A Companion to Woody Allen

By Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus

Edited by two renowned Allen experts, A Companion to Woody Allen presents a collection of 26 original essays on the director’s films. Contributions offer a number of divergent critical perspectives while expanding the contexts in which his work is understood.

• A timely companion by the authors of two of the most important books on Allen to date
• Illuminates the films of Woody Allen from a number of divergent critical perspectives
• Explores the contexts in which his work should be understood
• Assesses Allen’s remarkable filmmaking career from its early beginnings and investigates the conflicts and contradictions that suffuse it
• Discusses Allen’s recognition as a global cinematic figure

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781118514832

Book preview

Notes on Contributors

Christopher Ames is Vice President of Academic Affairs at Shepherd University. He is the author of The Life of the Party: Festive Vision in Modern Fiction (1991, reprinted 2010) and Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected (1997). He has published articles on literary modernism, the Hollywood novel, and film.

Gregg Bachman teaches cinema studies and screenwriting in the Communication Department at the University of Tampa. In addition to Woody Allen, Dr. Bachman, the co-editor of the volume American Silent Film: Discovering Margin­alized Voices, has written on such diverse topics as westerns and silent movie audiences.

Brian Bergen-Aurand teaches cinema at Nanyang Technological University, where he specializes in film, ethics, and embodiment. His recent work has appeared in Information Ethics, Intercultural Studies, and New Review of Film and Television Studies, including articles on Antonioni, Almodóvar, and Fassbinder. Currently, he is writing on Chaplin and film ethics.

Richard A. Blake, S.J., is Co-director of the film studies program at Boston College. His books include Woody Allen Profane and Sacred and Street Smart: the New York of Lumet, Allen, Scorsese and Lee. He was the regular film reviewer for America magazine for 35 years.

William Brigham, M.A., M.S.W., has taught film studies at various institutions of higher education in California and is the author of published essays on family in the films of Woody Allen, depictions of homelessness in American films, and the rage of African American filmmakers.

Iris Bruce is Associate Professor of German and Comparative Literature at McMaster University, Canada. Her research interests are Kafka in his time and contemporary popular culture, German-Jewish Studies, and Israel Studies: the literature of Israel and Palestine. She is the author of Kafka and Cultural Zionism. Dates in Palestine (2007).

Mark T. Conard is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City. He is the co-editor of The Simpsons and Philosophy, and Woody Allen and Philosophy; he is editor of The Philosophy of Film Noir, The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese, The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, and The Philosophy of Spike Lee.

Renée R. Curry, Ph.D., English, is Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at California State University Monterey Bay. She is the editor of Perspectives on Woody Allen; editor of States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change and White Women Writing White: H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath and Whiteness.

David Detmer is a Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University Calumet. He is the author of Phenomenology Explained (forthcoming), Sartre Explained (2008), Challenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth (2003), and Freedom as a Value (1988).

Menachem Feuer currently teaches in the Jewish Studies Department at the University of Waterloo. He has published essays and book reviews on philosophy, literature, and Jewish studies in several peer-reviewed journals including Modern Fiction Studies, Shofar, MELUS, German Studies Review, International Studies in Philosophy, Comparative Literature and Culture, Ctheory, and Cinemaction.

Katherine Fusco is a Senior Lecturer in English and Assistant Director of the Writing Studio at Vanderbilt University. She has published essays on celebrity and cruelty in contemporary film, D.W. Griffith’s adaptation of Frank Norris, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her book project is tentatively titled Efficiency Aesthetics: Time, Narrative, and Modernity in Silent Film and US Naturalist Literature, 1895–1915.

Colleen Glenn is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Kentucky. Her dissertation deals with Jimmy Stewart’s post-World War II films as representations of war trauma. A portion of her work on Stewart will be published in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Glenn is currently working on an edited collection with Rebecca Bell-Metereau titled Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering.

J. Andrew Gothard earned his BA and MA in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His most recent publication, " ‘Your Immediate Superior in Madness’: Orton’s What the Butler Saw and Foucault’s Madness and Civilization," is in Text and Presentation. His research focuses on twentieth-century British and Irish literature with particular interests in modernism, postcolonialism, and working class studies.

William Hutchings is a Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Reference Guide (2005), two books about David Storey, and numerous articles on James Joyce, Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, Anthony Burgess, Woody Allen, and others.

Claire Sisco King is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University, where she also teaches in the Film Studies Program. She is the author of Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema. Her work has also been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies, and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Christopher J. Knight is a Professor of English at the University of Montana. His most recent book is Omissions Are Not Accidents: Modern Apophaticism from Henry James to Jacques Derrida (2010).

Sander Lee is a Professor of Philosophy at Keene State College Keene, New Hampshire. He is the author of Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism (2002) and numerous additional essays. In 2006, he won the Keene State College Faculty Award for Distinction in Research and Scholarship.

Cynthia Lucia is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Rider University. She is author of Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film and co-editor of the four-volume Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film. Among her recent essays are those appearing in Film and Sexual Politics: A Critical Reader and Authorship in Film Adaptation.

John Douglas Macready is a doctoral student in philosophy and adjunct instructor at the University of Dallas, where he is focusing his research on the concept of human dignity in the work of Hannah Arendt. He has published reviews and articles in Film-Philosophy, Borderlands, Purlieu: A Philosophical Journal, and Ramify: The Journal of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts.

Gilles Menegaldo is a full Professor of American Literature and Film Studies at the University of Poitiers. He has co-written a book on Dracula, published many articles on Hollywood genres and edited collections of essays on Frankenstein, H.P. Lovecraft, R.L. Stevenson, A. Conan Doyle, Jacques Tourneur, film and history, crime fiction, and horror films.

Patrick Murray is Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He is author of Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (1988) and editor of Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present (1997).

Monica Osborne teaches at Loyola Marymount University and UCLA, where she was also a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish American Literature. She has written for Tikkun, The New Republic, Religion and Literature, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Shofar, Modern Fiction Studies, MELUS, and Jewcy.com. She teaches courses on Jewish literature, Holocaust Studies, post-World War II German film, and Midrash in a modern context.

Stephen Papson is a Professor of Sociology teaching in the Film and Representation Studies Program at St. Lawrence University. He has co-authored three books: Sign Wars (1996), Nike Culture (1998), and Landscapes of Capital (2011). He teaches courses in film theory and Australian cinema and has recently written on Baz Luhrmann’s Australia.

