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Woody’s Spanish ‘Double’: Vocal Performance, Ventriloquism, and the Sound of Dubbing

Tom Whittaker

in Locating the Voice in Film: Critical Approaches and Global Practices

This chapter addresses Woody Allen’s approach to vocal performance as a means of providing a broader meditation on the ventriloquism of the dubbed voice in film by examining the relationship between ... More

This chapter addresses Woody Allen’s approach to vocal performance as a means of providing a broader meditation on the ventriloquism of the dubbed voice in film by examining the relationship between Allen and his regular Spanish dubbing actor, Joan Pera, in order to explore the wider location of the voice in Spanish dubbing. Dubbing has formed an integral part of Spanish film practices. Yet the discussion of dubbing also provides the opportunity to reflect more widely on the fundamentally split nature of all voices, whether technologized or not. In using Allen’s ‘Spanish double’, the chapter considers two areas of dubbing that have received little academic attention: the vocal performance of the dubbed voice, and its place within the soundtrack of the film. Also addressed are the challenges and contradictions that surround the dubbing of nonverbal sounds, such as the stutters and stammers for which Woody Allen is well known.Less

The Director’s Body

Linda Haverty Rugg

in Self-Projection: The Director's Image in Art Cinema

Analysis of the appearance of cinematic authors within their own fictional narratives and how this relates to self-projection. Theories of embodied spectatorship related to a discussion of embodied ... More

Analysis of the appearance of cinematic authors within their own fictional narratives and how this relates to self-projection. Theories of embodied spectatorship related to a discussion of embodied authorship. Particular focus on Woody Allen and self-caricature, François Truffaut’s roles, Ingmar Bergman’s voice, Pedro Almodóvar’s interest in gendered embodiment.Less

Disgusting Happiness

Fred Feldman

in What Is This Thing Called Happiness?

An ancient objection to eudaimonism is based on the idea of “disgusting happiness”. Steven Cahn developed an interesting version of this objection based on a fictional character—Judah Rosenthal, from ... More

An ancient objection to eudaimonism is based on the idea of “disgusting happiness”. Steven Cahn developed an interesting version of this objection based on a fictional character—Judah Rosenthal, from the Woody Allen film Crimes and Misdemeanors. Judah passes all popular tests for happiness but is utterly morally corrupt. His case casts doubt on the naive identification of happiness with welfare. It's not clear that the case is decisive. Nevertheless, a form of eudaimonism that is intended to circumvent this problem can be developed. According to this novel form of the theory, the welfare value of each episode of happiness must be adjusted so as to reflect the extent to which the object of that happiness deserves to be enjoyed. It is left to the interested reader to determine whether the modification is really needed.Less

Morality and Unhappiness

Steven M. Cahn and Christine Vitrano

in Happiness and Goodness: Philosophical Reflections on Living Well

This chapter examines the connection between morality and unhappiness. It considers circumstances in which immoral behavior provides a greater chance to avoid disaster than does acting morally, ... More

This chapter examines the connection between morality and unhappiness. It considers circumstances in which immoral behavior provides a greater chance to avoid disaster than does acting morally, citing an example inspired by the plot of Woody Allen's movie Crimes and Misdemeanors. Given the ever-present possibilities of accident, illness, and death, everyone's happiness is fragile. Yet we can also ask whether or not the happiness of those who act immorally is more fragile than the happiness of those who act morally. On average such is the case, but averages do not necessarily apply in specific cases. For instance, the average man is taller than the average woman, but some women are taller than most men.Less

The Constitution of the Real: Documentary, Mockumentary and the Status of the Image

Ryan Bishop

in Comedy and Cultural Critique in American Film

Cinema’s apparent veri similitude — its ability to document that which appears before the lens — provided the source for early non-fiction film experimentation and opened the door for propaganda and ... More

Cinema’s apparent veri similitude — its ability to document that which appears before the lens — provided the source for early non-fiction film experimentation and opened the door for propaganda and misinformation. The work of a clutch of theorists and film-makers addressd in this chapter questions the changing status of the image, cinema’s self-reflexive engagement with this status, and the fomenting and/or quelling cultural criticism. This inquiry explores the aesthetics of the documentary as a genre in the creation of that oxymoronic phenomenon of media called ‘unmediated representation’. Along with the now-standard aesthetic qualities of the genre, documentary gains its unique filmic status by partaking of the historical authority of the newsreel and its presentational format, a kind of visual store of collected moving image memory and historical events that is amplified exponentially with the coming of television, and later the internet and online streaming, as well as platform-to-platform media sharing.Less

