Table of contents

Table of Contents

Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgments

PART I: Biography/Autobiography/Auteurism

1: The Stand-up Auteur

The Place of the Auteur in American Film Culture

The Auteur as Commentator

Stardust Memories: The Auteur between Distrust and Desire

Acknowledgments

2: Which Woody Allen?

Woody vs. Woody

Woody, Post-Scandal

Playing Woody Allen

Acknowledgments

3: Woody Allen and France

Aspects of the Representation of French Culture in Allen’s Films

Building Up the Persona

Allen and French Cinema

Truffaut, Godard, and Others

Aspects of Allen’s Critical Reception in France

4: “Raging in the Dark”: Late Style in Woody Allen’s Films

5: A Difficult Redemption: Facing the Other in Woody Allen’s Exilic Period

6: Comic Faith and Its Discontents: Death and the Late Woody

PART II: Movies about the Movies

7: Critical Theory and the Cinematic World of Woody Allen

Zelig: Reflections on the Cultural Landscape

From Interiors to Radio Days: An Exploration into Art and Culture

Celebrity, Negotiating Identity

8: Crimes and Misdemeanors: Reflections on Reflexivity

9: Play it Again, Woody: Self-Reflexive Critique in Contemporary Woody Allen Films

Celluloid Memories

Have We Met Before?

Talking in Circles

The Way They Were

That’s the End?

10: Jazz Heaven: Woody Allen and the Hollywood Ending

Moral and Aesthetic Blindness (Crimes and Misdemeanors and Hollywood Ending)

The Framed Screen (The Purple Rose of Cairo and Stardust Memories)

PART III: Allen and His Sisters: Cultural Critiques

11: “Here . . . It’s Not Their Cup of Tea”: Woody Allen’s Melodramatic Tendencies in Interiors, September, Another Woman, and Alice

Woody’s Melodramatic Tendencies

Motherhood, Family, and Its Complications: Inscriptions and Revisions of the Family and Maternal Melodramas in Interiors and September

Dreamscapes and Realities: Paranoid Spaces and Female Agency/Passivity

12: “It’s Complicated, Really”: Women in the Films of Woody Allen

Manhattan: Three Types of Women

Hannah and Her Sisters: Pregnant Women and Controlling Men

Another Woman: “You Must Change Your Life”

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: “Chronic Dissatisfaction”

Whatever Works: It’s a Matter of Luck

Conclusion: “It’s Complicated”

13: Woody Allen’s Grand Scheme: The Whitening of Manhattan, London, and Barcelona

14: Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris: Remembering Modernism, Remembering Woody

Shoring up Fragments: Allen, Eliot, and Modernist Citation

No Warts, Not At All: Historical Blindness and Modernist Biographies

It’s Delovely: Depthless Citation

“Very Pretty Lyrics”: Midnight in Paris’s Modernist Tour Book

Just Desserts: Upon Midnight, Recalling Woody

PART IV: Influences/Intertextualities

15: Taking the Tortoise for a Walk: Woody Allen as Flâneur

16: Lurking in Shadows: Kleinman’s Trial and Defense

Kafkaesque Wake-up Calls and Trials: The Spectre of Anti-Semitism

Kleinman’s Expressionist Nightmare

Shadows of the Holocaust and Beyond

17: Woody Allen and the Literary Canon

Crossing the Literary Divide

Russian Influences

Kafka and Other Absurdists

18: “Who’s He When He’s at Home?”: A Census of Woody Allen’s Literary, Philosophical, and Artistic Allusions

Census of Woody Allen’s Allusions

19: The Schlemiel in Woody Allen’s Later Films

The Schlemiel and Autonomy: From Moses Mendelssohn to Woody Allen

Blindness and Insight

Mitigated Skepticism

The “Parisian Dream”

20: Barcelona: City of Refuge

Cities of Refuge

Set in Barcelona

Barcelona, New York, Barcelona

PART V: Philosophy/Religion

21: Woody Allen and the (False) Dichotomy of Science and Religion

Allen’s Flux Metaphysics

Allen’s Epistemological Claims

The Meaning and Value of Life

The False Dichotomy

22: The Philosopher as Filmmaker

Allen’s Philosophical Claims

Film and Philosophy

Assessing Allen’s Philosophical Claims

Acknowledgments

23: Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen

How the Factoring Philosophy Makes the World Disappear

Woody Allen’s Existentialism

David Hume as the Consummate Trick Philosopher

Skepticism’s Instability

Skepticism and Freethinking: Oscillating between Incompatibles

Global Skepticism’s Philosophical and Artistic Dead Ends

How to Live if All Values Are Strictly Subjective

Reflecting on “Life’s Shortness and Uncertainty”

Counterworking “the Artifice of Nature”

Problems with Projection Theory – But Not to Worry

Acknowledgments

24: Love, Meaning, and God in the Later Films of Woody Allen

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009)

Cassandra’s Dream (2007)

25: Hollywood Rabbi: The Never-Ending Questions of Woody Allen

26: Allen’s Random Universe in His European Cycle: Morality, Marriage, Magic

Afterword: The Abyss: Woody Allen on Love, Death, and God