The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (4 page)

In managing this trick, Allen is enacting another tendency attributed to the Jewish American artist: “The urban self-consciousness for which Jewish writers just now are the leading spokesmen is a sensibility which, for all its ideological origins, withholds commitments,” Mark Shechner has argued.

The impurity of its origins and the indeterminacy of its allegiances, however, constitute its strength: it is ideally suited to the expression of extremes of thought as well as extremes of doubt, that is, to modern states of informed confusion. Psychologically, this sensibility stands at the boundary between outer and inner worlds, just as it seems, stylistically, to accommodate both realism and interior monologue, as though in acknowledgment that to be both Jewish and modern—in America, at any rate—is to be a bridge between worlds and to be required, above all else, to keep the traffic flowing.
²⁷

Shechner’s suggestion that the Jewish American artist typically “withholds commitments” and hedges allegiances invokes a final manifestation of Allen’s ambivalence toward art—in this case, his own. This equivocal attitude is exemplified most clearly by the methodicalness of his film production practices.

During a period in which the filmmakers with whom he is routinely compared as America’s preeminent directors—Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, George Lucas, Spike Lee, Steven Spielberg—have released on average ten to fifteen films, Allen has completed twenty-nine, not counting the three (
Play It Again, Sam, The Front,
and
Scenes from a Malt
) in which he appeared but did not direct. To achieve this remarkable feat, Allen has had to commit himself to the production of films that, by Hollywood’s standards, are extremely modest in scope. (To date, his most expensive production has been
Bullets Over Broadway,
which cost $20 million, approximately one-fifth of the Hollywood average.
²⁸
) Allen’s films generally take only three to four months to shoot from the day on which he finishes scripting them, their production schedules continuing to replicate those of Allen’s earliest films: “I’m for turning out a comedy every year,” he told Lee Guthrie in the middle 1970s, “I wish we could just keep turning them out.”
²⁹
Allen’s gradual shift toward the creation of more serious films did not, in his mind, necessitate revised production schedules, in part because his filmmaking practices were inspired by one of the world’s most serious filmmakers.

In his 1988 review of Ingmar Bergman’s autobiography,
The Magic Lantern,
Allen offered a substantial argument for Bergman’s illumination of his characters’ interior lives through imagery, and then proceeded to celebrate a few of the Swedish filmmaker’s other film-production virtues. “All this, ladies and gentlemen,” Allen exulted, “and he works cheaply. He’s fast; the films cost very little, and his tiny band of regulars can slap together a major work of art in half the time and for half the price that most take to mount some glitzy piece of celluloid. Plus he writes the scripts himself. What else could you ask for?”
³⁰
Delete the honorific clause “major work of art” from this passage and what you might well be asking for—or getting—is a Woody Allen movie. From location selection through the employment of a fairly constant film crew to decisions about cutting techniques, Allen’s films, like Bergman’s, are conceived to be produced as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Between
Love and Death
(shot in Hungary and Paris) and
Mighty Aphrodite
(which contains brief scenes shot in Taormina, Sicily) and
Everyone Says I Love You
(with location shoots in Paris and Venice), Allen’s films were exclusively shot within an hour of New York City, the director having determined during the shooting of
Love and Death
that one sacrifice he was unwilling to make for his art was being unable to return to his apartment at the end of the day. “I’m completely aware,” he once told an interviewer, “that I’m shooting in New York because it’s easy.”
³¹
Making a career of producing films in New York City, of course, has confronted Allen and his production staff with considerable artistic and logistical challenges. Nonetheless, it’s probably not unfair to say this: Fitzcarraldo Woody Allen isn’t.

