In the voluminous "urban anti-romantic comedies" made in woody allen's middle age, it is not so much a critique as a precursor to 21st-century anti-intellectualism in the United States. His style was to pull some expressive intellectuals off the podium, or to ridicule the representatives of the middle class who were in mental trouble.
He sees the struggles of these characters as trivial, banal and untouched by the essence. He felt that under the premise that "everyone will eventually die", how to live more meaningfully is the problem that everyone should consider.
Allen Stewart Konigsberg, born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935, is an American director, screenwriter, actor, honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, whom discerning French call "the only intellectual in American cinema."
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="7" > directors and "bad typos"</h1>
Talking about Woody Allen is a difficult thing to do.
First of all, as a famous director, he has shot more than fifty films in his nearly sixty-year creative career – the length of his creative career and the richness of the content involved make his style less easy to define.
Secondly, as a Golden Globe Lifetime Achievement Award winner, as a filmmaker who has been walking on the screen as an intellectual for many years, the second half of his life was deeply involved in the scandal of "molesting an adopted daughter". It's especially difficult to talk about because many people simply don't bother to understand whether this "stain" is real or not, as one well-known person openly stated to the media: Regardless of the facts, I am on the side of women.
It looks like the absurdity of Woody Allen's films, such as in the well-known film Midnight in Paris, where an unknown university professor opens his mouth to comment on any literary work he sees, and although it is full of loopholes, it is important to express opinions — the key is that someone likes to listen, and whether he is right or wrong.
Woody Allen can make such characters look bad in public in the film, but when he comes back to his own question, he basically loses the right to explain. Probably because the upright American middle class longs for such a bad example — the important thing is not that he has done bad things, but that the public has the right to think that he is an immoral person, otherwise what is written in the newspaper? What people see is that Woody Allen is married to a Korean-American girl who is 35 years younger than himself, and this girl is also his adopted daughter with his ex-girlfriend (Woody thinks she is the child adopted by his girlfriend Mia Farrow and her ex-husband), all of which proves that he is not good at character?
So, with regard to the "American Dream," people need both positive and negative targets of attack, and Woody Allen had better accept it, or he is using his influence to cover up the facts, as the Clintons did.
Woody Allen obviously couldn't stand the stolen goods, and although he had spent his life stressing that he didn't care about other people's opinions as a director, he published an autobiography that went public in the United States at the end of March 2021 (no Chinese translation yet available).
At the time of writing this book, the director, who in Mia Farrow's mind," who "ruined the good image he set up with good character and his ugly deeds," must have remembered the film master Ingmar Bergman, who died suddenly after 5 days of talking with him—although he had never been able to make a film comparable to his idol in his lifetime, his long exploration of film and life also had its complete value, and all of this made him not allow himself to carry a huge "stain" to be covered.
Woody Allen's idol: Bergman
Fellini
Kurosawa
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="257" > making a movie is like Kundera writing</h1>
Woody Allen made more than fifty films in his lifetime, moving forward from "A Rainy Day in New York" in 2019, there are too many good films to remember, such as "Blue Jasmine" in the 2010s, "Love in Rome", "Midnight in Paris", "Midnight Barcelona" in the 2000s, "The End point" in the 1990s, "Deconstructing Love Maniacs" "The Virtuous Couple", "Alice" in the 1980s, "Hannah Sisters" in the 1980s, "The Purple Rose in Cairo", "Xili Biography", and "The 1970s" that laid the foundation for his style. Manhattan," "Deep in My Heart," and his most acclaimed Anne Hall. Even the comedic elements of his early works, "Dumb Goose" and "Fool in Prison," which he felt were just typical commercial films, were often mentioned.
As a prolific director, Woody Allen's most obvious trait is his intellectual tone, especially in the films in which he himself starred, and he used a fixed nerve-sucking and talkative image to the extreme.
Does Woody Allen also consider himself an intellectual? At least not as a young man, he said in an interview that he didn't pick up Dostoevsky's work and read it until the end of high school—he thought his literary accumulation was far from enough.
And why is it firmly believed that he is indeed an intellectual director? Woody jokes that he's just sticking a bunch of seemingly complicated words into movies, like at the beginning of Anne Hall, and when he starts quoting Freud's teachings, audiences inevitably think he's a cultured man. This is his usual self-deprecating routine, in addition to showing self-humility, he may also remind the audience that the level of knowledge is not enough, of course, the most likely explanation is that he is actually satirizing the kind of people who think they are intellectuals.
