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Woody Allen Show
Essay on Woody Allen films
Match point Trailer
Match point
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Crimes and misdemeanors
Part 2
Woody Allen Announces His Retirement From Filmmaking
September 17, 2022 Jordan Ruimy
Woody Allen has announced his retirement as he works on his 50th and final film in Europe. It was inevitable, but it was more or less confirmed by the legendary writer-director this afternoon in Spain.
The announcement came on Saturday in an interview with LaVanguardia. Allen stated that he had no desire to make any more movies, but that he wanted to write a novel in his final years.
About that final film, set in Paris and shot entirely in French, Allen tells the Spanish outlet that “it will be similar to “Match Point,” exciting, dramatic and also very sinister.” The plan is to shoot it in a couple of weeks.
Since this is his final film, I would presume a major world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival will be in the works.
Allen has received a record-breaking 16 Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay. His major works, for me at least, will always be “Annie Hall,” “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Husbands and Wives,” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”
The next batch of essential Woodys are “Broadway Danny Rose,” “Zelig,” “Radio Days,” “Bullets Over Broadway,” “Midnight in Paris,” “Blue Jasmine,” “Match Point,” “Sleeper,” “Bananas,” and “Manhattan.”
What a legendary career
Part 3
Woody commenting on Midnight in Paris
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December 31, 2017
Letty Aronson, c/o
New York 10001
Dear Mrs. Aronson,
I am looking forward to 2017 and another film from Woody Allen. I have spent the last few years looking at the works of Francis Schaeffer and Woody Allen on my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org . As a result, if you google “WOODY ALLEN SCHAEFFER” you will be brought to my blog.
Have you ever wondered why Woody keeps producing a film every year even though he holds to a nihilistic point of view concerning the total pointlessness of it all?
I think I have figured out that reason he keeps going and it may be the same reason that one of the most popular blog post I have ever done was entitled, “The Characters referenced in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris” (Part 15, Luis Bunuel).” At my blog http://www.thedailyhatch.org I have had over 1 million views and this post has been in my all-time top 5 most popular posts. But for some reason during the last couple of months it has drawn more attention than ever and that caused me to take a closer look at the content of the post to see if I could identify why so many thousands of people have been curious about it. When I went back and examined the blog post (originally posted on 6-23-11), I discovered WHAT KEEPS WOODY ALLEN GOING STRONG IN HIS FILM MAKING.
Here is a portion of that blog post:
surrealism definition. A movement in art and literature that flourished in the early twentieth century.Surrealism aimed at expressing imaginative dreams and visions free from conscious rational control. Salvador Dali was an influential surrealist painter; Jean Cocteau was a master of surrealist film.
Wikipedia says concerning Bunuel:
After this apprenticeship, Buñuel shot and directed a 16-minute short, Un Chien Andalou, with Salvador Dalí. The film, financed by Buñuel’s mother,[42] consists of a series of startling images of a Freudian nature,[43] starting with a woman’s eyeball being sliced open with a razor blade. Un Chien Andalou was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning French surrealist movement of the time[44] and continues to be shown regularly in film societies to this day.[45]
The script was written in six days at Dalí’s home in Cadaqués. In a letter to a friend written in February 1929, Buñuel described the writing process: “We had to look for the plot line. Dalí said to me,‘I dreamed last night of ants swarming around in my hands’, and I said, ‘Good Lord, and I dreamed that I had sliced somebody or other’s eye. There’s the film, let’s go and make it.’”[46]
….When his first film (Un Chien Andalou) was released, Buñuel became the first filmmaker to be officially welcomed into the ranks of the Surrealists by the movement’s leader André Breton, an event recalled by film historian Georges Sadoul: “Breton had convoked the creators to our usual venue [the Café Radio]… one summer’s evening. Dalí had the large eyes, grace, and timidity of a gazelle. To us, Buñuel, big and athletic, his black eyes protruding a little, seemed exactly like he always is in Un Chien Andalou, meticulously honing the razor that will slice the open eye in two.”
The SURREALISTS were the same men who started the “Dada Movement” and Francis Schaeffer noted concerning that movement:
Dada was started in Zurich and came along in modern art. Dada means nothing. The word “Dada” means rocking horse, but it was chosen by chance. The whole concept of Dada is everything means nothing. [In this materialistic mindset Chance and Time have determined the past, and they will determine the future according to Solomon in life UNDER THE SUN (Ecclesiastes 9:11 says this)]… Dada carried to its logical conclusion the notion of all having come about by chance; the result was the final absurdity of everything, including humanity.
