Remembering Annie Hall

by Jonathan Ellis (Editor), Ana María Sánchez-Arce (Editor)

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.

272 pages, Hardcover

Published September 21, 2023

Reviews

[Mynt Marsellus · Rating 2 out of 5]

An absolutely torturous read. Starting from "This is a book about Annie Hall, not Woody Allen." the book shows the serious limits of this kind of foreclosure and disavowal of authorship study. When your contributors repeatedly refer to scenes dripping with rape culture without mentioning the misogyny, it shows that your disavowal has compromised your reading skills. There are some great contributions here though. Sarah Kennedy's "The Mechanical Bride", Ana Maria Sanchez-Arce's "The Spanish Annie Hall" and Jonathan Ellis's "Don't look back" all really get into the weeds of the problems this collection otherwise fails to explore. But when you have a writer say that women's films struggle to "be seen or understood on their own terms" because a film is being compared to Annie Hall, that film can't also be called "the gay Annie Hall" by it's writer-director-star. The wider argument that contributor is making is obviously important, but the piece needed serious editing so as to not say something so rhetorically problematic and questionable. And that really is the problem here, not enough peer review, not enough editing to take pieces with interesting premises into being actually interesting contributions to an important conversation.