In his two best-known films, Anne Hall and Manhattan, Woody first brought the master of communications Marshall McLuhan into his story and asked McLuhan to personally go abroad to deny a university professor who talked about his theories. In the latter film, Woody plays a stand-up script writer who, because of his views different from that of trendy people, angrily says to the young girlfriend played by Marel Hemingway (the granddaughter of the writer Hemingway): I am angry because I hate garbage dressed as intellectuals!
This is the consistent style of Woody Allen, who has to tease everyone, especially hating experts and scholars, and satirizing well-known artists without mercy. And since "Anne Hall", he has always rushed to the camera endlessly to talk directly to the audience, "instilling" a bunch of his own feelings or opinions into them. Just as Milan Kundera, who writes novels, always pops out of the storytelling and starts talking, startling the reader – like suddenly inserting advertisements in a program for children, this "disengagement" tactic often makes the attentive audience very angry.
"Anne Hall"
Woody has always adhered to this "self-righteous" temperament, and because he often appears as the lead actor of his own films, the protagonist is quite fixed, and the vast majority of the audience also thinks that he is playing in his own color, and that the lines of the role are exactly the showdown that Woody made to the public as an intellectual.
When Woody filmed the intellectual's horse's feet and ugliness, when he played with middle-class family gags, the audience was certainly happy to chase him, but when his spearhead was aimed at their ordinary lives, this all changed. Because fans need a "Come on, Woody, let's laugh and fall to the ground, as you did in the past" ("The Second Half of Woody's Life"), not a high-minded and pretentious upper class.
Because of this, when Woody released his first serious film after "Anne Hall", "Deep in My Heart", he was greeted not only with a sympathetic hug, but by unanimous criticism from critics and ordinary audiences. And his other immersion work, "Once Upon a Time in the Stars", which he retried after "Manhattan", also suffered an almost Waterloo-style failure.
Manhattan
Woody once explained that many of his films are actually made for college students. But his "intellectualism" did not cause much of an echo in the United States, and he slowly transformed from a widely acclaimed comedy director into a niche literary film director, and after the mid-1990s, his loyal audience was basically precipitated on the European continent.
Of course, this does not mean that Woody was a European director, and the masters of the Old World were more intellectual than his intellectual tendencies and more authoric. So they wouldn't be as content as Woody was to get involved in the discussion of the moral interests of the middle class, and it would be better to write a book, as Žižek did—and while the up-and-coming philosopher was always interested in commenting on newly released topic films, it could be a disaster for his mind if he were to go down and direct a love movie himself.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="258" > class confusion of major directors</h1>
Strictly speaking, Woody Allen is not a serious intellectual. In the large number of "urban anti-romantic comedies" filmed in his middle age, it is not so much a criticism as it is a precursor to anti-intellectualism in the United States in the 21st century. Woody's style was to pull some intellectuals who liked to express themselves off the podium, or to ridicule the representatives of the middle class who were in mental trouble. He sees the struggles of these characters as trivial, banal and untouched by the essence. He felt that under the premise that "everyone will eventually die", how to live more meaningfully is the problem that everyone should consider.
Existentialism influenced Woody Allen as a playwright and director, but he was also trapped in a kind of childhood or adolescence confusion and did not go further in the swamp of ideas.
Richard Sickel, author of Woody Allen: A Life in Cinema (a veteran film critic at Time magazine), once compared Woody and Chaplin: "Chaplin's late work deals with broad, extremely distinct social themes—the alienation of labor, the evils of fascism, capitalism—and Woody's work rarely touches on these issues. ”
This is a relatively common perspective on Woody's achievements, and among the many criticisms of Woody, the voice accusing him of not caring about the bottom of society is particularly sharp. How does Woody explain this?
In his 1980 film Once Upon a Time in the Stars, which he wrote and directed, there was a response to these accusations. It's a film about a successful man living in a developed city who doesn't know how to face the chickens and pieces of his abundant life, because he has been thinking about the grand proposition that "people will eventually die, and the life in front of them is meaningless". In the film, Woody plays a well-known director named Sandy, and after watching the Italian movie "The Bike Thief" with a young woman, Sandy expresses his opinion to the fans who sympathize with the low-level characters: When you live in an environment of material abundance, social issues are not so important, and what you should care about becomes the problems of love, aging and death.
"Once Upon a Time in the Stars"
After the film was released, Woody quickly fell into the whirlpool of public opinion. Of course, people are more concerned about the problem of being ignored by Woody or Sandy, but that the film has created a group of fans into a group of characters who are more nervous than Sandy. The audience therefore believed that Woody, the writer, director and lead actor, was a white-eyed wolf, and everyone praised him, but he was ungrateful and mocked them in the movie as useless.
