Although Woody Allen is more than eighty years old, he still wins the attention of film fans around the world with the "prolific" creative energy of one film a year, and the year he really began to gain worldwide attention dates back to 1978, when his self-written and self-directed film "Annie Hall" won four awards at the 50th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Allen went from being a stand-up comedian and producer to a director to be the most powerful director in the new Hollywood cinema. "Anne Hall" tells the love between Elvey played by Woody Allen and his girlfriend Anne Hall in a unique humorous tone, and reveals the siege dilemma of love and life faced by intellectuals such as Elvie in the New York Metropolis in the 1970s, and the advent of "Annie Hall" changed the romantic comedy genre and still affects the creation of current romantic comedy films.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="64" >. Siege: The Double Contradiction of Intellectuals</h1>
"Anne Hall" revolves around Diane Keaton's Anne Hall, but Woody Allen's Elvey represents the intellectual fringe state that the director really wants to show, "the people around the city want to escape, the people outside the city want to rush in." This is true of marriage, career, and life. "The thrust of 'Siege' is the core of this classic Hollywood movie. In the film, Elvie is a marginal elite in New York, USA, his own paranoid personality and subjective and objective relationships such as social change environment make it impossible to calmly cope with his life, whether it is love with Annie or his ideal state, he has always lived in the double contradiction of love and life.
As a romantic comedy, Anne Hall reveals the "irrational, crazy and absurd" romantic relationships of intellectuals. In Elvie's self-description, the film features a happy, humorous, simple-minded female figure Anne Hall, who met Elvie during a game of tennis and developed a romantic relationship, and anne realized that the two were inappropriate and eventually separated under Elvie's transformation. Anne's appearance fills the void in Elvie's past feelings: he refuses to make out with his first wife, even though she is so graceful and intelligent; he cannot stand his second wife's extensive social connections and neuroticism. Anne is very different from Elvie's past lovers, but it is self-deprecating that it is Precisely Anne's ignorance and simplicity that fascinate him, and he enjoys the process of raising Anne to become the ideal lover. Elvie encouraged Anne to read serious books and encouraged her to take college courses, but when Anne transformed into an intellectual lady, he was unable to grasp the love affair with Anne and was eventually abandoned by Anne. The way the picture is divided many times in the film reveals the different experiences of Annie as a woman and Elvie in the relationship, Anne is in the right psychologist to ask Annie about the state of love, she thinks that "three times a week" sexual behavior is too much, while the left Elvie is helpless to say "three times a week" to his doctor is relatively small, with humorous jokes and novel sound and picture language exposing the different attitudes of men and women's gender life.
Secondly, the siege of intellectuals like Elvie is not only in love, but also in many aspects of life, career and so on. Elvey, played by Woody Allen, is a stubborn, high-minded intellectual elite, he is a loyal fan of fellini and Bergman, two directors, easy to grasp Freud's psychoanalytic theory, born in a Jewish family and is extremely sensitive to the outside world discriminating against Jewish words and deeds, Elvie's siege encounter is that although he has cultural qualities, it is difficult to deal with the reality of life, thus falling into a strong gap between ideals and reality. In Woody Allen's films, he does not take the aesthetic taste and life emotion of intellectuals as a single theme, and the intellectual elite represented by Elvie has lost the consciousness of the real elite, they no longer assume the role of thinking about the grand propositions of society and human beings, and turn to the minutiae of the trivialities of life, so the director wants to complete the ridicule and irony of the self-righteous intellectual community, Andelvie's siege dilemma is also a true portrayal of the director himself, in a 1987 interview Allen talked about his worries "The great difficulties in love relationships, the difficulties in communication, the depression and fear that arise when you realize how meaningless life is, how empty religion is, how unsatisfactory spiritual therapy is." Life is painful. Elvie prides himself on understanding the elegance and decency that intellectuals revere, but he avoids dealing with real celebrities, and he hates himself, just as he said to his second wife, "Intellectuals can look talented, but they don't." ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="62" >. Change: A New Romantic Comedy Movie</h1>
George Lucas, Coppola and other film boys opened a role in the New Hollywood film movement in the context of the great changes in American society in the 1960s, and Arthur Payne's "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967 was the symbol of the new Hollywood film movement, so Hollywood began to revolutionize the film in aesthetic style and content theme, and the brilliance of Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" at the Academy Awards made it a force to be reckoned with in the New Hollywood film movement. The transformation of "Anne Hall" is that first of all, it has created two love movie protagonists who are very different from the male and female protagonists of Hollywood's golden age movies, and also changed the happy ending of the reunion comedy, placing a trace of love and life in a humorous way in the story, and still affects the direction of today's romantic comedy film creation.
