313 catch up-- Annie Hall

Forgive me if this is fragmented and not completely ‘there’ in a sense. I am playing blog catch up for the past few weeks, and I am using muscle memory at this point. For this week, we were to read Barker’s piece on Post-Modernism. The lecture for this week was all over the place with connections. I love that we make so many different connections in class, I know some people find this frustrating, but I think the more ways we can connect things then the more people will understand in the end. So we got a hand out on postmodernism vs. modernism, and we were asked to see what Annie Hall was – Postmodern, or modern? We looked at the master/slave relationship, and different avenues you can see it in. IE man/woman, race, ect. This was a normative thing throughout society, and this can still be seen in today’s world. We also looked at World War I as being a “modern war” due to the use of different technologies, and destruction and massive death. We examined Pg. 187, the “Cultural Politics of Modernism”, examining the subjective world of angst, form lacking context, as well as realism vs. modernism.

So anyways, back to Annie Hall. This film, in my opinion, is a postmodernist film. It is very fragmented in the way the movie travels through time, as well as the film is suggestive. This movie was representative of the “radical romantic comedy” of the postmodern era. The main character, Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) was constantly facing the camera, breaking the fourth wall essentially. He turned himself into a cartoon, screen splitting, etc. There are many different avenues Allen takes when making this film, and since it is so fragmented with so many different avenues, it makes it completely postmodern. My personal favorite was the subtitles between Alvy and Annie, cutting through their conversation to show what they were really feeling inside.

 This film shows divorce now, and how it works. This was not too common before hand, but now the film shows Alvy’s failed marriages, and examines why they did not work out in the first place. Although I only saw what was shown in class, the film seemed to leave the relationship between Alvy and Annie unresolved, so maybe there was only one divorce. Either way, it really examines failed marriages and why they do not work out in the first place. Pretty cool film, I think I might check it out in my free time, because I actually enjoyed it in class.