Tag Archives: Woody Allen

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

by John Carvill

What’s Wrong With This Picture: ‘Annie Hall’ and the endless quest for the perfect Home Cinema experience.

You don’t have to be a died-in-the-wool Luddite to recognise that technology can be a two-edged sword. In fact, if you were seeking to plot a course through the last millennium or so of technological innovation, marking only those special milestones that are unanimously, uncontroversially recognised as wholly positive developments, you would end up with quite a short list, one which would probably look something like this: printing press; telescope; refrigerator; Concorde; the Draught Guinness ‘floating’ widget; rear parking sensors.

In the home cinema universe, the ‘Big Bang’ moment came with the introduction of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR) in the late 1970s. The next big leap forward occurred when the DVD, which had gradually superseded the clunky, unglamorous VHS cassette, was combined with the widescreen TV.   That vast expanse of flat, matt, glare-free screen, coupled with the crystalline clarity of DVD, allowed us to enjoy our favourite films all over again, with a richness of detail that can seem almost hallucinatory. As The Sopranos’ Paulie Walnuts poetically put it, having recently seen ‘On The Waterfront’ on a widescreen: “Karl Malden’s nose hairs looked like fuckin’ BX cables.”

But there’s always a down side. For every pro, there’s a corresponding con. Or, to put it another way, for every revelatory glimpse of Karl Malden’s nasal hair, there’s an infuriatingly unintuitive, bafflingly circuitous DVD menu system, seemingly designed by MC Escher during a bad LSD experience.  (To add insult to injury, many DVDs force you to endure an excruciatingly loud jingle or dialogue snippet every time you return – however inadvertently – to the man menu screen.)

Continue reading →

The Dream Never Dissolves: Taschen’s ‘Movie Icons’

by John Carvill

Taschen’s ‘Movie Icons’ series offers a chance to ponder the particularities of iconic movie stills.

“She gave great still. She is funnier in stills, sexier, more mysterious, and protected against being. And still pictures may yet triumph over movies in the history of media. For stills are more available to the imagination.”

- David Thomson on Marilyn Monroe

In the olden days of the Hollywood dream factory, when movie stars were doggedly elusive and – not coincidentally – infinitely more interesting, the big Studios rigorously controlled access to their stars, radically adjusting their accessibility levels according to context: on one side, no press people got any kind of unmediated access to the likes of Bogart or Gable – the Studios controlled and choreographed all such encounters; at the same time, stars were made to make themselves available for publicity duties at the behest of the moguls who called the shots. Studio publicity departments were adroit at image-massaging machinations. If a male star, say, was the subject of rumours which threatened to undermine his perceived heterosexuality, then a suitable starlet would be lined up to publicly accompany him to a première or party, acting as a twinkly-eyed beard. It was the age of the ‘publicity still’. Elaborate tableaux were constructed into which the compliant actors were expected to step at the last moment, to have their photographs taken surrounded by suitably image-reinforcing paraphernalia. The resultant shots were at once utterly disconnected from the actors’ presence in their films, yet also somehow of a piece with their existence as ‘stars’.

Continue reading →

Sex and Politics in Annie Hall

by John Carvill

Sex and Politics in Annie Hall: Not Essentially a Political Comedy at All

by John Carvill

Annie Hall is densely packed with references and cultural allusions. The scope is wide, taking in literature, philosophy, psychiatry, psychology, drugs, religion, cinema, art, academia, and more. Right at the start of the film, we’re straight into a discussion of Sigmund Freud’s ‘Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious’. Not standard romantic comedy material. This fast-paced and wide-ranging use of references is itself signposted when Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) tells comedian Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), after he’s played a college stand-up gig, how much she enjoyed the show and that, “I think I’m starting to get more of the references, too.” The film also represents a continuation of a number of themes that don’t so much recur in Allen’s films, as run like veins through his whole body of work. Anyone reasonably familiar with Allen’s oeuvre could doubtless very easily fire off a list of common Allen preoccupations which show up in this film, some of the most obvious being: New York (in general, and as opposed to Los Angeles), neurosis, sex, the travails of the nebbish, modern-day male-female relationships, death, existential angst, city versus country, paranoia, the role of the artist, the meaning of life, or lack thereof, etc.

Arguably, the most prevalent theme in Allen’s work in general, and in Annie Hall in particular, is that of Jewish identity. If this is subtly alluded to in the very first lines of Alvy’s opening monologue – the combination of ‘old joke’ and ‘Catskill mountain resort’ clearly signalling Jewishness – a more obvious early instance occurs in the film’s opening scene proper, in which Alvy and his best friend Rob (Tony Roberts) are seen approaching out of the far distance, discussing Alvy’s propensity to “pick up on” nuances of everyday speech which he interprets as making derogatory reference to his Jewish roots:

“You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said, ‘Did you eat yet or what?’, and Tom Christie said, ‘No, JEW?’. Not ‘Did you?’, JEW eat? JEW? No, not ‘Did you eat’, but JEW eat, JEW, you get it? JEW eat…”

Later, when Alvy and Annie are shown meeting for the first time, Alvy nervously accepts Annie’s invitation to come up to her apartment for a glass of wine – despite being “all perspired” – and they make awkward conversation on Annie’s rooftop terrace. Totally oblivious to Alvy’s sensitivities, Annie’s opening gambit proves difficult for him to swallow:

Annie: “You’re what Grammy Hall would call a real Jew!”

Alvy: “Thank you.”

Whole books have probably been written about this theme in Allen’s work, but another topic which has received a lot less attention, certainly in as much as it might be present in Annie Hall, is politics. During a key scene in the film, Alvy tells the audience at a 1960s political rally that he doesn’t know why he’s been invited because he’s “not essentially a political comedian at all.” Similarly, Allen’s films are not often thought of as being very political, and certainly not Annie Hall which is ostensibly a ‘Romantic Comedy’, albeit one far, far removed from the cloying, vacant sludge served up under that faded banner nowadays. Of course, Alvy’s disavowal needs to be taken with a pinch of salt – he is after all addressing a rally in support of Democratic Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, in his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to win the Democratic nomination that would eventually go to JFK.

Continue reading →