In 2002, Woody Allen received the prestigious Cannes Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award. His career spanned five decades, earning him fourteen Academy Award nominations and three Oscars, and six Oscars for his cast and crew.
Allen has won eight BAFTA (British Film Institute) Awards, and his films continue to win awards and accolades from the New York and Chicago Film Critics Association, the Writers Guild of America, the César Awards in France, and the Bodier Award in Denmark. He is a professor of cinema in the philosophy departments and film departments of universities in Europe and North America.
In addition to his extensive feature film work (more than 30 films with directors and/or scripts), Allen has written numerous screenplays and short stories. In 2002, Time magazine film critic Richard Schkel produced Woody Allen: A Movie Life: A Movie for cable's "Turner Classic Movies" channel.
Allen has always downplayed the consistency between himself and the characters in the film, but he is definitely a creator, directing, writing and starring in most of his films.
He often hires equally important crews – photographers Sven Nyquist, Gordon Willis and Carlo di Palma; Producer Jean Dumannian and, of course, his cast members, including Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton, Diana West, Judy Davis and Alan Alda.
In situations not often found in Hollywood movies, Allen has a notoriously strict control over every aspect of his work — casting, screenwriting, filming and editing — and beyond that, he is so proud that he doesn't even need to submit a script to the studio. After experiencing 1965's The Merry Gentleman (who wrote the script but felt out of control during filming), Allen demanded and gained actual autonomy.
The late film critic Pauline Kyle suggested in her review of The Hannah Sisters (1986) that New York critics liked Woody Allen because "they were applauding their fantasies." In some of his films, including Once Upon a Time in Stardust (1980) and Deconstructing the Lovemaniac (1997), Alan explores how to become a prisoner of his own personality (while denying the similarity).
Although the role won Alan a loyal audience, his performance in the film industry was mixed, in part, as Kyle puts it, due to his appeal to urban quasi-intellectuals who criticized film; Over time, this familiarity has changed from intimacy to contempt.
In recent years, "critiques" of Woody Allen's films have tended to overlook those that don't fit with what seems more important to the discussion: his scandal-ridden private life.
Because of his strong writing background, Allen's films, especially those that are widely comedic, have a lot of dialogue (which Alan finds more challenging than films without dialogue). He often used main shots and cast choreography, a technique that was implemented more successfully in Husband, Wife and Lover (1992) than in Non-Strong Aphrodisiac (1996).
Although the ambition and achievement of his films has generally declined over the past decade, he remains a key figure in the American film industry. Academic and popular criticism of Allen's films most often uses psychoanalytic theory, as his subjects easily echo Freud's notions of desire, repression, anxiety, and sex.
The essay "Rejecting Death" (a psychoanalytic text in which Allen buys Anne in Anne Hall and reflects on them after they separate) mentions two strategies to escape death – sex, which Alan wholeheartedly accepts in his work and in his life; And faith and service to God, he did not.
Other critics noted his similarities with philosophers such as Socrates and Jean-Paul Sartre, who believed that true romantic commitment was impossible.
Allen seems obsessed with the fact that, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, the continued existence of death is embodied in God's ideas and the possibility, afterlife, and destiny of moral order in the universe. Throughout his career, he has invested a scholarly commitment to humanity's plight in a doomed universe.
For Alan, these are all inevitable aspects of humanity, and therefore our destiny is to struggle between desire and morality, freedom and faith, fulfillment and reflection. His films explore the perhaps pointless struggle to achieve a solution.
Sometimes, as in Anne Hall, ironic grievances arise when a hard-won ideal is realized and the reality is not. The Goose (1972), Anne Hall and Manhattan (1979) celebrate the end of love in a nostalgic way. As a psychoanalytic concept, nostalgia is a painful return, an incredible pathology.
In other films, such as Deep in My Heart (1978), Crime and Fault (1989), and Murder in Manhattan (1993), the deaths are more pronounced – a mother commits suicide and a mistress is murdered in cold blood. For Allen, the fatal aspect of romance was put on the forefront.
In Love and Death (1975), the themes of sex, death and the possibility of the afterlife (set against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century Russian literary landscape) are seriously and comically treated, with Alan's character Boris walking through the woods with death, both recalling and mimicking the image of death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).
Irony and fate, the other two aspects of our existential dilemma, are recurring themes for Allen. In 1995's Bullets on Broadway, the cultured protagonist David Shane must watch in despair as Cheic improves and defends his play. Cheic is a rude bodyguard with a natural sense of theatrical dialogue.
