singular''; simply put, Barthes attempts to recognise
the influences and tendencies in popular culture without being caught
up and swayed by them (9). Barthes must still, however, ''grasp the
meaning of representations before he is able to analyse the ways in
which meaning is constructed. (9)''. For the viewer of Allen's films,
all that is significant is the produced meaning, the complex artifice
that creates the little man, that is partially revealed in Annie Hall,
and subsequent works, frequently escapes attention leading to the conflation
of Allen with his work.
That Allen's films do not carry the imprimatur ''A film by Woody Allen...''
is perhaps an indication that he himself is aware of the many difficulties
involving authorship of film in general, and the particular difficulties
involving his audience's involvement with his little man persona. As
Phillips observes, the phrasing ''A film by'' is closely associated
with auterism. The name of the director acts as a sign, indicating to
the public something of the content and the theme. Ordinarily, as Philips
explains, the director's name only carries expectations from ''his previous
work and the kind of promise offered by a new film bearing his name.
(Nelmes ed.,1996, 150-1)'' The special case of the director as auteur
carries a greater significance. Approaching an Allen film within the
auteur construct places it in a context of his work as a whole. Within
the auteur structure each work by the artist is seen to reflect ''some
essential underlying personal force'' (Phillips in Nelmes Ed. 150) implying
that films do not exist singularly but rather as a collective body.
An unusual product of this approach, as Philips observes, is that ''absurd
conclusions'' have been drawn; ''a bad film by an auteur was ''better''
than a great film by a non-auteur'', a standpoint which highlights the
blurring of the auteur construct. The conspicuous difficulty with auterism
is its tendency towards overt generalisation, a fact that has become
prominent in the many recent critical assessments and indeed, prompted
the development of several more objectively thorough auterist critical
strategies. These have ranged from the uncovering of consistent themes,
to the ''auteur - structuralist'' examination of mise-en-scene or recurrent
visuals. (Caughie 12-130. Common to the various strategies, however,
is that blinkered quality of view that places the filmmaker as the romantic
artist, serving his own inspiration from his mind, untouched by all
external influences until they are deliberately drawn to him. Devotion
to auterism leads Allen to be viewed as a maker of quirky New York comedies
where the focus is upon his nebbish persona; an account which hardly
begins to account for the depth and diversity of films such as Sleeper,
Annie Hall and Crimes And Misdemeanors.
This conventional view of Allen can be immediately dismissed if we turn
to its critical fulcrum, Allen's little man persona. Broadly, until
Annie Hall,
Allen's little man persona was fairly consistent. Much of the humor
of the early films derived from his cabaret technique of exploiting
disjunctions between visual and verbal messages. Steve Allen, a veteran
comic of the 1950s, and an acquaintance of Woody Allen, explains this
technique in his assessment of a comic monologue Woody gave in 1963;
''Allen depends on the incongruity between two factors: his alleged
prowess as a lover and his mousy physical appearance. This appearance
makes it possible for him to say certain things without offending....
Needless to say in making these observations I make no reference whatever
to the reality of Woody Allen's sexual or romantic experience.'' (Spignesi
ed., The Woody Allen Companion, 1994, p. 109.) Steve Allen usefully
highlights the operation of much of Woody Allen's early humour, it is
from exactly these type of contrasts that much of Love and Death
emanates. Allen's character Boris Grushenko is a highly unlikely soldier
both physically and intellectually, a fact indicated by his penchant
for butterfly collecting, so it is all the more amusing when he becomes
firstly a highly decorated hero and, subsequently, embroiled in a plot
to assassinate Napoleon.
Significantly, Steve Allen also clearly establishes the separation between
Woody Allen and the little man persona he employs in performance. As
Steve Allen indicates, some of the humour of the monologue is generated
from ostensible references to the real life of Woody Allen, (Spignesi
ed. 109) knowledge or accuracy to Woody Allen's real life is unnecessary.
