The reluctant film art of Woody Allen / Peter J. Bailey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bailey, Peter J., 1946- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Allen, Woody, 1935---Criticism and interpretation.

Allen, Woody.

Allen, Woody, 1935-.

Criticism and interpretation.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xi, 437 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

Second edition.

Place of Publication:

Lexington, Kentucky : The University Press of Kentucky, [2016]

Summary:

For thirty years no American filmmaker has been as prolific -- or as paradoxical -- as Woody Allen. From Play It Again, Sam (1972) to Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Allen has produced an average of one film a year. Yet with each new film he reveals a progressively skeptical attitude toward art.

Merging criticism and biography, Peter Bailey uses Allen's ambivalent views of the artistic enterprise as the key to understanding his entire career. In an exhaustive, jargon-free reading, Bailey demonstrates how Allen's films constitute a debate he is conducting with himself about the capacities of art to improve the quality of life and about the resulting price exacted upon artists and those around them. Bailey identifies the underlying tension between reality and image in film after film, demonstrating how the resolution of this conflict in each movie is revisited, critiqued, and reconfigured in the next.

Contents:

That old black magic: Woody Allen's ambivalent artistry

Strictly the movies: Play it again, Sam

Getting serious: the antimimetic emblems of Annie Hall

Art and idealization: I'll fake Manhattan

Strictly the movies ii: how Radio days generated nights at the movies

Life stand still here: Interiors dialogue

In the stardust of a song: Stardust memories

Woody's mild Jewish Rose: Broadway Danny Rose

The fine art of living well: Hannah and her sisters

If you want a Hollywood ending: Crimes and misdemeanors

Everyone loves her/his illusions: The purple rose of Cairo and Shadows and fog

Poetic license, bullshit: Bullets over Broadway

Let's just live it: Woody Allen in the 1990s

Because it's real difficult in life: Husbands and wives

Rear condo: Manhattan murder mystery

That voodoo that you do so well: Mighty Aphrodite

And what a perfect plot: Everyone says I love you and Zelig

How we choose to distort it: Deconstructing Harry

From the neck up: Another woman and Celebrity

Allen and his audience: Sweet and lowdown

Confrontation and escape: Allen's twenty-first-century meditations on comedy and tragedy

The magic of luck: Scoop, Magic in the moonlight, and Match point

The heart still wants what it wants: Vicky Cristina Barcelona and You will meet a tall dark stranger

"People reinvent themselves, don't they?": Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine

Epilogue.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780813121673

0813121671

9780813167190

0813167191

OCLC:

932302477