Twenty-two years later, in an interview with Swedish film critic Scott Björkman, Woody still can't forget this past, saying:
"What I wanted to explore [in 'Once Upon a Time in the Stars'] was primarily the relationship between man and death, which I've shown in other films."
But he still didn't explain the question posed by the producer at the beginning of the film: "What is there to be bitter about him?" Doesn't this guy know he has the best talent for comedy? (This line is a typical view in the film critics after Woody filmed "Deep in My Heart")
This question, in reality, is expressed as: Why does Woody Allen, as such a successful director, have to be self-pitying in the film all the time, is he not lucky?
People don't understand Woody, he looks like he has the "rich man's disease", or the "genius disease" that the male protagonist suffers from in "A Rainy Day in New York". Woody also doesn't understand why people are holding on to this question, and his more common response is: Hey, movies are movies, I'm me, Sandy thinks so, but that doesn't mean I think so.
Objectively speaking, there is some truth in the fans' accusations, and Woody's spiritual dimension is indeed not so broad. We can see that in his 2012 film "Blue Jasmine", the heroine played by Kate Blanchett fell from a noble lady to the most ordinary working class, she obviously can't cope with this muddy life, so while accusing herself of being depraved and preferring to entrust herself to the sister of an ordinary straight male worker, she constantly "self-improvement" and look forward to remarrying into the rich.
Of course, we can also use this narrative as a satire, but in his 2019 film "A Rainy Day in New York", we see the story of young men and women from a noble family who are trapped in dog blood. In the film, the male protagonist played by the popular young student Timothy Chalemet walks on the pedestrian street outside the mansion while talking to himself in his heart, not so much criticism, but rather this is an attempt by Woody to rewrite his adolescence: Woody, as a juvenile character, although he solved economic problems in his early years, he still had to run for life, so if as a rich second generation, how would his youth be spent?
As someone asked Kundera: Thomas in Unbearable Lightness of Life is yourself, right? Kundera replied: No, it was precisely because I didn't make the choices he made, so I often wondered what I would have become if I had done the same thing he did...
It is hard to imagine that the thinking of a master artist in his later years would also undergo such a metamorphosis. From Woody's own point of view, it is inevitable that he has that kind of empty worldview and outlook on life: he only cares about writing a paragraph for the newspaper at an age when he should be a good reader. Although he later returned to make up for the lessons as a proud son of heaven, the spiritual traits he showed prematurely had already fixed his thinking.
"A Rainy Day in New York"
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="259" > funny is an instinct for him</h1>
Woody Allen, whose original name was Alan Stewart Connisberg, was born in 1935 and grew up in a rented house in Brooklyn, New York. His father worked as a jeweler and bookmaker, as a waiter in restaurants and billiard halls, in taxis and as a bartender, and his mother was an ordinary clerk.
According to Woody's sister, when their parents were young, they either quarreled or had a cold war, and for several years they did not even speak to each other.
In Woody's film Radio Age, he recreates a scene from his childhood:
The family was doing their own thing in the house, and my father was lying on the couch reading the newspaper.
The childhood "Woody" ran to his father and said, "Can I ask for 15 cents to buy The Masked Ranger's Ring"?
The father lowered the newspaper and replied impatiently, "What am I doing?" Money? ”
At this time, my mother leaned out of the kitchen and said: You should spend more time on your schoolwork and listen less to the radio.
"Woody": You don't listen to the radio all day?
Mother: That's different. That's how our lives are, but you still have a chance to grow up and be a decent person.
From this clip, it can be seen that although the childhood Woody was carefree, his life was far from being rich. He roams the streets of Brooklyn all day, firing his curiosity through movie theaters everywhere.
His mother wanted him to grow up to be a pharmacist, but Woody was so energetic that he always jumped up and down in the house, so he was treated more strictly. In an interview later in life with a crew that filmed documentaries for Woody's directorial career, my mother regretted that "if I hadn't been so harsh on you then, you probably wouldn't have become an acute." ”
Much of his anxious personality is expressed in the films in which woody stars in a neurotic nagging, and when arguing with people, his endless stream of consciousness stutters in his mouth due to excessive mental excitement and overactive thinking.