(Surrealists: Man Ray, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, André Breton; Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard, Max Ernst and Rene Clevel, 1930.)
Jean Arp (Hans Arp)
Jean Arp is associated with the DADA movement. His collages were of torn pieces of paper dropped and affixed where they would land. His use of chance is intended to create free of human intervention. “Dada,” wrote Arp, “wished to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an UNREASONED ORDER.”
Francis Schaeffer in his book THE GOD WHO IS THERE noted:
“It is often said that Søren Kierkegaard, the Dane (1813-55)… is the father of modern secular thinking and of the new theological thinking…. Why is it that Kierkegaard can so aptly be thought of as the father of both? What proposition did he add to Hegel’s thought that made the difference? Kierkegaard came to the conclusion that you could not arrive at synthesis by reason. Instead, you achieved everything of real importance by a leap of faith. So he separated absolutely the rational and logical from faith……from that time on, if rationalistic man wants to deal with the real things of human life (such as purpose, significance, the validity of love) he must discard rational thought about them and MAKE A GIGANTIC, NON-RATIONAL LEAP OF FAITH. The rationalistic framework had FAILED TO PRODUCE AN ANSWER ON THE BASIS OF REASON, and so all hope of a uniform field of knowledge had to be abandoned.”
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(Francis Schaeffer pictured below)
(Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Salvador Dali visit with Gil Pender in the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS)
(Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dali, circa 1930 pictured below)
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The principle of making A GIGANTIC, NON-RATIONAL LEAP OF FAITH is demonstrated by the Surrealists in a scene in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS when Salvador Dali introduces his friends Luis Bunuel and Man Ray to Gil Pender and then comments to them “Pender is in a perplexing situation.”
Gil Pender tells the SURREALISTS, “It sounds so crazy to say. You guys are going to think I’m drunk, but I have to tell someone. I’m…from a…a different time. Another era.The future. OK? I come…from the 2000th millennium to here.I get in a car, and I slide through time.”
When they accept this then Gil responds, “Yeah, you’re surrealists!But I’m a normal guy.” In other words the SURREALISTS understand Gil’s predicament and realize that they too have attempted to escape from reason in their own lives (sometimes probing their own dreams in an attempt to find meaning). That is the reason Gil suddenly realizes that he is getting no where with them. Luis Bunuel did this often in his movies.
I am presently going through the characters referenced in Woody Allen’s film “Midnight in Paris.” Luis Bunuel is a surrealist film director that is responsible for the film “Belle de Jour” which Francis Schaeffer discusses below.
In the book HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Schaeffer notes:
Especially in the sixties the major philosophic statements which received a wide hearing were made through films. These philosophic movies reached many more people than philosophic writings or even painting and literature. Among these films were THE LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD by Alain Resnais (1961), THE SILENCE by Ingmar Bergman (1967), JULIET OF THE SPIRITS by Federico Fellini (1965), BLOW UP by Michelangelo Antonioni (1966), BELLE DE JOUR by Luis Bunuel (1967), and THE HOUR OF THE WOLF by Ingmar Bergman (1967).
They showed pictorially (and with great force) what it is like if man is a machine and also what it is like if man tries to live in the area of non-reason. In the area of non-reason man is left without categories. He has no way to distinguish between right and wrong, or even between what is objectively true as opposed to illusion or fantasy….One could view these films a hundred times and there still would be no way to be sure what was portrayed as objectively true and what was part of a character’s imagination. if people begin only from themselves and really live in a universe in which there is no personal God to speak, they have no final way to be sure of the difference between reality and fantasy or illusion (pp. 201-203).
Belle de Jour Presentation
Uploaded on Jul 19, 2006 (run time 14:43)
(You will notice in the last part of the 14 minute clip above, it shows how the movie “Belle de Jour” ends. Even though her husband has been shot three times which was the result of the horrible friends she had associated with, he is pictured in her dreams as recovering from his wheel chair and blindness and he gladly kisses her. Francis Schaeffer in his film series shows how this film was appealing to “nonreason” to answer our problems.)
(I got this clip from youtube and below is the paragraph by the author of the youtube clip.)
In a film class my partner and I did a video presentation on the film Belle de Jour and the filmmaker Luis Bunuel. Bunuel was a surrealist, so if the video doesn’t quite makes sense, its not supposed to.
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Catherine Deneuve, “Belle de Jour”, 1967
Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop in their book WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? asserted concerning Woody Allen:
The thinkers in our society have been admitting for a long time that they have no final answers at all.