Robert M. Polhemus is Joseph Atha Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus, Stanford University. He is the author of The Changing World of Anthony Trollope, Comic Faith, Erotic Faith, Lot’s Daughters: Sex, Redemption and Women’s Quest for Authority, and the editor (with Roger Henkle) of Critical Reconstructions.

Joanna E. Rapf is a Professor of English and Film & Media Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Periodically, she also teaches at Dartmouth College. Her books include Buster Keaton: A Bio-Bibliography (1995), On the Waterfront (2003), and Interviews with Sidney Lumet (2005). With Andrew Horton, she co-edited the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy (2012).

Cecilia Sayad is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK). She is the author of a book on Charlie Kaufman titled O jogo da reinvenção: Charlie Kaufman e o lugar do autor no cinema (2008), published in Brazil, and her essays have appeared in journals such as Framework and the Journal of Film and Video.

Jeanne A. Schuler is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. She has authored numerous articles on the history of modern philosophy and critical theory. She is working on a series of articles exploring Hegel’s most fundamental insights; the first of these appeared in History of Philosophy Quarterly.

Acknowledgments

Frances Weller Bailey supplied a thirty-ninth year of undeviatingly devoted marital support as well as inspired tech assistance without which Peter J. could never have completed his co-editorial tasks.

Sam would like to thank students who have worked with him at Vanderbilt including Evan Blaire Garlock, Stephanie Page Hoskins, Aldea Marine Meary-Miller, Merrill Hendrickson, and Deann Valrae Armstrong. Special thanks goes to Cynthia Lucia for her outstanding advice. Mark L. Schoenfield, chair of the Department of English at Vanderbilt, has been a source of steady support and assistance. Calista Marie Doll of the department also was a great help. As always, the greatest thanks for support and inspiration goes to Scottie Girgus whose help grows even greater as the years grow longer.

Sam B. and Peter J. very gratefully acknowledge the hard work and the collegial, thoroughly companionable efforts of our 26 contributors, and the professionally rewarding relationships we have enjoyed with Wiley executive editor Jayne Fargnoli and copyeditor Helen Kemp. We express our gratitude as well for the many, many films of Woody Allen, without which they and their contributors would have had, quite literally, nothing to say.

Introduction

Peter J. Bailey

The July 29, 2011 issue of Entertainment Weekly made it official: Midnight in Paris had surpassed Hannah and Her Sisters as Woody Allen’s top-grossing film. As the contributors to this Companion and many of its readers understand, top-grossing Woody Allen film is a term that demands significant contextualizing. ("By my meager standards, [Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah] did very nicely, Allen told Douglas McGrath, but certainly not very nicely by Very Nicely standards" (qtd. in McGrath 2006: 118).) Coming in at just over $46 million by September, Midnight accumulated profits a quarter of those claimed by another 2011 summer romantic comedy, Bridesmaids, while being eclipsed by the proceeds of the first week of Harry Potter and the Deadly Hollows Part II by an even larger margin.¹ Few of the contributors to this Companion probably saw either of those movies, but many of them (as their chapters attest) watched Midnight in Paris with surprise and delight. They would have watched with surprise, for one reason, because many of them live in places where Woody Allen movies never appear except on DVD rental shelves. During one week that summer, Midnight was appearing on 912 screens in the United States, compared to Allen’s most financially successful recent predecessors, each of which earned approximately $23 million: Match Point (maximum 512 screens) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (maximum 776 screens). (More improbable still, at the showing on one of those screens, in Boston on a Saturday night, one of the Companion editors was turned away because Midnight in Paris was sold out. A Woody Allen movie sold out!) The contributors would have been delighted because, arguably at any rate, Allen hadn’t made a film of such substance and charm since Hannah. They would be agreeing with the estimation of Kenneth Turan, who articulated his personal surprise and delight in the Los Angeles Times: Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write again, he acknowledged. "Woody Allen has made a wonderful new picture, Midnight in Paris, and it’s his best, most enjoyable work in years."

If you’re surprised to be reading that, think how I feel writing it, Turan added. I’ve been a tough sell on the past dozen or so Allen films, very much including the well-acted but finally wearying Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It seemed that everything he touched in recent years was tainted by misanthropy and sourness. Until now (Turan 2011).

In addition to Vicky Cristina Barcelona (which closes with the two title characters grimly traversing the Barcelona airport, their disconsolate expressions express­ing all that need be said about the psychic residuum of their would-be romantic summers), Turan was very likely thinking of Whatever Works (2009), in which the facile character reversals of the transplanted Southerners do little to clear the viewer’s mind’s ear of Boris Yellnikoff’s incessant existential kvetching, and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, with its unrelenting emphasis on the delusions the human need for love and companionship delivers us mortal fools into desperately embracing. Contributors to the Companion make much more of these three films than I just have, of course, but none of them claims any of the three to be robustly cheerful, nor is any of them likely to find misanthropic and sour completely inappropriate descriptors of the emotional trajectories of Midnight’s trio of predecessors.

"With Midnight in Paris," Turan continued,

Allen has lightened up, allowed himself a treat and in the process created a gift for us and him. His new film is simple and fable-like, with a definite when you wish upon a star quality, but, bolstered by appealing performers like Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard and Rachel McAdams, it is his warmest, mellowest and funniest venture in far too long. Allen says he’s been enamored of Paris since he wrote and acted in What’s New Pussycat? in 1965. You can sense his continued passion for the city throughout the film, feel the extra pep in his step and pleasure in his heart (Turan 2011).²

Robert M. Polhemus, whose chapter in this Companion, Comic Faith and Its Discontents: Death and the Late Woody, treats Midnight in Paris at length, seems to concur with Turan in characterizing the movie as a gamechanger for Allen’s oeuvre, which assumes that, before this spring, Allen critics have been exerting themselves on a somewhat different field, and, therefore, one of the purposes of this Introduction, in addition to introducing the essays contained within the Companion, is to offer the reader a highly concentrated view of the pleasures, challenges, and occasional frustrations of being a Woody Allen film critic before – and since – Midnight in Paris.

