Overview

For 30 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 more sceptical attitude towards art. Merging criticism with biography, this work uses Allen's ambivalent views of the artistic enterprise as the key to understanding his entire career. The author 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. An underlying tension between reality and image is identified, demonstrating how the resolution of this conflict in each movie is revisited, critiqued, and reconfigured in the next.

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9780813190419

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Reviews

Bailey's investigation of Allen's debate over the redemptive powers of art addresses crucial questions about American popular culture and entertainment. An important contribution to American film studies. - American Studies; Bailey's serious study will please the serious student of film and of 20th-century artistic expression. - Virginia Quarterly Review; Fans and students of Allen's films will gain new insights into both the most popular as well as some of Allen's neglected works. - Sam B. Girgus

Bailey's investigation of Allen's debate over the redemptive powers of art addresses crucial questions about American popular culture and entertainment. An important contribution to American film studies. - American Studies; Bailey's serious study will please the serious student of film and of 20th-century artistic expression. - Virginia Quarterly Review; Fans and students of Allen's films will gain new insights into both the most popular as well as some of Allen's neglected works. - Sam B. Girgus

Author Information

Peter J. Bailey, professor of English at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, is the author of Reading Stanley Elkin.

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