Take Woody Allen, for example. Most people know his as a comedian, but he has thought through where mankind stands after the “religious answers” have been abandoned. In an article in Esquire (May 1977), he says that man is left with:
… alienation, loneliness [and] emptiness verging on madness…. The fundamental thing behind all motivation and all activity is the constant struggle against annihilation and against death. It’s absolutely stupefying in its terror, and it renders anyone’s accomplishments meaningless. As Camus wrote, it’s not only that he (the individual) dies, or that man (as a whole) dies, but that you struggle to do a work of art that will last and then you realize that the universe itself is not going to exist after a period of time. Until those issues are resolved within each person – religiously or psychologically or existentially – the social and political issues will never be resolved, except in a slapdash way.
Allen sums up his view in his film Annie Hall with these words: “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.”
Many would like to dismiss this sort of statement as coming from one who is merely a pessimist by temperament, one who sees life without the benefit of a sense of humor. Woody Allen does not allow us that luxury. He speaks as a human being who has simply looked life in the face and has the courage to say what he sees. If there is no personal God, nothing beyond what our eyes can see and our hands can touch, then Woody Allen is right: life is both meaningless and terrifying. As the famous artist Paul Gauguin wrote on his last painting shortly before he tried to commit suicide: “Whence come we? What are we? Whither do we go?” The answers are nowhere, nothing, and nowhere.
PEOPLE MIGHT EVEN WONDER WHY WOODY ALLEN KEEPS MAKING FILMS IF HE TRULY HAS A NIHILISTIC OUTLOOK ON LIFE? Woody tells us:
It’s just an accident that we happen to be on earth, enjoying our silly little moments, distracting ourselves as often as possible so we don’t have to really face up to the fact that, you know, we’re just temporary people with a very short time in a universe that will eventually be completely gone. And everything that you value, whether it’s Shakespeare, Beethoven, da Vinci, or whatever, will be gone. The earth will be gone. The sun will be gone. There’ll be nothing. The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction.You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.
LET ME OFFER UP ANOTHER REASON WHY WOODY ALLEN KEEPS PRODUCING MOVIES ABOUT LOVE!!!! God created us so we can’t deny that we are created for a purpose and when a person falls truly in love with another person then they have a hard time maintaining we are only just a product of evolution and our lives have no lasting significance.
Solomon wisely noted in Ecclesiastes 3:11 “God has planted eternity in the heart of men…” (Living Bible). No wonder Bertrand Russell wrote in his autobiography, “It is odd, isn’t it? I feel passionately for this worldand many things and people in it, and yet…what is it all? There must be something more important, one feels, though I don’t believe there is. I am haunted. Some ghosts, for some extra mundane regions, seem always trying to tell me something that I am to repeat to the world, but I cannot understand that message.”
Mark Twain admitted:
It is the strangest thing, that the world is not full of books that scoff at the pitiful world, and the useless universe and the vile and contemptible race–books that laugh at the whole paltry scheme and deride it…Why don’t I write such a book? Because I have a family. There is no other reason.
– Notebook #29, 10 November 1895
The Clemens family from left to right: Clara, Livy, Jean, Sam, and Susy. Photo courtesy of the The Mark Twain House
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Big time director Woody Allen and wife Soon-Yi Previn along with daughters Bechet and Manzie Tio were at the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Beverly Hills, CA on June 15th, 2012
Francis Schaeffer noted in his book HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT:
So just as all men love even if they say love does not exist, and all men have moral motions even though they say moral motions do not exit, so all men act as though they there is a correlation between the external and the internal world, even if they have no basis for that correlation…Let me draw the parallel again. Modern men say there is no love, there is only sex, but they fall in love. Men say there are no moral motions, everything is behavioristic, but they all have moral motions. Even in the more profound area of epistemology, no matter what a man says he believes, actually–every moment of his life–he is acting as though Christianity were true, and it is only the Christian system that tells him why he can, must, and does act the way he does (Chapter 4, HE IS THERE AND HE IS NOT SILENT ).
WOODY ALLEN LOVES HIS FAMILY AND DEEP DOWN HE KNOWS THAT HE WAS PUT ON THIS EARTH FOR A PURPOSE!!!! The surrealists knew it too and they could not accept that life had no meaning and that is why they kept looking for meaning. THAT IS WHY MY BLOG POST HAS BEEN SO POPULAR!!! PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR SOME SORT OF MEANING WHEREVER THEY CAN FIND IT!!!