The pleasures are perhaps best epitomized by the delight so many of the critics take in their essays in moving from one Allen film to another, in critically linking films of what is generally agreed upon as his major period (1981–1992: Zelig through Husbands and Wives) with the later movies that have tended to attract more equivocal responses from reviewers and critics (Manhattan Murder Mystery, Celebrity, Hollywood Ending, and Anything Else among them). Co-editor Sam B. Girgus and I encouraged our contributors to keep in mind that, in order that this book not replicate the earlier Allen critical compilations with their concentrations on Zelig, Purple Rose, Hannah, and so on, the majority of Companion chapters would at least touch on Allen’s post-major period films, Accordingly, in his chapter, ‘Raging in the Dark’: Late Style in Woody Allen’s Films, Christopher J. Knight takes issue with the putative decline in Allen’s later films, pointing up the many moviegoer pleasures to be encountered even in his lesser efforts. So while there is a perception that Allen’s work went into eclipse in the post-Farrow period, Knight acknowledges,

this period has, in fact, included many fine achievements, and when it is taken into account that the director is responsible for all of a film’s facets, these achievements become more unarguable. Think, for instance, of the brilliant cinematography in Husbands and Wives (Carlo Di Palma, DP), Sweet and Lowdown (Fei Zhao, DP), Match Point (Remi Adefarsasin, DP) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Javier Aguirresarobe, DP). Think of the scintillating performances of Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives; Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Tilly, and Chazz Palminteri in Bullets Over Broadway; Mira Sorvino in Mighty Aphrodite; Sean Penn and Samantha Morton in Sweet and Lowdown; Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Brian Cox, Matthew Goode, and Scarlett Johansson in Match Point; Colin Farrell, Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson, and Hayley Atwell in Cassandra’s Dream; Hugh Jackman in Scoop; Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, and Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona; and Larry David and Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works. Think of the choreography in Mighty Aphrodite and Everybody Says I Love You and of the music that so enhances Everybody Says I Love You, Sweet and Lowdown, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream (Philip Glass, composer), and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. And think of Allen’s own script work in Sweet and Lowdown, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Match Point, Cassandra’s Dream, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There have been definite successes, and not to extend Allen his due should entail a serious misjudgment.

Knight’s inventory of Allen’s post-1992 achievements might be expanded to include the homage to Kafka and German Expressionist film techniques in Shadows and Fog (for an illumination of which, see Iris Bruce’s Companion chapter, Lurking in Shadows: Kleinman’s Trial and Defense), and the fact that, during an era in which Hollywood film has become increasingly mindless, most of Allen’s movies take viewers (and the critics secreted among them) seriously enough to offer them questions to ponder, to confront them with substantial human problems to contemplate. The existential conundrums these films pose are the special province of the philosophically oriented Companion critics, including Richard A. Blake, Mark T. Conard, David Detmer, Sander Lee, Patrick Murray and Jeanne A. Schuler, and Monica Osborne. If there is one reflection on his filmmaking career that the Companion essays seem singularly devoted to confuting, it’s Allen’s contention that, I never had enough technique or enough depth in my work to make anybody think (qtd. in Lax 2007: 365). (Part IV, Influences/Intertextualities, of this Companion provides compelling evidence of how much of other writers’ and thinkers’ writings and thoughts have worked their ways into Allen’s films. William Hutchings’ Woody Allen and the Literary Canon demonstrates how pervasively Allen’s films invoke canonical authors, and J. Andrew Gothard’s ‘Who’s He When He’s at Home?’: A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions makes an impressive first pass at charting such allusions. William Brigham is surely the only critic ever to view Allen’s protagonists through the prism of the French flâneur, and although Menachem Feuer is far from the first critic to view Allen protagonists as schlemiels, his conception of that venerable Jewish comedic figure includes a capacity for growth which hasn’t always been part of that mythos. The section concludes with Brian Bergen-Aurand’s reading of Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a city of refuge narrative illuminated by other Barcelona films by Whit Stillman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pedro Almodóvar, and Alejandro González Iñárritu.)

Knight’s inventory of achievements also points up in microcosm the most obvious – and yet hardest to fully appreciate – aspect of Allen’s oeuvre: its magnitude. How easy it is to type or say that Allen has made 41 films in 41 years; how difficult it is to grasp fully the consistently indefatigable creative energy that that accomplishment enshrines. Filmmakers get no awards purely for productivity, certainly, but Allen’s ability to produce a screenworthy script annually for four decades puts him in a class of American artists (Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, and the late John Updike are other members) who constantly outproduced their critics’ capacities to say comprehensive things about their work. Then Allen had to shoot his. To be a critic of Woody Allen films is to feel incessantly surpassed by the amplitude of his production.

In a different sense, it’s a blessing and a challenge for Allen critics that he has been so prolific. We’re never at a loss for texts to write about and compare/contrast, and, unlike some reviewers who complain that his films tend to run together, we never confuse Broadway Danny Rose, Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors, September, Husbands and Wives, Shadows and Fog, Bullets over Broadway, Everyone Says I Love You, Deconstructing Harry, Match Point, and Midnight in Paris. We understand that moviegoers less focused on movies than we are might experience some blurring among their memories of Allen’s movies, but, if the chapters here dramatize one thing, it’s their authors’ cumulative conviction of the remarkable variety that exists within Allen’s immense oeuvre. True enough, many of his films devote themselves to illuminating the human capacity for love, and yet, as Kent Jones argued in his review of Midnight in Paris (2011), Allen’s movies approach the subject from a number of moods and in a variety of tonalities:

playful (Alice, 90; A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, 82; Manhattan Murder Mystery), tough as nails (Husbands and Wives, 92), sardonic (Match Point, 05; Tall Dark Stranger), celebratory in the face of obsolescence (Radio Days, Broadway Danny Rose, 84), autumnal (Another Woman), or a musically modulated combination thereof (Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, 86; Crimes and Misdemeanors, 89).

The challenge with which his productivity confronts Allen’s critics?: Writing about three of the films without trying to incorporate six more into the argument.

Probably the most idiosyncratic element of the relationship between Allen and his critics is that many of them appear to value his movies substantially more than he does. Allen has consistently articulated his sense that The Purple Rose of Cairo, Husbands and Wives, and Match Point are the films in which he came closest to achieving what he set out to do in writing the scripts; he places Stardust Memories and Zelig in his second rank of cinematic achievement (Lax 2007: 255). Nonetheless, as he in 2000 told Eric Lax (whose voluminous interviews with Allen are quoted in the Companion nearly as often as are his movies),

I don’t see myself as an artist. I see myself as a working filmmaker who chose to go the route of working all the time rather than making my films into some special red carpet event every three years. I’m not cynical and I’m far from an artist. I’m a lucky working stiff (Lax 2007: 97).

