A central tension in Woody Allen’s film career exists between his devotion to releasing a movie every year and his utter skepticism about the effectuality of art. Allen has repeatedly dismissed the Modernist notion that art somehow “saves” the artist by providing works that live on after the artist’s death; in Stardust Memories, he has the assassinated Sandy Bates return from the dead to insist that he would give up the Oscar posthumously presented to him for one more second of life. If it is true that, as Allen often cites Oscar Wilde as maintaining, “art is useless,” then why should he spend ... More

A central tension in Woody Allen’s film career exists between his devotion to releasing a movie every year and his utter skepticism about the effectuality of art. Allen has repeatedly dismissed the Modernist notion that art somehow “saves” the artist by providing works that live on after the artist’s death; in Stardust Memories, he has the assassinated Sandy Bates return from the dead to insist that he would give up the Oscar posthumously presented to him for one more second of life. If it is true that, as Allen often cites Oscar Wilde as maintaining, “art is useless,” then why should he spend every year of his dwindling existence writing, producing, and shooting films? The contested element of his oeuvre consists in his thoroughgoing skepticism about the value to himself and to others of his filmmaking colliding with his need to distract himself from existential anxieties via the production of movies. That skepticism, in turn, compromises the effectiveness of his output by placing significant limits on what he attempts to achieve cinematically. “I’m trying to make as wonderful a film as I can,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987, “but my priorities are always in order, and they are never aesthetic. Artistic accomplishment is always third or fourth.” These ambivalences notwithstanding, Allen’s reputation as a filmmaker, almost in spite of his own deeply ambivalent attitudes, has increased substantially into the twenty-first century as his nihilism has deepened.