First of all, "Anne Hall" left two male and female protagonists with distinct personalities and unique tastes for the film screen. In the past Hollywood Golden Age movies, Gary Grant, James Stewart, Clark Gable and other white male actors are tall, handsome, humorous gentlemen, they date ladies in hotels, ships, cafes, the camera turns, to "Anne Hall" Woody Allen played the male protagonist Elvie subverted the audience's expectations for the male image of romantic comedy movies. Elvie is not tall, wears black round-rimmed glasses, and is a little bald, and he is not gentlemanly, he will be because the people behind the queue attack the idol Fellini and argue loudly, and boldly confide in his sexual desires and confusion, Elvie is very different from the romantic comedy male protagonist produced by the big studio, he jumped in front of Anne with intellectual confusion and ridicule, and chattered to Annie and the audience about his self-righteous thought system. Diane Keaton won her the 50th Academy Award for Best Actress, in which Diane, encouraged by director and ex-boyfriend Woody Allen, showcased her good taste in New York City women's dress, and these 70s costume styles have been preserved through the film. Most of Diane's clothes in the film come from Diane's own collocation: vest, tie, wide-leg high-waist pants, belt outside, men's tweed hat, sunglasses, Anne is no longer an elegant and reserved female character in Hollywood romantic comedies such as "One Night's Wind", "Street Shop", "Philadelphia Story", she hangs the mantra "la-de-dah" on her lips, always loves to laugh and cry to give the character a sense of intimacy, and the humor of her unusual personality makes Anne Hall between charles Chaplin and Catherine Hepburn.
Since "Anne Hall", the bitterness of love and the helplessness of life have begun to be placed in romantic comedies. At the beginning of the film, Elvie seems to confide in the audience: "Annie and I broke up, and I can't let go of it, I look at our relationship in my mind, and examine my life, to understand how it all went wrong." 」 And a year ago we were in love. At the end of the film, Anne shakes hands with Elvie, and then strides across the road, under the music of "Like Old Time" that Annie once sang, accompanied by montage shots such as the two of them catching lobsters together and walking under the bridge in the evening, Elvie can only sigh at the "unreasonableness, madness and absurdity" of love, which completely changes the happy romantic ending of the Hollywood two-sex romantic comedy story reunion, and the bitterness generated by Ellen and Annie's regret will always remain in the hearts of the audience. "In the post-industrial era, social customs have changed, and people no longer believe in the eternal love that movies preach with the help of sunsets and lovers." From "When Harry Meets Sally" in the 90s and "Sleepless Nights in Seattle", the film has begun to express the connotation of the long journey of men and women running in and the beauty of regret and brokenness, to the humorous but unsustainable office love in "500 Days with Summer" in 2009, and then to the acclaimed youth film "Me and Earl and the Girl Who Will Die" at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015, which is contrary to the routine plot of youth movies, telling the story of a lonely high school student meeting Rachel, a girl with leukemia. "Anne Hall" rewrites the protagonist image of the gentleman and lady and the golden boy from the role, and turns to the ordinary men and women who are not perfect in personality; in the main theme, the regret and bitterness of love and life replace the reunion and romantic finale, so as to reflect people's various concerns and shortcomings in the face of love; in the technique, a large number of monologues intervene in the picture, and the change of picture segmentation and narrative clues gives the content a multi-meaning and multi-angle way of thinking, continuing the innovation of new Hollywood film audiovisual skills Abandoning the gorgeous retro environment and costumes in production, the director team turned to independent production of relatively low-cost romantic comedy films. Perhaps Woody Allen himself did not realize the importance of Anne Hall to the new Hollywood film movement love films, but the existence of Annie Hall profoundly rewrote the taste of love stories.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="61" > conclusion</h1>
At the end of Anne Hall, Aylvie tells a joke: a man says to the doctor, "Doctor, my brother is crazy, he thinks he's a chicken." The doctor said, "Then why don't you bring him here?" The man replied, "But Doctor, I need eggs." Then Elvie explains the joke "This is the relationship between men and women, irrational, crazy, even absurd, but the vast majority of us have to go through this because we all need love." Although intellectuals understand literature and film, distinguish between the music of Wagner and Mendelssohn, and abandon kitsch mass culture, in real life, the rationality of books alone cannot solve the actual encounters of daily life, and those brave, sensual, and calm characters are the magic way to solve the siege crisis of life, and the eternal force to resolve the crisis of reality.
Text/Hu Jie
Editor/Xiao Yang
The pictures in this article are from the internet