Allen has made enough movies critical of the artistic personality (Interiors, Stardust Memories, Shadows and Fog, Bullets over Broadway, and Tall Dark Stranger are a few of them) to establish that artist is not necessarily for him an unambiguously commendatory title; nonetheless, the contributors to the Companion are certainly writing as if their subject is very much a creator of artistic films worthy of the most serious critical attention and of the most sophisticated critical techniques developed to illuminate cinematic texts.

The discrepancy in perspectives between filmmaker and critics is attributable partly to Allen’s penchant for comparing his films to Bicycle Thieves, The Seventh Seal, and similar cinematic classics and, consequently, unfailingly finding his wanting; he also regularly acknowledges a modesty of intentions, as in his titling of September: I want a title that doesn’t promise much. That’s my confidence, he told Lax in 1987, implying that his confidence wasn’t exactly sky high. I try to take a soft-sell, nonpretentious approach, like one-word titles (Lax 2007: 73). That discrepancy is exacerbated further by differences between Allen’s assumptions about responses to films and his own. As we’ll see, he seldom reacts to reviews or critical readings of his films, but in the few cases where he has done so, Allen decided that the movie failed to convey his point sufficiently (e.g., in Stardust Memories he didn’t communicate effectively to the audience that the last two thirds of the plot takes place within Sandy Bates’s unstable imaginings), or that the audience misinterpreted his meaning. Three of the Companion chapters cite Allen’s extremely illuminating rejoinder to a suggestion that there is something ambiguous about the ethics conveyed in Match Point:

What I’m really saying, and it’s not hidden or esoteric – it’s just clear as a bell – is that we have to accept that the universe is godless and life is meaningless, often a terrible and brutal experience with no hope, and that love relationships are very, very hard, and that we still need to find a way to not only cope but lead a decent and moral life (Lax 2007: 123–124).

Where Allen doesn’t locate the problem, interestingly, is in the intricacies of cinematic communication themselves. He very politely disagreed with the conclusions drawn by a Catholic priest who wrote about Crimes and Misdemeanors in the New York Times, Allen assuming that the interpretation was predicated on the writer’s knowledge of Allen’s atheism. Allen objected that, [the writer] made a wrong assumption . . . the film can’t honestly be read to imply I’m saying anything goes and that’s fine with me (Lax 2007: 124). Many of the Companion critics would wonder, given that Judah asserts that the murderer in his imaginary screenplay only suffers the occasional moment of guilt over his undiscovered crime, why the interpretation that Allen is suggesting that anything goes and that’s fine with me isn’t valid, or isn’t at least arguable. In "Crimes and Misdemeanors: Reflections on Reflexivity, Gregg Bachman argues very compellingly that all the self-conscious elements embedded within Allen’s plot and subplot render unambiguous ethical readings of the text extremely difficult to achieve, while Claire Sisco King’s Play It Again, Woody: Self-Reflexive Critique in Contemporary Woody Allen Films" contends that

such films as Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) can be read as self-reflexive meditations on Allen’s cinematic oeuvre itself. Through both narrative and stylistic choices, these films call attention to Allen’s characteristic tropes and iconography in order to critique the normative influence of Hollywood conventions and Allen’s complicity in their perpetuation.

In Jazz Heaven: Woody Allen and the Hollywood Ending, Christopher Ames maintains that Allen has become a master of the varied ways of using a film-within-a-film to exploit the self-referentiality of that subgenre and to examine the interaction between filmmaker and audience. Perhaps topping them all in terms of problematizing the understanding of Allen’s cinema is the argument of Colleen Glenn, who points out in Which Woody Allen? that,

As a star persona, therefore, Woody Allen presents a difficult case study because the man we know as Woody Allen comprises so many different real-life and fictional identities that it becomes nearly impossible, despite his iconic public image, to sort out exactly which of the Woody Allens we mean when we say Woody Allen.

However devotedly the filmmaker might soundtrack his films with American Songbook classics, many of Allen’s Companion critics consistently and energetically contest his refusal to enter postmodernity.

Richard A. Blake’s Allen’s Random Universe in His European Cycle: Morality, Marriage, Magic addresses later films than Crimes and Misdemeanors, but his general critical approach consists in a concerted, basically formalist effort to explicate what [Allen is] really saying. Blake’s thesis statement seems right in line with Allen’s invocation of a godless universe and his assertion that life is meaningless.

By any measurement, Allen’s preoccupation with a universe without structure has become more prominent, and more oppressive, as his work developed through the years, Blake maintains. "By the time he reaches his European cycle – Match Point (2005), Scoop (2006), Cassandra’s Dream (2007), and Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008) – his vision of a pointless universe has darkened to its bleakest degree ever. If Allen ever did read film criticism on his work, it seems certain that he would have to applaud Blake’s essay for gauging accurately the bleak tonalities in Allen’s movies that the director perceives as clear as a bell."

On the other hand, Stephen Papson’s chapter, Critical Theory and the Cinematic World of Woody Allen, takes a very different approach to one of Allen’s most admired films. Papson writes,

Allen explores the intersection of meaning, pleasure, and identity in relation to the social and cultural contradictions of modernity. We encounter the most pronounced articulation of this in Zelig. As I will illustrate, the diegesis of Zelig is a direct extension of Fromm’s (1941) analysis of the underlying psychological conditions produced by modernity reflected in the rise of Nazism.

In addition to Erich Fromm, Papson’s essay is pervaded by quotations from theorists of the Frankfurt School of Sociology, who provide him with characterizations of the social and cultural contradictions of modernity that he also finds permeating Zelig. What Papson never explicitly contends – and this is where Allen’s what I’m really saying starts to seem inadequate as a critical stance – is that Allen has read Fromm or Adorno or Marcuse. Papson’s essay is artful because of his presiding assumption that Allen’s consciousness was formed amidst the underlying psychological conditions of modernity, and that he responded artistically through Zelig to the very same cultural tensions that inspired intellectual responses from theorists. It astonishes me what a lot of intellectualizing goes on over my films, Allen said in the 1980s, seeming to anticipate Emmet Ray’s self-conscious defensiveness about his art: They’re just films (qtd. in Carroll 1994: 93). Papson and other Companion critics would not dispute that Allen’s movies are just films; where they would disagree with him is in his implicit assumption that those films’ meanings are restricted to what the screenwriter/director intended them to mean. Many of the Companion critics would concur, alternatively, with a statement Gregg Bachman makes in the context of his Crimes and Misdemeanors chapter: my point is that our reads, as critics and scholars, are just as important as the filmmaker’s intention. Cynthia Lucia makes the same argument in her chapter, Here . . . It’s Not Their Cup of Tea: Woody Allen’s Melodramatic Tendencies in Interiors, September, Another Woman, and Alice," when she distinguishes between Allen’s interview comments about September and the movie she experienced: Although in Allen’s own view Diane ‘doesn’t act maliciously. She just does what she does because she doesn’t know better’ . . . the film itself adopts a more ambivalent attitude.

