The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen [Hardcover]

Peter J. Bailey (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2000

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Bailey engages Allen with a serious, intelligent, and creative critical imagination." -- Sam B. Girgus, author of The Films of Woody Allen

“His detailed treatment of Allen’s work in the nineties is an especially welcome addition of the critical literature.” -- American Studies

From the Inside Flap

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 Shadows and Fog, one of Allen’s characters says of a circus magician, “Oh yes, everyone loves his illusions!” 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. For example, Bailey contends that in Manhattan, Allen’s cinematic romanticizing of the Manhattan cityscape contrasts thematically with the shallowness of the movie’s characters, while he reads Hannah and Her Sisters as a film in which Allen allowed his desire to project a resolution affirming the family to overwhelm his predominantly realistic impulses. 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 study opens with a discussion of Allan Felix’s life-denying obsession with Casablanca in Play It Again, Sam, and closes with Allen’s guilt-laden allegory of the artist’s relationship to his audience in Sweet and Lowdown. Bailey’s examination of Allen’s art/life dialectic also draws from the offscreen 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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Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Kentucky (October 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813121671
• ISBN-13: 978-0813121673
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,084,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deconstructing Woody, June 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (Hardcover)

If you've ever wanted to reach right into the movie screen, shake one of Woody Allen's characters by the shirt collar, and say, "Snap out of it, bub," here's a book for you. Peter J. Bailey's The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen offers a fascinating, crystalline analysis of one of the most vexing questions to dog three generations of Woody Allen characters: Is the fictional world of art--especially film art--more a help or a hindrance in our difficult lives?

Bailey, an English professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., demonstrated his gift for making sense of challenging contemporary literary art with Reading Stanley Elkin in the mid-'80s. In The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen, he takes on a more readily accessible subject but does not hold back any of the tremendous critical insight at his command. The result is a book both for serious film buffs--that is, buffs of serious film (a subjective distinction taken up in this book)--and for film scholars alike. I was impressed by Bailey's scholarly precision, yet after reading the first couple of chapters I wanted to dash out and rent Stardust Memories, Manhattan, and several other signature Woody Allen flicks. This book has actually made watching his movies a more intellectually stimulating experience without killing the comic moments so abundant in them.

A college English instructor myself, I appreciate the challenge of leading a critical investigation of something fun and entertaining without making that subject, well, less fun and entertaining. Bailey succeeds admirably with this book, mainly because he never puts Allen on a pedestal. The author is a fan, to be sure, as indicated by his generous praise for what Allen does well--and has done well at a pace of roughly one film a year since 1972. This book's thesis, however, delves more deeply into a particularly compelling set of questions at the core of most of Allen's films: What do they say about the role of art in our lives? Is it a redeeming social force or merely a pleasant diversion from life's suffering? Are Woody Allen's films art or merely pleasant, entertaining diversions?

Bailey combines his own convincing interpretations of Allen's film work with previously reported comments from Allen on these questions to show not only how equivocal Woody Allen movies are on the matter of art's benefits and costs, but how central a theme this equivocating is in those movies. To his great credit--and unlike many scholarly investigations of film and literary art--Bailey avoids overbearing suggestions that HIS interpretations are REALLY what Allen's films are all about. Rather, the author has found a thread running through Allen's work that he holds up to the light--a light that has lingered too long on the personality of Woody Allen and the attending tabloid drama. This more illuminating thread--the vexed relationship of art to life and the difficulty of reconciling the two, both in art and in life--is of such enormous importance in the broader conversation of American popular culture that the absence of details on Allen's personal travails reads as a virtue in Bailey's book.

While Woody Allen fans will definitely find The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen most enjoyable and accessible, any moviegoer who has ever contemplated what distinguishes the cinematic good and bad from the ugly will find this book thought-provoking, perhaps at times profound. Ultimately, this is not a portrait of a filmmaker so much as the study of an intriguing film mind at work--and a snapshot of a possible film legend as a work-in-progress.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-have for Woody's fans, January 23, 2004

By 

Carol H. "Proustian mess" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (Paperback)

I have read several books on Woody Allen and this is the most brilliant so far. Those who are tired of hearing about his squabble with Mia Farrow will be relieved to find that the author concentrates on his work and only mentions facts of Woody Allen's life that are relevant to his films. The book painstakingly analyzes the psychological and philosophical undercurrents in Woody's work, and especially delves into the issue as to whether art cand lend coherence to an otherwise contingent and random life. It'll help you see Woody's films from a broader standpoint but also set you brooding over your life as well.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An interesting perspective on Allen's major films, December 3, 2003

By 

R. J. Marsella (California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen (Hardcover)

Peter Baily establishes his thesis that a primary thread running through many of Allen's major films is an examination of the tension between art and life and the struggle of the artist to disengage from the real world to unleash the creative juices. Citing examples from many of my favorite Allen films and following through on his major premise Baily delivers a fine book that challenged me to look at this films from a new perspective. I highly recommend this to fans of Woody Allen. I am cueing up my DVD copy of Hannah and her Sisters as soon as I log off.