Further facilitating the expeditious production Allen’s films is the crew he assembled which stayed with him from movie to movie and thus has had years of training in the efficient creation of films.
³²
Allen’s preference for master shots over the intercutting of scenes is another factor, the omission of the step of reshooting scenes from numerous angles and then intercutting them saving significant production time. That this cinematographic strategy limits the visual variety and innovativeness of Allen’s films is a price he’s been thoroughly willing to pay, one which has included his being largely disregarded by critics and moviegoers devoted to cinematic experimentation. The fact that he has used three of film’s finest cinematographers—Gordon Willis, Carlo Di Palma, Sven Nykvist, and Zhao Fei—to shoot movies which are predominantly script-driven and often visually conventional exemplifies simultaneously Allen’s reverence for cinematic art and the modesty of his own films’ cinematic ambitions.

Such cinematographic modesty notwithstanding, the substantial criticism of Allen’s work has well established what this book at length reaffirms: that there is little uncalculated about the making of his films. There
is,
however, a certain offhandedness about their release. “I also wanted to go against making it a special event when my films came out,” Allen told Stig Bjorkman. “I just want to make a lot of films and keep putting them out. And I don’t want it to be, ‘Oh, it’s the new Woody Allen film! Two years we’ve waited for it!’ I just want to turn them out and that’s it. I like to work a lot, and I’ve made a deal with the film company so that the minute I pull out the script from the typewriter, the next day I’m in production…. For me it’s like stamping out cookies. I finish a film and move on to the next one.”
³³

Coming from a filmmaker who speaks with such awe of the work of Bergman and Fellini, Allen’s industrious baker’s model of film production is disconcerting, prompting one to wonder whether a few of the cookies wouldn’t have been more delectable had they been given more time to bake. Nonetheless, Allen remains remarkably consistent in his workmanlike impiety toward his own processes of aesthetic creation. “I make so many films,” he has pointed out, “that I don’t care about individual successes and failures. … I hope I’ll have a long and healthy life,” he continued in his conversation with Bjorkman, “that I can keep working all the time, and that I can look back in old age and say, ‘I made fifty movies, and some of them were excellent and some of them were not so good, and some of them were funny.”
³⁴

Allen’s production strategy has generated a stunningly generous output of films, and it is a credit to the systematization of that filmmaking process that he was able to produce in periods of less than twelve months films as ambitious as
Zelig, Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors,
and
Bullets Over Broadway
. It’s tempting to wonder, however, whether the production limits imposed on each film don’t reflect a deliberate refusal on Allen’s part to invest himself overmuch in any project, an oblique means of expressing his disavowal of the masterpiece-aspiring objectives of serious art. Which returns us to the ambivalence toward art which is at the heart of Allen’s artistic achievement. “I’m trying to make as wonderful a film as I can,” he told William Geist in 1987, “But my priorities are always in order, and they’re never artistic. Artistic accomplishment is always third or fourth.”
³⁵

“I’m one of those people that believes there’s no social value in art,” he explained to Lee Guthrie in the 1970s, “not just comedy, but no social value in art at all, anyplace, anytime. To me, all [art]—opera, painting, anything—is a diversion, an entertainment. So I view my own work in that same way that there is no social value.… In the end, [serious drama or a symphony are] all entertainment. I don’t believe in art as a social force.”
³⁶
Although these comments predate the production of the films on which Allen’s reputation as a significant filmmaker rests, the incredulity he articulates here toward the grander claims made for art remains a consistent theme throughout his career, one only occasionally contested by his generous celebrations of other serious filmmakers and artists. Allen’s production methods, then, contain embedded within them the assumption that there is no essential difference between comic and serious films; in his view, neither genre has any significant social impact on human values or behavior, and both of them constitute nothing more, finally, than entertainment. It is impossible to perceive Allen’s films adequately without paying substantial attention to those movies’ pervasive skepticism toward the very art of which they are a product. Although Harry Block’s attitude toward art is demonstrably more cynical than Allen’s, we will nonetheless encounter in these pages many temptations to recall Harry’s concluding repudiation of the human capacity to misconstrue and misrepresent our experience: “Our life,” he asserts, “consists of how we choose to distort it.” Like Harry’s, Woody Allen’s distortion of choice is called art.