The jokes of the monologue are essentially fabrications, they seem realistic
because of the persona Allen employs to present them, the references
are to the fictional life of the persona, not Allen's own for clearly
they are far too far-fetched to have actually happened:
For the first year of my marriage, I would say I had a basic attitude
toward my wife. I tended to place my wife underneath a pedestal all
the time, and we used to argue and fight, and we finally decided that
we would either take a vacation in Bermuda or get a divorce, one of
the two things.
We discussed it very maturely and decided finally on the divorce, 'cause
we felt we had a limited amount of money to spend on something and that
a vacation in Bermuda is limited but a divorce is something you will
always have. (Spignesi ed., 1994)
At this point in Allen's career then, the temptation to conflate the
real Woody Allen's experiences with his persona is minimal. With the
release of Annie Hall, however, the little man appeared to be
revealing more than the hapless events that befell him, the persona
Allen presented us with, Alvy Singer, essentially became less a caricature
and more a character with a rounded experience, and importantly a history,
and it is exactly this change this change that leads the audience to
consider the film to be of a more autobiographical nature.
Allen's awareness of the audience's approach is indicated by his deliberately
shifting presentation of the little man and significantly his continued
use of reflexive, self referential techniques to alert the viewer to
the constructed nature of his films. These techniques include frequent
reference to other films within his own, and in the characters of his
films viewing films made by other fimmakers. These techniques frequently
disrupt the narrative flow of Allen's films foregrounding, as Robert
Stam suggests, ''the specific means of ''filmic production'' subverting
''the assumption that art can be a transparent medium of communication.''
(Quoted in Pogel, 215) Reflexive techniques remind the audience that
they are watching a film, stressing the escapist nature of cinema. Further,
unlike in the random montage of surfing through channels, the insertion
of secondary sources into Allen's primary film stock can be used to
comment on the primary film itself. Similarly Allen frequently has characters
in his films speak directly to the camera, breaking the conventional
realism of film, by violating, in Brechtian style, the illusion of the
audience watching real events. It is through these reflexive techniques
that Allen can explore within the context of his films the relationships
between film and reality highlighting the construction and presentation
of autobiography, specifically focusing upon the mediating effect of
constructing identity and personal history from the subjective perspective
of the narrative present.
The representation of the little man persona in Annie Hall allows
Allen to examine the narrative strategies of autobiography. Alvy Singer
emerges prominently, like the Carnegie comics in Broadway Danny Rose,
as the narrator of Annie Hall. The focalisation of the events
of the film from his perspective draws the audience to an awareness
of the perspectivism of both his own story and inevitably, those characters
involved within his life. As we watch both Annie Hall and Broadway
Danny Rose we are clearly aware of the fact that the story we view
is being presented through the mediating view of another character,
and therefore is subject to the whims of how that narrator wishes to
present that story. Put simply, Allen makes clear that these films are
subjectively presented.
Louis Renza would suggest that it is exactly this type of subjective
representation; the editing of a 'Life' that leads to the fictional
element of autobiography. For him the need to for an order in fiction,
and doubtless this theory can be transferred to film, imposes a certain
falsehood, for life is never complete or certain, much depends on chance.
For the reader and viewer, however, the improbable and inappropriate
impact of chance (true or not) can effectively spoil the escapist, entertainment
value of the text/film; which have their own conventions to fulfill.
Allen's films demonstrate Renza's argument in their simultaneous highlighting
of narrative perspectivism that signifies to the reader the fictional
nature of his work, whilst constantly inviting the audience to draw
autobiographical parallels between his 'real life'' as understood by
the public and that shown on the screen. Allen indicates this in film
the precarious position of the autobiographer that Renza describes.
The act of representation is that of making experiences ''present''
again in a new medium - but it also indicates a difference and distance
from the original experience. Representation frequently involves finding
a difficult balance between truth and fiction:
The autobiographer cannot help sensing his omission of facts from a
life the totality or complexity of which constantly eludes him - the
more so when discourse pressures him into ordering these facts. Directly
or indirectly infected within the presence of incompleteness, he concedes
his life to a narrative ''design'' in tension with its own postulations,
the result being an autobiographical text whose references appear to
readers within an aesthetic setting, that is, in terms of the narrative's
own ''essayistic'' disposition rather than in terms of their nontextual
truth or falsity. (Olney, James. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical
and Critical. Guildford. Princeton University Press. 1980, p. 207.)