"Non-Strong Aphrodisiac" openly presents the theme of fate, with a true Greek chorus providing commentary and warning of the dangers of disturbing fate.
As an early film writer, The Dummies in Jail (1969), The Banana (1971), and Science City for Dummies (1973) were largely platforms for the development of burlesque and iconic dialogue, as well as the evolution of "The Fools" (a Yiddish comedy character characterized by timidity, failure, and tenacity).
"Anne Hall" and "Manhattan" are bittersweet comedy films about the loss of love and the perversion of the idea of pursuing romantic happiness. The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and The Radio Age (1987) are nostalgic fantasies in which Alan revels in period costumes, landscapes, and emotions.
Once Upon a Time in Stardust once again evokes nostalgia for old-fashioned romance, but is also a more serious critique of filmmaking. Just as Anne Hall can be compared to Sartre, Once Upon a Time in Stardust is a fantasy, an acknowledgement of death, in keeping with Heidegger's philosophy.
Film director Sandy Bates battled the hostility of critics, who felt that his transition from comedy to drama betrayed them. Shortly after Deep in My Heart, Allen's first public dramatic film, the similarities are evident.
The film has drawn more accusations of narcissism and self-indulgence, like Deconstructing Lovemania (also centered around an artist's static point in his career), but Once Upon a Time in Stardust is lighter and ultimately more positive.
While these films sometimes document the desperation of romantic protagonists, they are promising, at least relatively speaking. (The exception here is Deep in My Heart, whose gray seaside locations, claustrophobic interiors, and suicide are indeed bleak and derided as overthinking Bergman.) )
The fool is an incompetent image, and Alan is always self-deprecating — "if you have a little integrity, you hate yourself" — but this dissatisfaction seems to be more of an aspect of the character than a personality.
However, Allen's films in the '90s have shown a darker tendency, a bitterness without sweetness. Critic J. Hoberman detected this trend in his 1998 review of Celebrities:
"One would hardly have imagined that Allen's attempt to satirize the daily life of the nation's entertainment industry would be so exhausting, sore and depressed. Whether or not the filmmaker considers celebrity status a curse, his musings on the subject are extraordinarily punitive. Celebrity is as nasty as Non-Powerful Aphrodisiac or Deconstructed Lovemania, and there are no jokes. ”
The film reviews the empty nature of fame and fortune. It portrays those whom society deems worthy of celebration as stupid, vain, occasionally violent and largely irrelevant. The film is lackluster, exposing the common apathy of the characters and filmmakers.
As if Allen's lifelong investigation led to a grim conclusion - man is not worthy of concern because he is a slave to his own desires, and he chooses to remain in the dark; If he is not satisfied with struggling in the quagmire, then he is too listless to change.
In Deconstructing Lovemania, Allen's perverse pleasure in interrogating the boundaries of his film characters again focuses his criticism on the similarities between Ellen and his protagonist, Harry, a writer who must endure the wrath of family and friends as he exposes them in a rugged autobiographical story.
For those who see Allen's film as a canvas for his own anxiety, the film is a masochistic lash as Harry realizes the intense pain, anger and shame he brings to the people in his life. The tragic unhappiness of the characters is compelling, even if expressed with twisted humor.
Harry explained his situation to a prostitute - "I'm mentally broken. I'm empty, I'm scared... I have no soul".
If we can continue to read these films as the work of an author, it seems that Woody Allen's early "romantic philosophy" nature has developed cynical, if not misanthropy.
Perhaps those things that have been sublimated to a safe distance in his art, such as the desire to profligate and how to comply with it, have penetrated the screen into life. Instead of seeking change, his characters are content to stay put, or not see far enough to make the right change.
His characters no longer find the joy of redemption in the small details of life, like the Sunday breeze and Dolly's face in Once Upon a Time in Stardust, or the face of Trish in Ingmar Bergman's movies and Manhattan. Allen argues that the fact that we continue to make the same mistakes and not learn is no longer harmless fun.
On several occasions in Shkell's documentaries, Allen completely rejected the idea that his satirical works had a purpose and that his characters had a point, in a rather surreal way.
In his filmography, he seems to have abandoned the serious inquiry into human nature and is content to lash out at our shortcomings – the nouveau riche (The Amateur Thief, 2000), the film industry (Hollywood Ending, 2002), and, of course, the inevitable doom of romantic love.