The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen - Hardcover

Bailey, Peter J.

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9780813121673: The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813121671 ISBN 13: 9780813121673

Publisher: Univ Pr of Kentucky, 2000

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For thirty years no American filmmaker has been as prolific—or as paradoxical—as Woody Allen. From Play it Again, Sam (1972) to Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Allen has produced an average of one film a year. Yet with each new film he reveals a progressively skeptical attitude toward art.

Merging criticism and biography, Peter Bailey uses Allen’s ambivalent views of the artistic enterprise as the key to understanding his entire career. In an exhaustive, jargon-free reading, Bailey demonstrates how Allen’s films constitute a debate he is conducting with himself about the capacities of art to improve the quality of life and about the resulting price exacted upon artists and those around them. Bailey identifies the underlying tension between reality and image in film after film, demonstrating how the resolution of this conflict in each movie is revisited, critiqued, and reconfigured in the next.

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From the Inside Flap:

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 Shadows and Fog, one of Allen’s characters says of a circus magician, “Oh yes, everyone loves his illusions!” 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. For example, Bailey contends that in Manhattan, Allen’s cinematic romanticizing of the Manhattan cityscape contrasts thematically with the shallowness of the movie’s characters, while he reads Hannah and Her Sisters as a film in which Allen allowed his desire to project a resolution affirming the family to overwhelm his predominantly realistic impulses. 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 study opens with a discussion of Allan Felix’s life-denying obsession with Casablanca in Play It Again, Sam, and closes with Allen’s guilt-laden allegory of the artist’s relationship to his audience in Sweet and Lowdown. Bailey’s examination of Allen’s art/life dialectic also draws from the offscreen 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.

About the Author:

Peter J. Bailey, professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, is the author of Reading Stanley Elkin.

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