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The answer to find meaning in life is found in putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The Bible is true from cover to cover and can be trusted. Below is some of the evidence that shows the Bible is a reliable historical document that we can trust. You can google any of these subjects and see that we don’t have to be adrift but God has spoken to us!!!
1. The Babylonian Chronicle, of Nebuchadnezzars Siege of Jerusalem, 2. Hezekiah’s Siloam Tunnel Inscription. 3. Taylor Prism (Sennacherib Hexagonal Prism), 4. Biblical Cities Attested Archaeologically. 5. The Discovery of the Hittites, 6.Shishak Smiting His Captives, 7. Moabite Stone, 8. Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III, 9A Verification of places in Gospel of John and Book of Acts., 9B Discovery of Ebla Tablets. 10. Cyrus Cylinder, 11. Puru “The lot of Yahali” 9th Century B.C.E., 12. The Uzziah Tablet Inscription, 13. The Pilate Inscription, 14. Caiaphas Ossuary, 14 B Pontius Pilate Part 2, 14c. Three greatest American Archaeologists moved to accept Bible’s accuracy through archaeology.,
Sincerely,
Everette Hatcher, cell ph 501-920-5733, P.O. Box 23416, Little Rock, AR 72221, everettehatcher@gmail.com, http://www.thedailyhatch.org
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Midnight in Paris trailer
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The mass media turned Picasso into a celebrity, and the public deprived him of privacy and wanted to know his every step, but his later art was given very little attention and was regarded as no more than the hobby of an aging genius who could do nothing but talk about himself in his pictures. Picasso’s late works are an expression of his final refusal to fit into categories. He did whatever he wanted in art and did not arouse a word of criticism.
With his adaptation of “Las Meninas” by Velászquez and his experiments with Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, was Picasso still trying to discover something new, or was he just laughing at the public, its stupidity and its inability to see the obvious.
A number of elements had become characteristic in his art of this period: Picasso’s use of simplified imagery, the way he let the unpainted canvas shine through, his emphatic use of lines, and the vagueness of the subject. In 1956, the artist would comment, referring to some schoolchildren: “When I was as old as these children, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”
In the last years of his life, painting became an obsession with Picasso, and he would date each picture with absolute precision, thus creating a vast amount of similar paintings — as if attempting to crystallize individual moments of time, but knowing that, in the end, everything would be in vain.
The movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS offers many of the same themes we see in Ecclesiastes. The second post looked at the question: WAS THERE EVER A GOLDEN AGE AND DID THE MOST TALENTED UNIVERSAL MEN OF THAT TIME FIND TRUE SATISFACTION DURING IT?
In the third post in this series we discover in Ecclesiastes that man UNDER THE SUN finds himself caught in the never ending cycle of birth and death. The SURREALISTS make a leap into the area of nonreason in order to get out of this cycle and that is why the scene in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and Luis Bunuel works so well!!!! These surrealists look to the area of their dreams to find a meaning for their lives and their break with reality is only because they know that they can’t find a rational meaning in life without God in the picture.
The fourth post looks at the solution of WINE, WOMEN AND SONG and the fifth and sixth posts look at the solution T.S.Eliotfound in the Christian Faith and how he left his fragmented message of pessimism behind. In the seventh post the SURREALISTS say that time and chance is all we have but how can that explain love or art and the hunger for God? The eighth post looks at the subject of DEATH both in Ecclesiastes and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. In the ninth post we look at the nihilistic worldview of Woody Allen and why he keeps putting suicides into his films.
In the tenth post I show how Woody Allen pokes fun at the brilliant thinkers of this world and how King Solomon did the same thing 3000 years ago. In the eleventh post I point out how many of Woody Allen’s liberal political views come a lack of understanding of the sinful nature of man and where it originated. In the twelfth post I look at the mannishness of man and vacuum in his heart that can only be satisfied by a relationship with God.
In the thirteenth post we look at the life of Ernest Hemingway as pictured in MIDNIGHT AND PARIS and relate it to the change of outlook he had on life as the years passed. In the fourteenth post we look at Hemingway’s idea of Paris being a movable feast. The fifteenth and sixteenth posts both compare Hemingway’s statement, “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know…” with Ecclesiastes 2:18 “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.” The seventeenth post looks at these words Woody Allen put into Hemingway’s mouth, “We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all.”