Of course, the films he has produced have given Allen ample opportunity to exact revenge upon film critics for what a lot of intellectualizing that goes on over [his] films, which is what he does in, among others, Sweet and Lowdown, a film seldom remarked upon in the Companion essays. Blanche Williams (Uma Thurman), the wife of jazz guitarist Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), is a journalist fixated upon penetrating the secrets of artistic creation, and Allen delights in having her pose unanswerable questions to her husband (What do you think of when you play? I mean, what goes through your mind? What are your real feelings?), to which Emmet replies, I don’t know. That I’m underpaid. Sometimes I think about that.

Subsequently, Blanche decides that a key to Emmet’s psyche is concealed within his love of trains, and as the couple sits in a switchyard, she recommences her interrogation: What is this fascination with trains? . . . Are you trying to recapture some feeling from childhood, when you dreamt of glamorous cities just out of reach?

Happily, Allen’s movies proved to the Companion critics not so intransigent to interpretation as the text of Emmet Ray does to Blanche.

As I have suggested, what we critics need not worry about at all is Allen reading our interpretations of his work and objecting to them. When asked by Lax (2007: 324) whether film critics or reviewers influence his moviemaking, Allen minced no words. Although he would

share many of the severest criticisms of my work if I hear about them, I have a very critical eye for my work, and for other people’s. I used to read about myself, but I completely stopped because talk about unhelpful distractions – the absurdity of reading that you’re a comic genius or in bad faith. Who needs to ponder such outlandish nonsense?

The chapters in Companion to Woody Allen spend no time on critical binaries like the one Allen dismisses here, of course, and the critics in these pages resolutely foreswore themselves to resist penning outlandish nonsense. Sam and I did encourage them, however, to include critical perspectives on Allen’s oeuvre which are anything but unhelpful distractions – for instance, Renée R. Curry’s Woody Allen’s Grand Scheme: The Whitening of Manhattan, London, and Barcelona, which argues that Allen’s determination to create movies that look like those Hollywood products he happily watched at the Midwood Theater in Brooklyn as a child has left him creating on film major urban centers nearly bereft of people of color, thereby distorting the racial and ethnic realities of those cities. Similarly, in "Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris: Remembering Modernism, Remembering Woody, Katherine Fusco finds a personal agenda working through this warmest of recent Allen films in which he simplifies Gil Pender’s modernist heroes in order tacitly to imbue himself with their canonical status. Joanna E. Rapf’s title reflects gender ambivalences plumbed by her study: ‘It’s Complicated, Really’ : Women in the Films of Woody Allen. Although creating a Companion unsympathetic to our filmmaker subject was never our intention, co-editor Sam and I nonetheless agreed that recognizing and illuminating the contradictions inescapably embedded within Allen’s film art is a necessary element of trying to understand it.

Allen is on record, as well, as asserting another reason for ignoring responses to his films, one that, in juxtaposing his movies against an unconquerable antagonist, resembles his negative estimation of them compared to Bicycle Thieves.

I don’t really know how people have responded to the film because I gave up checking years ago, but if they liked it, great. If they didn’t like it, it doesn’t mean much to me, not because I’m aloof and arrogant, but because I sadly learned that their approbation doesn’t affect my mortality. If I do something I feel is not very good, and the public embraces it, even wildly, that doesn’t make my personal sense of failure feel any better. That’s why the key is to work, enjoy the process, don’t read about yourself, when people bring up the subject of films, deflect the conversation to sports, politics, or sex, and keep your nose to the grindstone (Lax 2007: 106).

Allen’s casual juxtaposition of reactions to his films with the inexorability of his mortality suggests why so many of his movies – Love and Death, Shadows and Fog, Deconstructing Harry – include among their cast lists actors playing the role of Death. (In You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Roy [Josh Brolin] turns the title formula for romance deadly, telling his mother-in-law, promised by a psychic that amour is in her future, I believe, unfortunately, that you will meet the tall dark stranger that we all eventually meet.) Perhaps the most resonant recent image of Allen’s death-conscious, death-defying art is that of the recently deceased magician Sidney Waterman, Allen’s character in Scoop, continuing to perform card tricks on a boat captained by the Grim Reaper which is ferrying the magician and his deathly audience to the afterworld.

Implicit in this mortality-obsessed stance is another of Allen’s rationales for perpetuating his regimen of making a film per annum – a strategy that has both practical and magical intents. I make these films to amuse myself, or should I say to distract myself, Allen told Lax, and he readily admits that it is from the unanswerable questions and terrible truths of existence that the making of films distracts him. "[Shadows and Fog] fulfilled that desire that keeps me working, Allen continued, that keeps me in the film business. I do all my films for my own personal reasons . . ." (Lax 2007: 127). Like the characters in Manhattan who buffer themselves against issues of human ultimacy through their preoccupations with their erotic entanglements, and like Steffi (Dianne Wiest) in the closing scene of September, whose best counsel to the griefstricken Lane (Mia Farrow) is, Soon you’ll leave here [Connecticut], and you’ll start all over again in New York. There’ll be a million things to keep you busy. It’s gonna be all right, Allen’s interviews suggest that, for him, too, sometimes in life self-distraction is the best that can be done. To this extent, all of his films fulfill their motives of distraction, and his indifference to audience/reviewer responses as well as his lack of enthusiasm about many of them are, arguably, products of his movies having already served their primary personal objective for him before they’re ever released. Small wonder that Sandy Bates looks so demoralized after the screening of his film at the end of Stardust Memories.

Allen put a far more positive slant on his filmmaking regimen in his interview with Richard Schickel, likening it to living 10 months of every year of his life in magic.

[W]hen you see a magic trick, it’s something that defies reality. You know, my way has been movies. I live for a year in the movie. I write the movie. I live with those characters. I cast the movie. I’m on the set. The set is maybe a 1940s nightclub, or maybe it’s a contemporary thing, but I live in a fake world for ten months. And by living in that world I’m defying reality in a way – or at least hiding from reality. But that’s what it’s all about for me . . . To me, that’s the impetus for the work (Schickel 2003: 145).

