While Annie Hall is definitely one of my favorite films of all time – and very special for me because it was precisely this film, due to its ingenuity and formal audacity, that made me want to go into screenwriting – reading Rosenblum’s account of the editing process just made me regret that I am only seeing a part of what I could be seeing… The descriptions of the scenes that were cut out sound so funny and great, that I feel they would have added to the charm of the film, rather than burden it unnecessarily, as Rosenblum and Marshall Brickman seemed to think. Perhaps I just hold this opinion because I’ve always been a Woody Allen fan, and for me, more Woody is always better than less Woody, but it’s just a pity that this footage seems to be lost and cannot even be enjoyed as DVD extras or special director’s cut editions or in any other way that this new DVD technology now enables us to view it.

I also think it’s insightful to consider the specific content of the scenes that were cut out. Most of them tread heavily on psychoanalytic ground, appearing in the form of fantasies and dream sequences infused with phallic references and allusions, but even beyond that, from an ideological point of view, what makes these scenes stand out is their highly controversial and daring content. A conversation with God about the female orgasm? An tour of Hell led by the Devil himself? A faux sci-fi movie about the blacks invading white communities and making white women faint? This is all really sensitive subject matter, and appears to be much more controversial than all the other scenes that were included in the final version. One counterexample here might be the cocaine scene, which is indeed a rather scandalous topic, but in the same time it might seem a lot more scandalous to us now than it did to movie-goers in the 70s.

It was interesting to watch Annie Hall once again with Margolin’s discussion of character in mind. I’m sure that everybody would agree that it is definitely the originality and poignancy of the characters that made Annie Hall such an enjoyable and enduring movie, and I think this is mostly due to the very personal nature of the film. While Margolin makes it clear that any character, whether inspired by a real person or not, is a fictional creation as soon as it becomes part of the process of storytelling, Annie Hall is an interesting case to consider, due to the inextricable links between the main protagonists and the actors who embody them. The film’s extraordinary formal ingenuity is therefore paralleled by a very peculiar relationship between actor and character : first of all, audiences familiar with Woody Allen will undoubtedly recognize the actor’s quirky personality and neurotic psyche in the character of Alvy, who moreover is by profession a comedian in the storyworld, just like Woody Allen himself in real life. Furthermore, as we discussed in class, audiences going to see the film in theatres in the 70s were generally aware of the real romantic relationship between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, and it is rather natural that if two real-life lovers share a romance on screen, the actor/character boundary becomes eroded. Moreover, Allen even takes this a step further, when the onscreen characters of Annie, Alvy and Rob are transformed into cartoon characters, in Alvy’s cartoon fairytale fantasy – thus, the real Woody Allen becomes Alvy Singer who becomes cartoon Alvy, while the real Diane Keaton becomes Annie Hall who becomes the cartoon queen, in a wonderful sort of tertiary representation, if we can call it that without appearing pseudointellectual like that film professor in the theatre queue.