Young Lions and Historical Fictions 1990–2000

Kevin Whitehead

in Play the Way You Feel: The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film

The young generation of musicians such as Wynton and Branford Marsalis who shook up jazz in the 1980s arrives on screen in the following decade. Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues and the cable-TV movie ... More

The young generation of musicians such as Wynton and Branford Marsalis who shook up jazz in the 1980s arrives on screen in the following decade. Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues and the cable-TV movie Lush Life fictionalize successful musicians of the era. Underage players also show up, as in 1940s movies: a teenage Toronto trumpeter gets advice from good and bad mentors in one, and a young pianist grapples with Tourette’s syndrome in another. In the 1990s, we see an outbreak of historical tales with unreliable narrators: a sometimes fanciful biopic of early jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and Woody Allen’s extended tall tale Sweet and Lowdown, one of two 1990s films with a guitarist beholden to Django Reinhardt. In several particulars, Robert Altman’s Kansas City parallels his earlier film named for a musicians’ hub, Nashville, but in Kansas City, jazz doesn’t invade the main story.Less

Without a You, No I: Cinematic Self-Projection

Linda Haverty Rugg

in Self-Projection: The Director's Image in Art Cinema

A look at the historical and theoretical underpinnings of art cinema, examining how viewers are conditioned to recognize an author’s presence in fictional cinematic narrative. Discussion of ... More

A look at the historical and theoretical underpinnings of art cinema, examining how viewers are conditioned to recognize an author’s presence in fictional cinematic narrative. Discussion of autobiographical impulses in fictional films by the directors of this study, introduction of the term “self-projection.” Brief discussion of cinematic self-projection and gender.Less

Week Ten

Jonathan Boyarin

in Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: A Summer on the Lower East Side

The tryout visit of Rabbi Josh Yuter is described in this chapter, especially the dinner hosted by the author and his wife Elissa Sampson. There are more reflections about the relation between messy ... More

The tryout visit of Rabbi Josh Yuter is described in this chapter, especially the dinner hosted by the author and his wife Elissa Sampson. There are more reflections about the relation between messy experience and organized ethnography, emphasized through a non-allegorical discussion of garbage.Less

Self-Projection and the Cinematic Apparatus

Linda Haverty Rugg

in Self-Projection: The Director's Image in Art Cinema

Here the appearance of various attributes of the cinematic apparatus (projector, screen, photographic film frames) are linked to various parts of the filmmaker’s body and sensory apparatus, making ... More

Here the appearance of various attributes of the cinematic apparatus (projector, screen, photographic film frames) are linked to various parts of the filmmaker’s body and sensory apparatus, making the point, as early filmmakers do, that cinema creates a new kind of body (partly organic, partly technological) and thus a new way to conceive selfhood.Less

Toss Up: Trivial Pursuit?

Mike Miley

in Truth and Consequences: Game Shows in Fiction and Film

This chapter discusses how game shows came to have a pitiful scholarly reputation after the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. The chapter also discusses how an intermedial study of how game shows are ... More

This chapter discusses how game shows came to have a pitiful scholarly reputation after the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s. The chapter also discusses how an intermedial study of how game shows are used in fiction and film can illuminate the ways that game shows express and speak to American culture. The chapter then provides an analysis of how Woody Allen’s 1987 film Radio Days uses the game show intermedially as a metaphor for memory in an age of impermanence, encouraging viewers to recall every bit of trivia in order to stave off irrelevance.Less

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011)

Kathleen Riley

in Imagining Ithaca: Nostos and Nostalgia Since the Great War

This chapter explores the question, posed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, ‘How can one be homesick for a home that one never had?’ Its focus is Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, ... More

This chapter explores the question, posed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, ‘How can one be homesick for a home that one never had?’ Its focus is Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, the director’s most overt and sustained meditation on nostalgia, and the most wooing. The film concerns a twenty-first-century Hollywood screenwriter, Gil Pender, who stumbles effortlessly through the space-time continuum to find himself (in both senses) among Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation, a world he has always believed to be his spiritual home. Through Gil’s time-travelling odyssey, Allen probes the allure and the perils of nostalgia; he shows how nostalgia relies on impossibility or absence to feed it, to lend it piquancy and artistic efficacy. The chapter also examines the Lost Generation’s propulsive nostalgia which was spawned by a tremendous sense of rootlessness and flux, and why the Odyssey was a guiding text for expatriates like Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.Less

