sábado, fevereiro 19, 2005
phantasmagoria
Fellini Satyricon. Vernacchio, il guitto (Fanfulla)
"In front of a poster for Ingmar Bergman's Face to Face (1975), Alvy blames her bad mood on her monthly period, and they squabble together:
Alvy: Hey, you are in a bad mood. You must be getting your period.
Annie: I'm not getting my period. Jesus, every time anything out of the ordinary happens, you think that I'm getting my period.
Because they are late, Alvy refuses to stay because they've missed two minutes of the opening titles and credits of Bergman's film. She wails to him that they won't miss anything but the titles, and: "they're in Swedish." Even though she sighs, "I'm not in the mood to see a four-hour documentary on Nazis," he drags her across to the Upper West Side, where they stand in another movie line at The New Yorker theatre for Ophul's The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) (a four-hour documentary about Nazism) - a film they have already seen. Alvy explains that he is pent up with obsessive personality characteristics - it is a crisis if he misses even one minute of a film:
I've got to see a picture exactly from the start to the finish, 'cause, 'cause I'm anal.
She zings him when he admits he has a strident, "anal" personality: "That's a polite word for what you are." At first while they make small-talk in the second movie line, Alvy tries to ignore the intellectual cant of a pretentious academic braggard (Russell Horton) standing behind them in the lobby who opines loudly to his date:
We saw the Fellini film last Tuesday. It was not one of his best. It lacks a cohesive structure. You know, you get the feeling that he's not absolutely sure what it is he wants to say. 'Course, I've always felt he was essentially a - a technical film maker. Granted, La Strada was a great film. Great in its use of negative imagery more than anything else. But that simple, cohesive core...Like all that Juliet of the Spirits or Satyricon, I found it incredibly indulgent. You know, he really is. He's one of the most indulgent fulmmakers. He really is...
[Possibly, indulgent director Woody Allen is cautioning the Annie Hall film audience against making rash judgments about the incohesive, complex, and ambiguous structure of his film that they are watching.] Under his breath, Alvy reacts: "I'm gonna have a stroke...He's screaming his opinions in my ear."
Annie is thoroughly depressed about how she missed her all-important therapy session with her psychiatrist because she overslept. Alvy is annoyed with her disguised aggression - and loud revelations, acknowledging the crucial role psychiatry plays in modern love:
Alvy: Do you know what a hostile gesture that is to me?
Annie: I know, because of our sexual problem, right?
Alvy: Everybody on line at The New Yorker has to know our rate of intercourse?
The professor continues to savage others like Samuel Beckett. Alvy is unable to bear any more of the obnoxious, intellectual phony behind them: "He's spitting on my neck." Annie accuses Alvy of ego-centricity when they argue about their sexual problems:
Annie: You know, you're so ego-centric that if I miss my therapy, you can only think of it in terms of how it affects you!...
Alvy: (sighing and turning to Annie after a digression) What do you mean, our sexual problem? I mean, I'm comparatively normal for a guy raised in Brooklyn.
Annie: OK, I'm very sorry. My sexual problem, OK? My sexual problem. Huh? (A man in front of them in line turns back to look at them, and then turns away.)
Alvy: (embarrassed) I never read that. That was, that was Henry James, right? Novel, huh, the sequel to The Turn of the Screw, 'My Sexual Problem'?
In the movie-ticket line, Alvy wishes to one-up and embarrass the pseudo-intellectual movie buff who loudly pontificates, claims to teach a course on TV, Media and Culture at Columbia University, and quotes extensively from influential Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan:
What I wouldn't give for a large sock with horse manure in it. (He steps forward out of line and addresses the camera.)...What do you do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you? It's just maddening.
Even the blowhard speaks to the camera: "Why can't I give my opinion? It's a free country." Alvy triumphantly brings on the real-life Professor McLuhan to tell the man he doesn't know what he is talking about. Media critic McLuhan conveniently emerges from behind a theatre lobby signboard to contradict the theories of the startled, pompous bore who is annoying Alvy (and to satirize himself):
I heard what you were saying. You, you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
[The first choice(s) for a real-life artist/film-maker wasn't McLuhan, but Federico Fellini, and then Luis Bunuel.]
About this obvious, magically-fanciful situation, Alvy demonstrates the film's major theme - he turns to the camera and states that only in art can one re-shape reality and have such complete control over life:
Boy, if life were only like this."
Woody Allen, Annie Hall, 1977.
posted by Luís Miguel Dias sábado, fevereiro 19, 2005
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