20 years of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall

-Devdutt Trivedi

The films of Woody Allen use the Hollywood formula of ‘more images, less sounds’
and organic editing to refer to nihilistic themes, closer to the European Art House,
through humour. His films use post-modern references to genre like the
Bergmanesque chamber piece (Interiors), the mockumentary (Zelig) and the travel
film (Vicky Cristina Barcelona). His most significant film is Annie Hall that engages
the split between documentary and fiction through a kind of documentary recording
of performativity. Through this Allen hopes to achieve a subconscious exploration
akin to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the cinematographic aura that the film
provokes.

Using tools like the narrative voice that causes ruptures in the narrative, split screen
and subtitles, Allen establishes a schizophrenic relationship between his own persona
and the protagonist Alvie. More importantly, Allen is also the director who controls
Alvie through the scenario. In other words, Alvie’s character occupies the interior
whereas Allen controls the character from the outside. Unlike Hitchcock who
psychoanalyses his characters, Allen emphasizes the cinematographic affect through
characters that display uncertainty and neurosis to almost ‘voice’ the unconscious
through humorous lines.

The key theme in the film is desire, Alvie’s desire for Annie on the one hand, and the
film’s desire on the other, which attempts to resolve its own unconscious. Allen
achieves this through a manipulation of time and space as the narrative goes
backwards and forward each time reinforcing Allen’s psychoanalytic (male) gaze that
makes Annie his object petit a or obscure object of desire. Allen places desire within a
historical context of anti-semitism, to restore the place of the Jews in the world order,
that is resolved through the tool that is the joke. Whereas the characters search for
their own subconscious, the film attempts to resolve this subconscious through being
free from the burden of History i.e. when related to the Jewish question.

Like Jean-Luc Godard, Allen attempts to create a cinematographic form in which the
characters stutter to make film itself stutter in order to open it up to the unknown.
Words are divorced from their meaning and the inner self appears ghost like, and the
breaking of the fourth wall occurs so that the characters have a psychological
separation from their own situation. In this way, the film addresses the chaos of
experience as opposed to the ordered nature of art, which as represented in the artifice
of the play at the end, always seems to have a happy ending.

Allen is precisely interested in the ‘reality’ beneath these appearances so that they are
all intimately self-conscious. This gap between what the world actual is and its
representation through the idea is filled in with comedy, resulting in a realism that is
anti-mimetic. This documentary realism differentiates between the nature of a
happening and a narrative through which the gaze is involved so that the director
reminds the audience that in cinema, we see first and then understand. Allen’s film
can be easily read, with its gendered and anti-semitic discourse, as an example of film
being used to serve ideologies (as in Barthes’ apparatus theory). At the same time
Allen, rather self-contradictorily, points out to the pretentiousness of academics in the
sequence with Marshall McLuhan. In this sequence, the fourth wall is broken to
present a construct in which the narrative discourse can no longer hold its
(academically constructed) events.

Allen through this link between documentary and fiction is ultimately linking the
conscious with the subconscious through the materiality of bodies. He wants to point
out that the actor is part of the image, and a kind of disappearance, as in the bed scene
in which we see Annie’s ghost, is only possible in the cinema. Allen is referring to a
non-mimetic form in which Alvie and Allen do not resemble one another and the film
‘becomes-other’ and keeps transforming its nature according to the ‘new’ relationship
between the reality and the narrative.

The use of these cinematographic devices has extremely specific uses. For example,
the subtitles refer to text taking over the subconscious and Deleuzean ‘utterability’
that has its own language. For Allen, this language is that of stuttering to introduce a
sense of neurotic repetition in the image. This creates a schizophrenia between the
seen and the heard, the language spoken by everyone and the stammering which has
its own logic, represented in the schizophrenia of the split screen. These devices are
supported by a commentary on the images that destroy the potentiality of the images
through the utterance as if replacing the image with the voice so that representation
takes over presentation.

The film is a becoming in itself, but a pathological one, characterised by dissonant

split-screens, voice overs, subtitles and abrupt camera tracks (as in the very first
scene). This creates a rupture in the forwarding of narrative so that unspeakable can
enter into the neurotic logic of the characters. In other words, there is a relationship
between what lies in between the characters i.e. in the interstices of the narrative and
what lies outside the documentary happening in the space of the narrative. These
elements are represented in the character of Alvie, who like Orson Welles in Citizen
Kane, is Allen becoming something other than himself.

Whereas in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles is always on the outside of the action, Allen is
at the center of the narrative privileging a regime of signs that culminate in a climax.
Annie is his ‘Rosebud’ (the unknown element in Welles’ Citizen Kane), which is
transformed into artifice (the play at the end) that has a resolved ending. In other
words, theatre is that realm of consciousness where the randomness of manifest
reality resolves itself to produce a continuous narrative of perspective and climax.

In this way, Annie Hall transforms the language of narrativity into a cinema of
information where specific cinematic devices are used to open up the text to
multiplicity that resolve the subconscious, as symbolised through chaotic, realistic
‘happenings’, through the realm of artifice, thus transforming an open text into a
closed one that eventually conforms to Hollywood’s dictum of resolution and closure.