At the end of The Purple Rose of Cairo, Cecilia (Farrow) is, notwithstanding her recent personal confrontation with the fraudulence within the movie screen, gradually sucked back into the lushly romantic sham of Fred and Ginger’s Swing Time terpsichore magic, her heartbreakingly brightening face evoking the intensity of her deepening delusion. She, too, is defying reality, but the poignancy of the moment derives from our knowledge that, before long, she will once again have to choose reality by leaving the theater and reentering the desolate Depression world lorded over, for her, by her husband, Monk. In one of his more provocative comments to Schickel, Allen asserted that the reason that he had Pearl (Maureen Stapleton) doing magic tricks in Interiors is that, for me, reliance on magic is the only way out of the mess that we’re in. If we don’t get a magical solution to it we’re not going to get any solution  . . . (Schickel 2003: 136). Pearl does succeed in resuscitating Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) when Eve’s daughter fails to rescue her mother from her suicidal drowning, but, more often in Allen’s films, the magicians are too conscious of the mechanics of their illusions to save anyone – themselves included. Typical of these self-consciously impotent magicians is Scoop’s Sidney Waterman – Splendini – who, before dying, knows all too well that his agitating molecules to make subjects disappear in his dematerializer box is all a scam. When Sondra Pransky (Scarlett Johansson) embraces the box’s magical powers because she encounters the spectre of a dead reporter inside, Waterman asks her,

What do you think? There’s spirits? A world of departed people? . . . Not me. I’m a prestidigitator. I do coin tricks and card tricks . . . This [the mystery Sondra is inspired to begin sleuthing by the reporter] is not for me. I do occasional bar mitzvahs and children’s parties.

As Patrick Murray and Jeanne A. Schuler demonstrate in Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen, the tension between the possibility of a magical solution and the far greater likelihood that any such solution would only be a trick, an act of prestidigitation, pervades Allen’s films. As Allen told Schickel (2003: 78), my way [of defying reality] has been movies. Sometimes the magic works; sometimes not. When Manhattan opened, Allen, as he told Lax, skipped the premiere:

So people think, He doesn’t care, or He’s too aloof, or He’s snooty and arrogant, but, as I said, that’s not it. It’s more like joylessness. It doesn’t thrill me. It just doesn’t really mean anything. [He smiles.]

Then he added, as if anticipating the film that would turn his career around, But Paris thrilled me (Lax 2007: 116).

Notes

1 As of January, 2012, the domestic gross of Midnight in Paris was $56.5 million, making it the top grossing independent film of 2011 (Daily Variety, Jan. 27, 2012).

2 At significant risk of deflating Turan’s enthusiasm, it needs to be acknowledged that the Companion essay on Woody Allen and France by Gilles Menegaldo depicts a much more equivocal relationship between Allen and that country – particularly with Jean-Luc Godard – than Midnight so compellingly creates.

Works Cited

Carroll, Tim (1994) Woody and His Women. London: Warner Books.

Jones, Kent (2011) "Midnight in Paris." Film Comment (May/June).

Lax, Eric (2007) Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking. New York: Knopf.

McGrath, Douglas (2006) If you knew Woody like I know Woody. In Robert E. Kapsis and Kathie Coblentz (eds.), Woody Allen Interviews. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

Schickel, Richard (2003) Woody Allen: A Life in Films. Chicago: Irving R. Dee.

Turan, Kenneth (2011) Movie review: ‘Midnight in Paris.’ Los Angeles Times (May 20), B1.

Part I

Biography/Autobiography/Auteurism

1

The Stand-up Auteur

Cecilia Sayad

Woody Allen’s films have always addressed particular aspects of American culture – Jewish humor, local identities (Brooklyn, Manhattan, California), politics (his aversion to Republicans), and aesthetic tastes (his love of Hollywood classics, art cinema, jazz). But the director’s channeling of cultural identities and debates goes beyond the plots of his films. Allen’s public image, a combination of his screen persona and his public discourse, has invariably embodied a tension that was central to the definition of a film culture in the United States: that between high and low cultural objects – to put it bluntly, between enduring art and disposable entertainment.

It is a well-known fact that the French-born idea of the auteur became a valuable tool in the ascription of cultural value to films. The term’s designation of stylistic and thematic consistency, as well as of a director’s self-expressive needs, counterbalanced the formulaic and ephemeral aspects of industrial objects produced for mass consumption. We are also aware that Allen’s recurring themes and stylistic tropes have placed the majority of his works in the realm of auteur cinema, especially after Annie Hall (1977), which marks a transition to more complex narrative structures and profound themes – the film was immediately followed by Interiors (1978), Allen’s first incursion into the domain of drama. At the same time, the director’s experiences as a gag writer for columnists and television comedians, and as a stand-up comedian both on stage and on TV, charge his auteur identity with elements of popular culture that for long existed in tension with auteur attributes, and which, as I explain later, largely precipitated the skepticism towards Allen as a serious filmmaker among American critics.

It is tempting to detect a transition, in Allen’s career, from the realm of popular comedies to that of auteur cinema; in other words, from the slapstick, the burlesque, and the one-liner to more serious philosophical themes dealing with death, God, adultery, and the self. Even when avoiding the risks of such clear-cut distinctions, studies of the director’s work tend to draw attention to the artistry or the political and cultural relevance of Allen’s humor. Maurice Yacowar’s introduction to Loser Take All: The Comic Art of Woody Allen (1979) is tellingly titled The Serious Business of Comedy. Sam Girgus’s The Films of Woody Allen (1993) and Robert Stam’s study of Stardust Memories (1980) and Zelig (1983) in Subversive Pleasures (1989) bring to light the complexity and theoretical dimensions of his oeuvre. Peter J. Bailey’s The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (2001) analyzes the director’s cinematic dramatization of creative processes and anxiety about his place between art and entertainment. Mark T. Conard and Aeon J. Skoble’s Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy Is Wrong? (2004) explores the philosophical undertones of his movies, thereby stressing their artistic value.

What I here hope to contribute to these and other studies of Woody Allen’s films is the investigation not so much of the artistic merits or the philosophical relevance of his comedy, but the coexistence, in Allen’s image, of the stand-up comedian with the ambitious artist, as he combines fleeting comments on cur­rent affairs with timeless metaphysical questions. This discussion calls for a brief account of the role of the cinematic author in the critical debates about the place of film in American culture, as they imply the interdependency between artistry and individual authorship. This overview will ground my analysis of the ways in which Allen embodies this tension, which in turn destabilizes traditional approaches to the auteur, and indeed adds a new dimension to this figure. I will subsequently look at the director’s topical treatment of cultural debates, the residual traces of his stand-up persona, and its implications for the problematic opposition between auteur and popular cinema.

