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.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780813139241
Publisert
2013
Utgiver
Vendor
The University Press of Kentucky
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter