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Friday, January 21, 2011

Annie Hall


Annie Hall is a 1977 American comedy film directed by Woody Allen from a script co-written with Marshall Brickman and co-starring Diane Keaton. One of Allen's most popular and most honored films, it won four Academy Awards including Best PictureRoger Ebert described it as "just about everyone's favorite Woody Allen movie".[1]
Allen had previously been known as a maker of zany comedies; the director has describedAnnie Hall as "a major turning point",[2] as it brought a new level of seriousness to his work

Plot

The film is set in New York CityChippewa Falls, WI, and Los Angeles.
Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) is a neurotic comedian, attempting to maintain a relationship with the seemingly ditzy but exuberant Annie (Diane Keaton). The film chronicles their relationship over several years, intercut with various imaginary trips into each other's history (Annie is able to "see" Alvy's family when he was only a child, and likewise Alvy observes Annie's past relationships). In the first flashback showing Alvy as a child, we learn he was raised inBrooklyn; his father's occupation was operating a bumper cars concession and the family home was located below the Thunderbolt roller coaster on Coney Island.
After many arguments and reconciliations, the two realize they are fundamentally different and split up. Annie moves in with Tony Lacey (Paul Simon). Annie likes California, but Alvy hates it. Alvy soon realizes he still loves her and tries to persuade her to return with him to New York. He fails and, resignedly, returns home to write a play about their relationship, recycling the conversation they had exchanged in California, but ending with him winning Annie back.
Later, with Annie back in New York, the two are able to meet on good terms as friends, now with different lovers. Alvy ends the film by musing about how love and relationships are something we all require despite their often painful and complex nature.

[edit]Cast

[edit]Production

Allen's working title for the film was Anhedonia (a psychoanalytic term for the inability to experience pleasure from normally pleasurable life events), but this was considered unmarketable, as were Brickman's suggested alternatives, It Had to Be JewRollercoaster Named Desireand Me and My Goy.[3] Ultimately Annie Hall was decided on as the release title. Because of biographical similarities between the character Alvy and Woody Allen (including Allen's previous relationship with co-star Diane Keaton, whose real name is Diane Hall, and who portrays the character Annie Hall), Annie Hall has been widely assumed to be semi-autobiographical. Allen has denied this.
The film was originally intended to be a drama centered on a murder mystery with a comic and romantic subplot. However, during script revisions, Allen decided to drop the murder plot.[4] According to Allen, the murder occurred after a scene that remains in the film, the sequence in which Annie and Alvy miss the Ingmar Bergman film Face to Face.[2] Allen and co-writer Marshall Brickman would make a murder mystery film many years later, with 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, also starring Diane Keaton.
Similarly, the production of the film was semi-improvisational. For example, in the original script, Alvy didn't grow up under a roller coaster, but while Allen was driving around Brooklyn with his crew, looking for locations, "I saw this roller-coaster, and I saw the house under it. And I thought, we have to use this."[2] The "house" in question is in fact the Kensington Hotel, which really was located underneath the Thunderbolt roller coaster.[5] Another example is the scene in which Alvy sneezes into cocaine, which was purely accidental, but Allen decided to keep it in the movie; when they tested it with audiences they laughed so much that Allen had to add more footage after the scene so they would not laugh through important conversations afterwards.[6]

[edit]Style and technique

A scene from Annie Hall
Allen has said that Annie Hall was "a major turning point" both thematically and technically. "I had the courage to abandon... just clowning around and the safety of complete broad comedy. I said to myself, 'I think I will try and make some deeper film and not be as funny in the same way. And maybe there will be other values that will emerge, that will be interesting or nourishing for the audience.' And it worked out very very well."[2]
Allen has also stated that working with cinematographer Gordon Willis for the first time on Annie Hall helped improve his technical skills, calling Willis "a very important teacher" and a "technical wizard."[2] Annie Hall was the first of Allen's films to utilize long takes, where sometimes one shot will continue, unabridged, for an entire scene. Allen has commented, "It just seems more fun and quicker and less boring for me to do long scenes."[2] Film critic Roger Ebert cites a study that calculated the average shot length of Annie Hall to be 14.5 seconds, while other films made in 1977 had an average shot length of 4–7 seconds.[1] Ebert adds that the long takes add to the dramatic power of the film, saying, "Few viewers probably notice how much of Annie Hall consists of people talking, simply talking. They walk and talk, sit and talk, go to shrinks, go to lunch, make love and talk, talk to the camera, or launch into inspired monologues like Annie's free-association as she describes her family to Alvy. This speech by Diane Keaton is as close to perfect as such a speech can likely be... all done in one take of brilliant brinkmanship." As detailed in the book When the Shooting Stops... The Cutting Begins, written by the film's editor, Ralph Rosenblum, with Robert Karen, the trick to editing Annie Hall was paring the film down to its essential. The first rough cut was two hours and twenty minutes long; various subplots, background scenes and flashbacks-within-flashbacks were deleted to focus on the love story.
Although the film is not essentially experimental, Allen at several points undermines the illusion of reality. In one famous scene, Allen's character, standing in line to see a movie with Annie and listening to a man behind him deliver misinformed pontifications on the significance of Marshall McLuhan's work, leaves the line to speak to the camera directly. The man then steps out of the queue and speaks to the camera in his own defense, and Allen resolves the dispute by pulling McLuhan himself from behind a free-standing movie posterboard to tell the man that his interpretation is wrong. Later in the film, when we see Annie and Alvy in an earlier stage of their relationship making conversation and getting to know each other, humorous subtitles convey to the audience the characters' nervous inner thoughts. An animated scene depicts Alvy and Annie in the guise of the Wicked Queen from Snow White.
Other techniques that undermine the film's realism are taken from Allen's artistic influences. In one such scene (used by Allen's idol Ingmar Bergman in Wild Strawberries) the main characters visit Alvy’s childhood. Allen would use this again in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Similarly, the school scenes in the beginning of the film were influenced by another idol of Allen’s, Federico Fellini, to whose Amarcord Annie Hall owes a great debt.[citation needed] The Jewish humor—particularly the character of the oversexed Jewish man—also draws from Philip Roth's novelPortnoy's Complaint.[7]
While Allen uses most of these techniques only one time, he "breaks the fourth wall" several times when Alvy directly addresses the audience. In one, he stops several passers-by to ask questions about love, and in one of the film's last scenes, he makes modest excuses for the fact that a scene from his "first play" (which the audience has just seen) is his wish-fulfillment version of his breakup with Annie. Allen chose to have Alvy break the fourth wall, he explained, "because I felt many of the people in the audience had the same feelings and the same problems. I wanted to talk to them directly and confront them."[2]
Very little background music is heard in the film—an homage to Allen’s idol, Ingmar Bergman. The few instances of music in the film include a boy's choir Christmas melody played while the characters drive through Los Angeles, the Molto allegro from the Jupiter Symphony byMozart heard as Annie and Alvy drive through the countryside, Annie's two performances at the jazz club; Annie's song is also reprised in the film's final scene; and there is a muzak version of the Savoy Brown song "A Hard Way to Go" playing in the Paul Simon character's mansion during a party.

[edit]Awards and honors

Academy Awards record
1. Best ActressDiane Keaton
2. Best DirectorWoody Allen
3. Best PictureCharles H. Joffe
4. Best Original Screenplay, Woody Allen,Marshall Brickman
Golden Globe Awards record
1. Best Actress - Musical/Comedy, Diane Keaton
BAFTA Awards record
1. Best Actress, Diane Keaton
2. Best Direction, Woody Allen
3. Best Editing, Ralph Rosenblum, Wendy Greene Bricmont
4. Best Film
5. Best Screenplay, Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman
1977 Academy Awards (Oscars)
  • Annie Hall won one Golden Globe Award, for Best Actress in Musical or Comedy (Diane Keaton). It was nominated for three more: Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), Best Director (Woody Allen), and Best Actor in Musical or Comedy (Woody Allen).

[edit]Other awards

  • In 1992, this film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
  • Zagat Survey Movie Guide (2002) ranks Annie Hall one of the top ten comedies of all time, one of the top ten movies of the 1970s and as Allen's best film as a director.
  • In 2000, readers of Total Film magazine voted it the forty-second greatest comedy film of all time.
  • The film is number 28 on Bravo's 100 Funniest Movies.

[edit]Considered sequel

Allen says he gets approached "all the time" about making a sequel to Annie Hall,[8] but has repeatedly declined. He admitted in a 1995 interview that for a time he considered it, saying,
I did think once—I'm not going to do it—but I did think once that it would be interesting to see Annie Hall and the guy I played years later. Diane Keaton and I could meet now that we're about twenty years older, and it could be interesting, because we parted, to meet one day and see what our lives have become. But it smacks to me of exploitation.... Sequelismhas become an annoying thing. I don't think Francis Coppola should have done Godfather III because Godfather II was quite great. When they make a sequel, it's just a thirst for more money, so I don't like that idea so much.[9]

[edit]Influence on fashion

The film also had an influence on the fashion world during the late-70s, with many women adopting Keaton's distinctive look, layering oversized, mannish blazers over vests, billowy trousers or long skirts, and boots. Keaton's wardrobe also included a tie by Ralph Lauren. The look was often referred to as the "Annie Hall look". An example of the influence this look has had on the culture can be found in a 1970sDoonesbury comic strip, where Garry Trudeau depicts radio interviewer Mark Slackmeyer asking the fictional Iranian revolutionary leader Dr. Ali Mahdavi if the Ayatollah Khomeini would approve of "The Annie Hall look" for Iranian women. Mahdavi's response: "If worn with a veil, fine."



Allen recalled that Keaton's natural fashion sense (the outfits that Keaton wore in the film were her own clothes) almost did not end up in the film. "She came in," he recalled in 1995, "and the costume lady on Annie Hall said, 'Tell her not to wear that. She can't wear that. It's so crazy.' And I said, 'Leave her. She's a genius. Let's just leave her alone, let her wear what she wants.

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