The Place of the Auteur in American Film Culture

If in its romantic formulation the auteur is defined by the enduring and universal aspects of her work, Allen offers us a different model, defined as much by perpetual themes and elements of style as by the treatment of topical issues – in other words, current events in American culture, from politics to the mores of everyday life. And whereas Allen’s recurring themes and stylistic tropes place the director in the realm of auteur cinema, his exceptional productivity (at least one film per year since 1971), the usually limited budgets of his films and their constant recycling of similar material attach to Allen’s productions the seriality that is typical of popular culture. Allen personally articulates some of the tensions that have permeated the designation of the place and value of film in American society: tensions between uniqueness and repetition, universalism and topicality, and auteurism and commercialism.

The auteur has traditionally embodied notions of individuality, originality, control, stability, and universality. Primarily a tool for Cahiers du cinéma critics to assert the artistic value of supposedly low Hollywood genres, the notion of a film auteur was nonetheless at odds with the defining attributes of popular culture, characterized by its repetitive, ephemeral, and consumable qualities. Rather than fully embracing these notions, the defense of Hollywood filmmakers by the Young Turks headed by François Truffaut proceeded by attributing to their works characteristics associated with the high arts. One of the clearest articulations of this tendency was Jean-Luc Godard’s assertion that a film by Hitchcock was as important as a book by Aragon (MacCabe 2003: 74).¹ The auteur thus embodies some of the oppositions that have marked the cultural production of the twentieth century at large. After all, the redefinition of art by the avant-garde was contemporary with, and partly motivated by, the advent of the cinema. The same notions of uniqueness, essence, timelessness, and universalism that defined the romantic artist were put into question when the attention to popular culture led to the validation of seriality, surface, transience, and topicality, especially in the writings of art and film critic Lawrence Alloway, as Peter Stanfield’s study of his work makes very clear (Stanfield 2008). Surrealist automatism, Dadaist ready-mades, and, later, Andy Warhol’s appropriation of rejects of consumerist society, were on a par with the meditations on the cultural value of objects industrially produced, with strong entertainment and mass appeal, and which displayed a so-called distasteful penchant for vulgar humor, physicality, and violence.

The earlier romantic vision of the auteur as the artist who survives the system, who is constrained by the industry’s political and commercial interests and yet is able to assert personal vision and style, was soon called into question, and was deeply impacted by the late 1960s structuralist turn in film studies. Untouchable for its transcending genius but challenged on the aforementioned attributes, this figure was quickly redefined as a theoretical construct, especially in the works of British film scholars like Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Stephen Heath, Ben Brewster, and Peter Wollen, who coined the term auteur structuralism.² This new account of auteurism replaced the biographical auteur with a set of structures – rather than human beings with specific worldviews, auteurs become names for certain regularities in textual organization, as Dudley Andrew explains in The unauthorized auteur today (2000: 21). Auteur analysis, Wollen argues in the foundational Signs and Meanings in the Cinema,

does not consist of retracing a film to its origins, to its creative source. It consists of tracing a structure (not a message) within the work, which can then post factum be assigned to an individual, the director, on empirical grounds (1972: 167–168).

The critic’s mission, in Andrew’s later rendition of Wollen’s theory, is to isolate the auteur’s voice within the noise of the text (2000: 21). It follows that, however skeptical about the possibility of locating the source of meaning on a self-expressing individual, auteur structuralism held on to romantic notions of uniqueness and permanence.

Given the industrial modes of Hollywood productions, it is not surprising that the attribution of traditional artistic values to cinematic texts was deemed either implausible or artificially imposed. Histories of American film criticism by Raymond J. Haberski (It’s Only a Movie! Film and Critics in American Culture, 2001) and Greg Taylor (Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism, 1999), for example, tell us about the movie-loving critics’ resistance to the standards applied to literature, the theater, or the fine arts. The excitement around cinema consisted precisely of the ways it begged the redefinition of cultural values, the novelty of a medium that, in Haberski’s words, was both an industry and a cultural expression, or an art that had mass appeal and was mass produced (2001: 11). Taylor’s account of the cult and camp criticism respectively practiced by Manny Farber and Parker Tyler since the 1940s shows that film’s collective and industrial production modes did not always accommodate a traditional understanding of authorship as identifiable and stable. On the contrary, these approaches privilege the critic’s, rather than the author’s, construction of meaning. Cult critics, Taylor explains, show little concern for the artistic impulse behind the making of films. Instead, these critics stress their own capacity to select objects that were either produced by Hollywood but had little merit or that simply lay outside of the industry. In Taylor’s words,

cult criticism focuses on the identification and isolation of marginal artworks, or aspects and qualities of marginal artworks, that (though sorely neglected by others) meet the critic’s privileged aesthetic criteria. Often the marginal cult object is not a traditional artwork at all but a select product of popular culture (1999: 15).

Cult critics elect obscure objects that escape commoditization, frequently promoting an assault on the conventions and order of taste (Taylor 1999: 32). Their goal is to reorient audiences’ choices, driving their attention away from traditional artistic standards, and towards inappropriate objects from a lower taste culture (32). These objects are to be given meaning and value by the critic, who guides audience’s likings, capacitating them to select and construe their own canons, to define their own culture in opposition to prevailing standards (33).

Similarly, camp criticism also seizes film for the critic’s own expressive needs. Where cult emphasizes selective criteria, the critical camp spectator revels in the interpretation/transformation process while often placing little stake in the initial selection of mass objects (Taylor 1999: 16). Inclined to investigations of psychological and archetypal manifestations, Tyler’s camp practices placed the critic at the origin of the film’s meaning, the pleasure of criticism [lying] in forcibly remaking common culture into personal art (16). Camp appreciation relies on poorly controlled texts, which prove more rewarding than the tightly managed artwork for a critic (and an audience) wishing to appropriate these texts for their own use (52).

