Annie Hall · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands alone in front of a blank wall and talks straight to us. The affair is already over, he says; he's just trying to figure out where it went wrong. That is the first thing Annie Hall does, and it quietly cancels the rule every comedy before it had obeyed — that the story moves forward, and that something a character does will fix what's wrong. Alvy Singer never fixes anything. He replays. The whole film is a man sorting through what already happened, and that small reversal is why Gilles Deleuze, who never wrote a word about Woody Allen, turns out to be such good company in the dark.

Start with the thing the film is most famous for getting right: how memory actually behaves. Alvy doesn't remember in order. He remembers by feeling. A remark in the present snaps him back to a Brooklyn classroom, and instead of a tidy flashback he walks into the room as a grown man, standing among the seated children, bickering with his nine-year-old self's teacher. Deleuze, borrowing from Bergson, has a name for this: a sheet of past. Not a dated memory slotted into the timeline — this happened, then we came back — but the past kept whole, as a region you can walk around inside, where the adult and the child breathe the same air. Once you notice it, you see the film is built almost entirely out of these regions, visited in the order grief assigns them.

The fantasies work the same way. Annie turns into the wicked queen from Disney's Snow White in a burst of animation. Alvy, stuck in a cinema line behind a man pontificating about Marshall McLuhan, simply produces McLuhan himself from behind a lobby poster to demolish the bore. There's never a cut that announces now we are imagining. Wish and fact are spliced flush against one another. Deleuze calls the point where you can no longer separate the real image from its mirror or its dream a crystal — and the small, unannounced way Alvy's inner life keeps erupting into the scene a crystal seed. The McLuhan gag is something more precise still, what Deleuze calls a crystalline description: the image conjures an object only the image could supply, and we accept it, because the film has stopped pretending merely to record.

Which raises a question the film is honest about: can we trust any of this? Alvy is the narrator, and Alvy is a professional — a stand-up who turns his life into bits for a living. When the relationship dies he writes a little play about it and gives it the happy ending life withheld, then turns to us and admits what he's done. This is what Deleuze means by the powers of the false: not lying, but the recognition that a story told from inside a life can't be sorted cleanly into true and false, and that its creative force lives exactly there. Alvy is caught in the act of legending himself — fabulation, Deleuze's word for someone making a tale of his own life while living it. The film never settles whether Annie was really like this. It only insists this is how Alvy needs her to have been.

The single most beautiful stroke is on Annie's terrace, during their first nervous conversation. They make brittle small talk about photography while subtitles print what they're actually thinking — he wonders what she looks like naked; she frets that she sounds like a jerk. Two channels, two stories, at once. Deleuze would call this the image becoming something you read rather than simply watch, a split between what the voice says and what the picture knows. The whole comedy of self-consciousness sits in that gap.

None of it would land without Gordon Willis, here shooting Allen for the first time. The long takes, the sustained two-shots, the willingness to let actors wander out of frame or speak from an empty doorway — because the camera refuses to chop the scene into shot-reverse-shot and chase the action, the bodies are left to carry their own awkward real-time duration, the everyday body just being nervous, which Deleuze puts at the center of modern cinema. The stillness is the argument. Alvy has become a watcher — of others, and of his own past. He is the seer, not the doer. He's lost the one power the comic hero always had, to act and win the girl, and can now only look and understand. That is the crisis of the action-image, arriving, of all places, inside a romantic comedy.

Allen invented none of these moves; he was a devoted student. Walking bodily into one's own past is lifted almost intact from Bergman's Wild Strawberries. The artist treating his romantic and creative neuroses as the film's actual subject, braiding memory and fantasy, is the engine of Fellini's 8½. The nerve to rupture a realist surface and stare into a face comes from Bergman's Persona. The conspiratorial turn to the lens has its own comic bloodline — Michael Caine's confessions in Alfie, the address of Tom Jones, the machinery-baring of Hellzapoppin'. What Allen did was fuse the European art film's interiority with the Borscht-Belt one-liner, and find the seam in the edit.

That finding is literally true. As shot, this was a sprawling stream-of-consciousness picture about a man's mind, working title Anhedonia, complete with a murder plot. Allen and editor Ralph Rosenblum discovered the film in the cutting room, pulling the love story out of the wreckage and reassembling it by emotional rather than calendar logic. So the form of Annie Hall was authored the way Alvy authors his memories — after the fact, by feeling, hunting for the shape of a love that didn't last.

Watch it again and watch the seams. The question the film leaves open is the one it can't answer about itself: is Alvy finally understanding Annie, or composing her?