num_pages: 344
description: 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.
language: English
title: The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen
titlecomplete: The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen
genres: Film
ratings_count: 22
publisher: Univ Pr of Kentucky