Since its release, Annie Hall has established itself as a key film for Woody Allen's career and the history of romantic comedy more generally. At the 1978 Academy Awards, it won Oscars for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress and is regularly cited as one of the greatest film comedies ever released, credited with influencing directors such as Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Richard Linklater, Greta Gerwig and Desiree Akhavan. This lively collection brings a new ethical and philosophical perspective to bear on Allen's work quite different from previous generations of scholars.
At the same time as exploring the film's continuing influence on contemporary cinema, this book's contributors engage explicitly and implicitly with ongoing debates about Allen's cinematic output following the renewal of accusations against Allen by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow in 2014 and 2018. The book is alive to debates within film studies about the limits of auteur theory and the role of the spectator.
What does it mean to remember Annie Hall today, in light of Woody Allen's tarnished reputation? How do we approach (if we still want to) a genre-defining, hugely influential, erstwhile charming and popular film whose primary author is regarded by many as critically beyond the pale?
These are the core questions that this excellent collection of essays engages with, clear-sightedly and directly, deftly avoiding 'auteur apologism' and glib pleas to separate art and artist - which would be tricky to accommodate with something as autobiographical as Annie Hall anyway. Instead, these thematically and theoretically varied essays by some of the leading scholars in the field, along with an incisive interrogative introduction, permit the reader to re-approach and remember the archetypal 'nervous romance' of the 1970s in new ways, acknowledging that it is not solely a Woody Allen film and that its legacy and influence is complex and manifold. All the while, it addresses one of the major critical dilemmas of our time: what should we 'do' with the work of problematic filmmakers?