At the age of 5, there was another major event in his personal intellectual history that affected Woody— he knew what death was and "suddenly became depressed and bitter." In an interview later in his life, he recalled the situation and said:
When I started to realize that people are going to die one day and that life can't go on like this forever, "Hey, get me out, I don't want to play this game." Everything about me has changed since then. ”
In the film "Anne Hall", Woody also recreates this experience:
The mother takes childhood Elvie (the male protagonist played by Woody) to see a psychologist.
Mother: He's been depressed lately, suddenly, and he doesn't want to do anything.
Doctor: Why are you depressed? Elvie.
Mother: Tell the doctor quickly. (Turning to the doctor) could be the stuff he read.
Doctor: Did you read that?
Elvey: The universe is expanding... One day it will fall apart, and that will be the end of the world.
Mother: What does that have to do with you? (Turning to the doctor) He's not doing his homework anymore!
Elvie: What else is there to do?
Mother: What does the universe have to do with your homework?! You're in Brooklyn right now, and Brooklyn doesn't swell!
Doctor: It won't swell in another hundred million years! Elvie, we should still be here to enjoy life! Well? Hahahaha.
The mother could not explain to Woody such a grand proposition of "existence", nor could the psychologist, and the perfunctory adults on this issue allowed the young Woody to see the absurd side of the world: the result of all this was so unfortunate that people could pretend to live idly by.
He was too precocious, but precocious does not mean that this life can successfully find the answer in the exploration of the self. Later, he played in his childhood games, escaping discrimination against his Jewish identity, dodging attacks from the older children in school, and in the blink of an eye, he reached high school.
At school, several classmates discovered his talent for telling funny stories and suggested that he write passages for newspapers, which he did, and soon after his work was published in a big newspaper. He was invited to become a columnist and earned $5,000 a month at the age of nineteen.
Woody's funny talent has been well cultivated and trained, and he himself thinks that being able to come up with funny passages on the road is a huge talent — as simple as falling from the sky and he reaches out to catch it.
After dropping out of college, he became famous for writing stage scripts for talk shows and lace news for The New Yorker. After that, the big names in the entertainment industry thought it would be a good idea to turn this thin writer into a talk show star, and they put him on broadway. Woody's rise to fame laid the foundation for later film careers and style.
Unlike the images of a group of flesh-and-blood men, Woody's outfit for himself is comical in itself: a pair of black-rimmed glasses on thin cheeks, a partial head on the overly round forehead, and a thin skeleton covered by the clothing of a small clerk - a restrained nerd who looks like a minor, in the words of industry insiders, this is called: "A man who looks easy to be teased." ”
The man came out of the backstage and started talking about the passages, and people laughed one after another, and they found that the passages were much more funny than the previous writers' things.
Later, on a runway show, the host asked Woody: Did you learn boxing before to get out of poverty or because you really liked boxing?
Woody replied: Neither. I studied boxing so that I could deal with my mom. If she dares to reason with me again, I will definitely beat her to the ground and find her teeth, you know, she is an old lady.
In the creation of the story, Woody Allen aspires to be a theater master like Eugene O'Neill
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="260" > he could be the next Nobel Laureate in Literature</h1>
It's no secret that Trump also spoke of talk shows in his youth, but he ended up being the kind of guy Woody Allen satirizes in movies. Woody doesn't like to tell vulgar jokes, and can't even stand the crew's shortness of parents in middle-class families who lack intellectual overtones on the show.
However, talk shows are not very advanced things, although huge teleprompters were not popular at that time, and there were no clever post-editing, but in terms of pleasing the audience, the logic of the past and today is the same.
In American talk shows of the 1960s, art and politics began to turn into a fashionable "psychotherapy," where "everything looks so fresh and shiny." (The actors on the runway joked about Nixon, and some viewers couldn't help but laugh when they heard the name, and when the baggage was finished, everyone found that both sides of the enemy were ridiculed and laughed together.
It was a time of beatle movement, racial integration, equal rights for men and women, and homosexuality for inclusion. Woody stood on the stage and "killed" all the popular ideas, and the idle class in the audience admired him.
Woody seemed to be born to tell jokes, and even his half-baked body movements seemed to be a deliberately invented style. In fact, due to his shy personality, he was initially very unaccustomed to standing in front of the public and talking about this matter, so he often made strange moves, such as often wrapping the microphone cable around his neck, which frightened the audience, and everyone thought that he was too nervous to commit suicide.