In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Hemingway and Gil Pender talk about their literary idol Mark Twain and the eighteenth post is summed up nicely by Kris Hemphill‘swords, “Both Twain and [King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes] voice questions our souls long to have answered: Where does one find enduring meaning, life purpose, and sustainable joy, and why do so few seem to find it? The nineteenth post looks at the tension felt both in the life of Gil Pender (written by Woody Allen) in the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS and in Mark Twain’s life and that is when an atheist says he wants to scoff at the idea THAT WE WERE PUT HERE FOR A PURPOSE but he must stay face the reality of Ecclesiastes 3:11 that says “God has planted eternity in the heart of men…” and THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING! Therefore, the secular view that there is no such thing as love or purpose looks implausible. The twentieth post examines how Mark Twain discovered just like King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes that there is no explanation for the suffering and injustice that occurs in life UNDER THE SUN. Solomon actually brought God back into the picture in the last chapter and he looked ABOVE THE SUN for the books to be balanced and for the tears to be wiped away.
The twenty-first post looks at the words of King Solomon, Woody Allen and Mark Twain that without God in the picture our lives UNDER THE SUN will accomplish nothing that lasts. Thetwenty-second post looks at King Solomon’s experiment 3000 years that proved that luxuries can’t bring satisfaction to one’s life but we have seen this proven over and over through the ages. Mark Twain lampooned the rich in his book “The Gilded Age” and he discussed get rich quick fever, but Sam Clemens loved money and the comfort and luxuries it could buy. Likewise Scott Fitzgerald was very successful in the 1920’s after his publication of THE GREAT GATSBY and lived a lavish lifestyle until his death in 1940 as a result of alcoholism.
In the twenty-third post we look at Mark Twain’s statement that people should either commit suicide or stay drunk if they are “demonstrably wise” and want to “keep their reasoning faculties.” We actually see this play out in the film MIDNIGHT IN PARIS with the character Zelda Fitzgerald. In the twenty-fourth, twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth posts I look at Mark Twain and the issue of racism. In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS we see the difference between the attitudes concerning race in 1925 Paris and the rest of the world.
The twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth posts are summing up Mark Twain. In the 29th post we ask did MIDNIGHT IN PARIS accurately portray Hemingway’s personality and outlook on life? and in the 30th post the life and views of Hemingway are summed up.
In the 31st post we will observe that just like Solomon Picasso slept with many women. Solomon actually slept with over 1000 women ( Eccl 2:8, I Kings 11:3), and both men ended their lives bitter against all women and in the 32nd post we look at what happened to these former lovers of Picasso. In the 33rd post we see that Picasso deliberately painted his secular worldview of fragmentation on his canvas but he could not live with the loss of humanness and he reverted back at crucial points and painted those he loved with all his genius and with all their humanness!!! In the 34th post we notice that both Solomon in Ecclesiastes and Picasso in his painting had an obsession with the issue of their impending death!!!
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Related posts:
“Woody Wednesday” ECCLESIASTES AND WOODY ALLEN’S FILMS: SOLOMON “WOULD GOT ALONG WELL WITH WOODY!” (Part 7 MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Part F, SURREALISTS AND THE IDEA OF ABSURDITY AND CHANCE)
Woody Allen believes that we live in a cold, violent and meaningless universe and it seems that his main character (Gil Pender, played by Owen Wilson) in the movie MIDNIGHT IN PARIS shares that view. Pender’s meeting with the Surrealists is by far the best scene in the movie because they are ones who can […]
“Woody Wednesday” ECCLESIASTES AND WOODY ALLEN’S FILMS: SOLOMON “WOULD GOT ALONG WELL WITH WOODY!” (Part 6 MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Part E, A FURTHER LOOK AT T.S. Eliot’s DESPAIR AND THEN HIS SOLUTION)
In the last post I pointed out how King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN and that Bertrand Russell, and T.S. Eliot and other modern writers had agreed with Solomon’s view. However, T.S. Eliot had found a solution to this problem and put his faith in […]
“Woody Wednesday” ECCLESIASTES AND WOODY ALLEN’S FILMS: SOLOMON “WOULD GOT ALONG WELL WITH WOODY!” (Part 5 MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Part D, A LOOK AT T.S. Eliot’s DESPAIR AND THEN HIS SOLUTION)
In MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Gil Pender ponders the advice he gets from his literary heroes from the 1920’s. King Solomon in Ecclesiastes painted a dismal situation for modern man in life UNDER THE SUN and many modern artists, poets, and philosophers have agreed. In the 1920’s T.S.Eliot and his house guest Bertrand Russell were two of […]
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