2

Strictly the Movies

Play It Again, Sam

TRACY: So what happens to us?

ISAAC: Well, you know, we’ll always have Paris.

—Isaac Davis in
Manhattan
telling Tracy that their relationship has no future

All it would have taken was a single moviegoer. It’s 1972, and that lone film enthusiast enters a theater hardly a minute after the feature’s published starting time. Although he’s read nothing about it, he is looking forward to watching
Play It Again, Sam
. Instead of the new Woody Allen-scripted film, however, he’s confronted with the ending of
Casablanca,
awash in a strange shade of blue. Bewildered, the film goer heads off to the box office to ask whether the theater has without notice been transformed into a rerun house. He’s directed back to his seat, assured that it is
Play It Again, Sam
that’s being shown. As he reenters the theater, he sees on the screen Woody Allen’s face in close-up, slack-jawed with wonder; it becomes clear that Allen’s character is watching Bogart’s “the problems of three litde people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world” monologue. The moviegoer settles comfortably into his seat, relieved to know that he’s arrived at the film he’d intended to see. But afterwards, whenever he thinks of
Play It Again, Sam,
he’ll never completely shake the uneasy impression that
Casablanca
had somehow displaced Allen’s movie: that Michael Curtiz’s film had overwhelmed—even usurped—Allen’s.

Although that moviegoer’s response is the result of a misconception, it is completely appropriate to the film he was beginning to watch. There may be no better emblem anywhere in Allen’s canon for the power of film to over-whelm and overpower competing realities than
Play It Again, Sam’s
opening displacement by
Casablanca,
and it’s to an analogous effacement of himself by cinema which Allan Felix refers in voice-over as he leaves the movie house following Bogart’s chipper assurance to Captain Louis Renault that “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” “Who am I kidding?“ Felix asks himself, introducing the negative comparison of himself to Bogart’s Rick Blaine persona which will pervade the film. “I’m not like that. I never was, and I never will be. It’s strictly the movies.”

As the first chapter established, the disparity between fantasy and reality, art and life, is a particular preoccupation of Allen’s literary and film work; however, the dichotomy between cinematic reality and actuality is of such intense importance to his sense of his filmmaking career to demand an introductory chapter of its own. Two of the films generally acknowledged as being among Allen’s best—
Stardust Memories
and
The Purple Rose of Cairo
—deal specifically with this disparity as a primary theme, while two others—
Hannah and Her Sisters
and
Manhattan Murder Mystery
—are indebted to the movies of other filmmakers for their thematic resolutions. Most of Allen’s other films contain blatant echoes of other movies or—to some critics, more unforgivably—seem patently derivative of the films of masters of European cinema.
Radio Days,
the imitative argument maintains, is inspired by Fellini’s
Amarcord; Interiors
owes its gravid mood and close-up intensity to Bergman’s
Persona,
while
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
is an excessively reverential home-age to
Smiles of a Summer Night; Stardust Memories
is an Americanization and Woody Allenization of
8½,
while
Alice
mimics
Juliet of the Spirits; Another Woman
borrows liberally from the plot and dream imagery of
Wild Strawberries,
which also figures substantially in Harry Block’s journey to receive an honorary degree in
Deconstructing Harry; Shadows and Fog
is a pastiche of German Expressionist film styles blended with Bergman’s
Sawdust and Tinsel
; and
Manhattan Murder Mystery
seeks to resurrect the Nick and Nora Charles mode of 1940s film mystery/comedy. Admittedly, Allen’s cinematic debt to these films, filmmaking styles, and filmmakers cannot be denied, but it can be argued that Allen is every bit as aware of his influences as are the critics who with such patronizing glee catalogue imitative moments in his films. More than that, Allan Felix’s ongoing attempt to escape the anxiety of cinematic influences is very much what
Play It Again, Sam
dramatizes and is a central dynamic tension pervading Allen’s film career as well. To understand how this is true, we need to go to the movies with young Allan Stewart Konigsberg.