He doesn't communicate much with the audience, let alone to please them, he hasn't even learned how to perform, he doesn't have time to rehearse him, everything is live, the performance is smashed, so the nightclub owner will not wear more fashionable clothes than the actors to warm up and say: "This paragraph is so funny, how did we invite such a funny actor!" ”
1965, Woody Allen talk show
Of course, Woody also had times to act, but in general, the program effect was quite good, because although it was under pressure from the audience and the capital, the talk show at that time did not engage in any elimination system, although this was not very "democratic" in the program mechanism, but in the matter of humor, the audience was actually towards "dictatorship".
After Woody burst into flames, the big names in the film and television industry began to pay attention to him and invited him to write comedy film scripts. Thus, Woody's first film, written, directed and starring, was born, called "Fools in Prison".
In the film, Virgil, the protagonist played by Woody, contributes a memorable sentence: I am afraid of staying by the side of women, I will drool. The film was a big hit, and the whole filming process also made Woody very excited, he was able to shoot exactly according to his own ideas, rather than being subject to everything creatively - he had previously participated in a film written by himself, but with the interference of the capital, the script was changed to a mess, and since then he has made up his mind that he will not make any more movies unless he has complete decision.
Since "Fools in Prison", Woody's identity as a film creator has been determined, and he has also implemented the "arbitrary" directing style. It was extremely difficult both in the past and in the present to be free from the hostage of capital, and Woody was obviously a lucky person, like stepping on a cloud.
However, people's criticism of him also fermented in the dark, and eventually reached a climax after he made two films, "Deep in My Heart" and "Once Upon a Time in the Stars".
Woody's earliest films, such as "Bananas", are about a Don Quixote-style "good guys go out, there are dangers along the way", but the theme becomes "small clerks go out, bad luck one after another", this simple story structure carries the entertainment duty of providing laughter for the public.
But Woody didn't want to be just a director of funny films, his idols were Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Fellini, and in the creation of stories, he aspired to become a theater master like Eugene O'Neill. So, after making a few box office successes, he felt that he should transform, so he had a film like "Deep in My Heart".
What kind of movie is this? In terms of creative motivation, Woody at this time was a bit like a pedant, which was a common trait among intellectuals in that era. A more extreme example is the view of the science fiction writer Philip Dick: "[I am] a philosopher who writes fiction, not a fiction writer." My novel-writing skills are the tools I use to illustrate perception. At the heart of my writing is not art, but truth. ”
But the creation of the seventh art in this way must have been contrary to the original intention. Because his fans don't need someone who is much better off than them to look down and taunt them. As a result, the well-meaning critics of the past began to doubt Woody's motives, and the audience was even more unhappy - movies are movies, entertainment is entertainment, why talk about serious topics when everyone is drinking Coke and eating popcorn?
So, now the question becomes: Woody hated the interference of the capital in his script, but now the audience has jumped out to pick the thorn - there is no creative censorship system in the United States, so is there real creative freedom?
In other words: who is not flattering?
It's the ultimate question that hangs down every creator's path, but Woody, like a child, has a penchant for the proposition of death.
Woody Allen dreamed of making Bergman's great works, but he himself was at best close to Fellini's heights. From another perspective, Fellini's peak was over early, and Woody was in his 80s looking for an outlet to think.
Maybe he just didn't think about the question: Why compare with Bergman? Writers like Fitzgerald and Salinger don't have to compete with Borges—for a creator, his own genre is the most precious thing left to people. In the face of the insurmountable peaks in literary history, is it not worth mentioning that People like Fitzgerald, Salinger and Woody Allen have left brilliant memories of their youth?
What I would like to say is that for middle-aged and elderly friends who cannot continue to improve themselves, maintaining a pure heart is more worthy of respect than playing a well-known figure. But our intellectuals obviously don't agree with this, and they are still discussing the current trend of thought with the Internet passages from a decade ago.
And throughout Woody Allen's creative career, he has been growing. Therefore, there is no need to dwell on why he does not care about the bottom of society – he is already concerned with the ideological dilemma that everyone encounters, albeit through a playful picture and tone.
In his later years, Woody Allen gained a well-deserved reputation in Europe, so when he could not raise funds for filming in the United States, the European bosses extended an olive branch to him. Later in the story, we already know that Wanda acquired American Legendary Pictures, and used the production cost of nearly 70 "Wuji" to restore the long-lost Pacific entertainment industry on the level of news.
Will there be an intellectual director who will satisfy most people after that? It's hard to predict. But, given that Bob Dylan has already won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for his lyrics, I'd like to predict here that within five years Woody Allen won a Nobel Prize in Literature if nothing goes wrong.
END
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Original from Zhidao Media "New Educator" magazine, text/Ike, photo/network