As Allen’s character would say in one of Allen’s
movies: let’s start from the beginning. And the beginning
is that Allen, Woody, was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn,
New York, as Allan Stewart Konigsberg. This sentence resumes the
three elements that were to shape his life and career as one of
the greatest filmmakers in the 20th (and 21st) Century. New York,
the city of his dreams, his nightmares, his loves, his obsessions;
the family, a predominant topic at some stage in his cinema; and
being Jewish, an unquestionable cultural fact which has conditioned
his whole way of thinking, his humour and his film writing.
Allan, already known as Woody by his friends, was 17 when he
started writing jokes on an old typewriter. He could never have
imagined that shortly afterwards the jokes were going to become
his way of life. But that’s enough of prehistory, let’s
look at the movies, first of all making a stop in the theatre
where his monologues had audiences splitting their sides with
laughter, giving us an insight to what was going to be his future:
“I think I’ll take a look at some of the most important
events of my private life and put them in perspective”.
That’s what he’s been doing since he made his first
screen appearance in 1965. Four years later he decided to make
a change, veering towards noir comedy with Take the Money and
Run. In the early 70s, Allen spent his time learning to direct
and make folk laugh with his mad stories (Bananas...). His meeting
with Diane Keaton directed him towards another kind of more
mature cinema, with a more subtle sense of humour. Somewhere
between Annie Hall and Manhattan, Allen slotted himself first
person into his stories, hence making some of the most memorable
titles on his filmography. The appearance in his life of Mia
Farrow led him to make a kind of cinema in which the urban,
Jewish, neurotic intellectual collided with a more conservative,
middle-class world represented by the many families filling
their ten years of coexistence, and during which the odd more
heterodox movie nevertheless raised its head, like Zelig, Another
Woman and Shadows and Fog.
In the last twelve years Allen has redirected his cinema, and
with it his character, towards far more varied screenplays,
almost always set in New York: Manhattan Murder Mystery, Bullets
Over Broadway or Small Time Crooks, but widening the perspective
of which he talked in his monologue towards other cities (Paris
or Venice), other realities and other characters. Now, after
almost 40 years of career in addition to over thirty movies,
having become a reference for various generations of moviegoers,
Allen’s character could say in one of Allen’s movies
on receiving the well-deserved San Sebastian Festival’s
Donostia Award, that: “Writing and directing movies isn’t
a job, but a way of enjoying myself”. Him making them,
the audience watching them.
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