Moral Crusades, Child Protection, Celebrities, and the Duty to Believe

Frank Furedi

in Wrongful Allegations of Sexual and Child Abuse

The aim of this chapter is to explore why the informal/private sphere of intergenerational relations has become the focus of incessant moral crusades. It discusses the cultural narrative of child ... More

The aim of this chapter is to explore why the informal/private sphere of intergenerational relations has become the focus of incessant moral crusades. It discusses the cultural narrative of child protection and the rhetoric of claims-making about a new species of threats facing children. The nature of moral crusades is considered with reference to medieval witch hunts and, in post-Savile Britain, to victim advocacy with its use of moralised language and the rhetoric of big numbers. It is argued that the duty to believe has become a master-narrative through which claims of victimisation are interpreted, and which has turned allegations of sexual abuse into a constant focus of public anxiety. Operation Yewtree, in response to the Savile Scandal, is used as an exemplar of these broader cultural trends.Less

The Evil Demon of Images

Steve Redhead

in The Jean Baudrillard Reader

This chapter is an extract from Baudrillard’s The Evil Demon of Images, with an editorial overview

Actor, Avatar

Linda Haverty Rugg

in Self-Projection: The Director's Image in Art Cinema

The director’s relationship to his actors, and how that collaboration works within the framework of self-projection. Attention is paid to personal relationships between actors and directors ... More

The director’s relationship to his actors, and how that collaboration works within the framework of self-projection. Attention is paid to personal relationships between actors and directors (familial, sexual, hostile), with a special focus on the striking frequency with which art cinema authors employ their mothers as actors in their films. This section works toward a new theory of film acting.Less

Bursting into Song in the Hollywood Musical

Todd Berliner

in Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema

Chapter 11 examines the aesthetic value of novelty in a genre’s evolution by tracing the history of the convention that characters in Hollywood musicals spontaneously burst into song without ... More

Chapter 11 examines the aesthetic value of novelty in a genre’s evolution by tracing the history of the convention that characters in Hollywood musicals spontaneously burst into song without realistic motivation. The convention emerged in 1929 and largely vanished by the end of the 1950s. The chapter studies how studio-era filmmakers developed novel conventions that exploited the aesthetic possibilities of song in cinema. The eventual loss of the convention created new constraints on the uses of song, but it also enabled new aesthetic possibilities. Post-studio-era filmmakers transformed the convention, exposed it, and reclaimed it in ways that added novelty to spectators’ aesthetic experience.Less

The Director Plays Director

Linda Haverty Rugg

in Self-Projection: The Director's Image in Art Cinema

Examination of directorial self-representation in two related genres: documentaries on the making of films and narrative films about directing, in which the director plays a fictional film director. ... More

Examination of directorial self-representation in two related genres: documentaries on the making of films and narrative films about directing, in which the director plays a fictional film director. Discussion of how these practices figure into the larger notion of self-projection, with the director performing self-consciously as author or artist.Less

Epilogue: Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s Films, and the History of Cinema

Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams

in Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film

The epilogue considers how Eyes Wide Shut fits within modernist aesthetics, the European art film genre, and how it incorporates film history into its form and content. The film is not only a ... More

The epilogue considers how Eyes Wide Shut fits within modernist aesthetics, the European art film genre, and how it incorporates film history into its form and content. The film is not only a summation of Kubrick’s own work, but of his thinking about film in general. Full of allusions to other filmmakers, acknowledging their influence, giving a nod to his colleagues and friends. Kubrick has been called the last of the high modernists and he proves this through his concentration on the formal elements of his art as well as its allusive nature. Eyes Wide Shut is not an isolated phenomenon. No film is. Kubrick absorbed film like a sponge; he knew its history and he had his favorites.Less

The Eye/I of the Auteur

Linda Haverty Rugg

in Self-Projection: The Director's Image in Art Cinema

A brief conclusion that goes back over the major points of the study’s discussions and thinks about the implications of digital filmmaking. In the end, the imagined relationship between the spectator ... More

A brief conclusion that goes back over the major points of the study’s discussions and thinks about the implications of digital filmmaking. In the end, the imagined relationship between the spectator and the director is brought to the fore as the most significant moment in self-projection.Less