The attribution of a subversive quality to cult and camp criticism presupposes an understanding of film as artistic expression that predates auteurism, in a narrative that opposes film-as-art and film-as-commerce, deprived of any cultural value. On the film-as-art front, James Agee, for one, privileged the director over screenwriters and actors; he spoke of geniuses, praised the artistic merits of Hollywood films, and advocated that a movie was as serious a cultural object as literature or painting. His review of Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite (1933) and Atalante (1934) for The Nation on July 5, 1947, centered on the director’s artistry and, not unlike the politique des auteurs years later, detected a certain consistency in style. Historians call attention to Agee’s understanding of the director as the deity behind the entire production, the father-progenitor of the film, or the equivalent of a symphony conductor, who ‘selects and blends his instruments’ to achieve aesthetic results (Seib 1968: 123). Agee’s attribution of artistic merits to films often took the form of analogies with the high arts – he wrote, for example, that Preston Sturges’s The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1934) displayed the nihilism of Céline and the humanism of Dickens. Agee praised the film’s shifts between realism and comedy, claiming that, if you accept that principle in Joyce or Picasso, you will examine with interest how brilliantly it can be applied in moving pictures and how equally promising (reprinted in Agee 1958: 75).

The import of French auteurism by Andrew Sarris in the early 1960s, famously articulated in Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962, blends Agee’s emphasis on directors with a cultist celebration of Hollywood as privileged site for the manifestation of auteurship. Pauline Kael’s merciless attack on the purportedly esoteric critical criteria proposed by Sarris (namely, technical competence, personal style, and interior meaning) contests, among other things, his biased preference for Hollywood movies. Kael criticizes Sarris for establishing that the director’s personality arises from a tension between artist and modes of production. He proposes, for example, that George Cukor’s abstract style is more developed than that of Ingmar Bergman, who is free to develop his own scripts (Sarris qtd. in Kael 1963: 18). In Kael’s words, Sarris’s ideal auteur

is the man who signs a long-term contract, directs any script that is handed to him, and expresses himself by shoving bits of style up the crevasses of the plots. If his style is in conflict with the story line or subject matter, so much the better – more chance for tension (Kael 1963: 17).

Curiously, the distinction between commercial and art films in the United States led to a territorial division where art became the domain of foreign productions – something suggested in the comparison between Cukor and Bergman. Stam also indicates the presence of a territorial component to Sarris’s criticism, claiming that his open defense of Hollywood productions ultimately evolved to a surreptitiously nationalist instrument for asserting the superiority of American cinema (Stam 2000: 89).

Allen himself seems to incorporate the binary opposing art to American filmmaking. While on the one hand his long lasting dismissal of the studio system and love of art cinema have posited him as foreign (Baxter 1998: 3), on the other he has stated that, being an American, his films would never be perceived as art in the United States (Lax 1991: 179). This displacement of American cinema within the terrain of the art film is ironic when one takes into consideration that Hollywood movies provided the material for the French formulation of the artistry of mise-en-scène – just as it was the attitudes of Orson Welles, Jonas Mekas, or John Cassavetes that legitimized the director as the key creator in spite of the collaboration of other professionals. Concurrently, the European auteurs that came to define the notion of art cinema had great impact on American filmmakers. The New American Cinema promoted by Mekas, for one, was modeled after European films (Taylor 1999: 87), and the recognizable styles of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma, among others, owe as much to the aesthetic consistency of classical Hollywood auteurs as to the self-reflexive meditations typical of the French New Wave. However, few US directors have so explicitly articulated the split between the admiration for European art cinema and the American commitment to entertainment as Woody Allen.

Though the director’s recurring themes, stylistic tropes, and self-reflexivity define him as an auteur, Allen can just as easily be associated with Charles Chap­lin, Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, or Mel Brooks. The unchanging characteristics of their performances intermittently produce the suspension of the illusion of fiction – rather than blending into the depicted worlds and disappearing into different characters, these actor-directors evoke both their roles in previous films and their public personas. Similarly, the parts played by Allen share very similar traits – the Jewish background, the unglamorous Brooklyn childhood, the conflicted relationship with psychoanalysis, the attraction to sexy and neurotic women, the love of jazz and of the movies. His trademark black-rimmed glasses and balding disheveled head lead to the perception of such characters as the same figure inhabiting different scenarios – blending in well in the universe of contemporary Manhattan writers or filmmakers, but standing out in scenarios such as the year 2173 in Sleeper (1973), nineteenth-century Russia in Love and Death (1975), or medieval England in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex . . . But Were Afraid to Ask (1972).

Allen’s combination of European art cinema’s self-reflexivity and an all-too-New-Yorker avant-gardism epitomizes at once the intertextual patchwork that marks the citational cinema of the French New Wave and the tension between high and low cultures that guided the debate about the artistic status of film in the United States. The coexistence between popular art forms (slapstick, burlesque, stand-up) and high culture (Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Bergman), and the artistic crisis experienced by some of Allen’s characters articulate and dramatize American cinema’s identity crisis, and the evocation of his stand-up persona allows for a topicality that exists in tension with the traditional conception of the auteur.

The Auteur as Commentator

Articles on Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) often quote Michael Tolkin’s observation that, If [it] were an Italian film from 1953, we would have every scene memorized (qtd. in Kim 2003: epigraph). Given that Burnett is an African American director, Tolkin’s provocative remark seems to address US racial politics. Yet it also attests to the ghettoization of American art cinema (often equated with auteur cinema), suggesting that art remains the exclusive reserve of foreign productions. The polarity art/entertainment ingrained in the debates about film in the United States is also a central trope both in Allen’s oeuvre and in his public discourse. Allen has incorporated the territorial marker of this distinction by endorsing the association of art cinema and Europe (heralding Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini) while linking American cinema to entertainment (celebrating the influence of the Marx Brothers and Bob Hope in his work). Hollywood Ending (2002) uses that opposition as a central element of the plot, with Allen’s character (Val Waxman) as a once successful director whose decadence is frequently described in terms of his pretentious insistence on being an American artist. The film makes nostalgic references to the long gone respect for the art of filmmaking, when access to foreign movies on New York’s screens was easier. Symptomatically, Waxman wants a foreign cinematographer to bring in some texture to the image, and ends up having a picture he directs blind (and which flops badly at the American box office) hailed as a masterpiece in Paris. The fact that the French are in reality more at ease with Allen’s auteur status than are Americans constitutes this narrative event as at once redemptive of Allen’s artistic status (however disdained at home) and mocking of the Europeans’ aesthetic tastes – a paradox that seems to haunt Allen’s own cinematic self-perception. Hence Hollywood Ending reworks the opposition between American popular movies and foreign art cinema incorporated in Allen’s public discourse about his work. Speaking to biographer Eric Lax in the late 1980s about the contrast between his early commercial comedies and his more dramatic films, Allen said,

There is a problem in self-definition and public perception of me. I’m an art-film maker, but not really. I had