Renza guides us to a situation whereby the autobiographical elements
of an artists' work must be separated from the secondary source. In
attempting to separate the autobiographical material of Allen's films
from the fictional structures, however, we become engaged in the unprofitable
dissection of a jumble of layered fictions. What is clear is that Allen's
life is inextricably entangled with the films he makes, he has been
involved for over forty years in the movie business, he has frequently
cast his friends, lovers, wives thus merging life and art. The nature
between Allen's films and his life may be one of the common simbiosis
of all artists. His filmmaking is dependent on his life and, if we follow
Barthes notion of the influence of all culture surrounding us affecting
our art, then it also follows that something of Allen's life must have
impacted on his work. This is the position expounded by Eric Lax, the
first person to write an autobiography of Allen:
One reason Woody is prolific is that, like almost every great artist,
he is a prolific recycler of his own life. His ideas, he says, all have
some autobiographical content in that they spring from a germ of experience
that he turns and augments. While acknowledging the breadth of Woody's
imagination Charlie (Charles) Joffe thinks there is more than a germ
of reality in his work. ''He denies a lot of truths in his life. Radio
Days was easy to admit was autobiographical because he was six in
it.'' And Mia adds, ''I think everyone in Woody's life plays roles and
replays them in a different context. Some of Hannah was drawn from my
family, and I guess other sisters Woody has known, like Diane Keaton
and her sisters.'' (Lax, 1992.p.179).
Lax is really just modestly restating the common perception of Allen;
his perspective tends to accept the myth constructed around Allen, conflating
his private life transparently with his films. His biography is instructive
in terms of the ostensible facts of Allens life. It presents an
engaging story of Allan Konigsberg's rise from the low-income suburbs
of Brooklyn to his opulent Central Park apartment; but it fails because
it doesn't approach Allen's work critically. Lax has constructed a life
history of Allen that embraces rather than challenges the myth that
has grown up around Allen. Too often Lax accepts Allen's own explanations
of his motivation without analysing what Allen has said. For example
he encourages the perception of Allen as a death-obsessed neurotic by
repeating Allen's famous line:'I don't want to achieve immortality
through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.''; without
putting in into its context as a line from one of Allen's short stories.
A comparison with William Geist's Rolling Stone interview reveals
the shortcomings of Lax's approach. Geist is a writer for the New
York Times, not a personal friend of Allens, as Lax was. In
his casual interview, he reveals the naive reading of those who approach
Allen thinking he is the same character as he is on screen:
Woody Allen puts me at ease. ... He insisted he was not obsessing over
the essential nothingness of the universe at the moment and invited
me to sit down. He sat down too, and not at all in the foetal position...
For a man often depicted as a tormented neurotic, Woody Allen appeared
remarkably relaxed, ''centred and directed'', as pop psychologists say,
honest and sincere. And also quite rich.
Lax's tendency, then, to compliment Allen's work rather than deconstructing
it in order to discover something of Allen's impetus is disappointing,
especially given Lax's enviable access to ''Woody's sets, scripts, cutting
room and even Woody himself. (Spignesi, 1994. p. 426)''
In supporting the conventional view he skirts across the difficult ground
of Allen's self representation, when he may have been positioned to
reveal the constructed nature of the myth of Allen's little man persona.
In attempting to understand Allen's work it may be shrewdest to approach
works individually, looking for autobiographical themes, techniques
and discussions, whilst appreciating the larger picture of possible
continuities across his works that leads Bjorkman to conclude that ''even
if your (Allen's) films differ a lot, in content as well as in style,
being sometimes comedies and sometimes dramas, there is a coherence
about them.... (44).'' Beginning with Annie Hall then, we can trace
the development of Allen's increasingly sophisticated cinematic expression.
Developing theoretically and artistically Allen's film continually challenge
our perception of the little man of persona and thus implicitly the
myth surrounding Allens work, the realism of cinema, and importantly
how self-expression can be achieved within the framework of a variety
of narrative structures.
Continued
here - Annie Hall and more
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