Word: allene
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...once massively narcissistic and entirely cowardly, Allen is everywhere, but almost never filmed alone in close-up. He's never shown in solitude (though often oh so wrenchingly alone.) It's his privilege to make fun of himself (so that by a sleight-of-hand he accepts the contempt of others, and yet is knowingly beyond it)--but also his privilege to make fun of other people (who don't have this...
...Diane Keaton has to get stoned before sex in Annie Hall; this is just a joke (like her family). With Woody Allen, the same situation would be defused (but taken seriously) by a reference to his maternal ogre, a castrating Semite battleaxe. And he's notably coy about showing sex scenes, for all the doughy portent about 'relationships' in his films...
...Allen's private life is a taboo, reserved for the absent analyst, though the films are about him and intend us to imagine his complex 'interiority.' He's quite unable to imagine other people fully, as sufferers through the unspeakable Interiors will know. In Manhattan, though, he winningly has his ex-wife write about his obsessive narcissism, and the end of that film seems to me truer than anything he's done yet. Exactly because it's about the limitations of the Woody Allen persona, and the possibility that Mariel Hemingway stands for something different and better, that he ought...
...JUST IN the movie theatres. He's reached the course directories, too, and now the bookshops display a new-spawned product of academia, Loser Takes All by Maurice Yacowar of Brock University, Ontario. For Yacowar, Allen is 'a serious, probing artist with a consistent and distinctive vision.' His films are indeed suspiciously clone-like, but 'serious, probing'? By what standards? Well, says Yacowar, Manhattan can be compared with 'Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion, another classic analysis of the decay of western culture.' Oh, and 'like Kafka, Allen makes Jews of us all.' We might wonder just what manner...
...Allen is especially interested in the relationship between art and life...