Book description
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 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. 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 examination of
Allen's art/life dialectic also draws from the off screen 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.
"An in-depth look at the films and the internal struggle that
helped create them." -- Hollywood Inside Syndicate
