Annie Hall is a 1977 American satirical romantic comedy-drama film directed by Woody Allen from a screenplay he co-wrote with Marshall Brickman, and produced by Allen’s manager, Charles H. Joffe. The film stars Allen as Alvy Singer, who tries to figure out the reasons for the failure of his relationship with the eponymous female lead, played by Diane Keaton in a role written specifically for her.
Principal photography for the film began on May 19, 1976, on the South Fork of Long Island, and continued periodically for the next ten months. Allen has described the result, which marked his first collaboration with cinematographer Gordon Willis, as “a major turning point”, in that unlike the farces and comedies that were his work to that point, it introduced a new level of seriousness. Academics have noted the contrast in the settings of New York City and Los Angeles, the stereotype of gender differences in sexuality, the presentation of Jewish identity, and the elements of psychoanalysis and modernism.
Annie Hall was screened at the Los Angeles Film Festival in March 27, 1977, before its official release in the United States on April 20, 1977. The film was highly praised, and along with winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, received Oscars in three other categories: two for Allen (Best Director and, with Brickman, Best Original Screenplay), and Best Actress for Keaton. The film additionally won four BAFTA awards and a Golden Globe, the latter being awarded to Keaton. The film’s North American box office receipts of $38,251,425 are the fourth-best of Allen’s works when not adjusted for inflation.
Considered to be one of the best films ever made, it ranks 31st on AFI’s List of the greatest films in American cinema, 4th on their list of greatest comedy films and 28th on Bravo’s “100 Funniest Movies”. Film critic Roger Ebert called it “just about everyone’s favorite Woody Allen movie”. The film’s screenplay was also named the funniest ever written by the Writers Guild of America in its list of the “101 Funniest Screenplays”. In 1992, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Style and technique
Technically, the film marked an advance for the director. He selected Gordon Willis as his cinematographer—for Allen “a very important teacher” and a “technical wizard,” saying, “I really count Annie Hall as the first step toward maturity in some way in making films.” At the time, it was considered an “odd pairing” by many, Keaton among them. The director was known for his comedies and farces, while Willis was known as “the prince of darkness” for work on dramatic films like The Godfather. Despite this, the two became friends during filming and continued the collaboration on several later films, including Zelig, which earned Willis his first Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.
Willis described the production for the film as “relatively easy.” He shot in varying styles; “hot golden light for California, grey overcast for Manhattan and a forties Hollywood glossy for ... dream sequences,” most of which were cut. It was his suggestion which led Allen to film the dual therapy scenes in one set divided by a wall instead of the usual split screen method. He tried long takes, with some shots, unabridged, lasting an entire scene, which, for Ebert, add to the dramatic power of the film: “Few viewers probably notice how much of Annie Hall consists of people talking, simply talking. They walk and talk, sit and talk, go to shrinks, go to lunch, make love and talk, talk to the camera, or launch into inspired monologues like Annie’s free-association as she describes her family to Alvy. This speech by Diane Keaton is as close to perfect as such a speech can likely be ... all done in one take of brilliant brinksmanship.” He cites a study that calculated the average shot length of Annie Hall to be 14.5 seconds, while other films made in 1977 had an average shot length of 4–7 seconds. Peter Cowie suggests that “Allen breaks up his extended shots with more orthodox cutting back and forth in conversation pieces so that the forward momentum of the film is sustained.” Bernd Herzogenrath notes the innovation in the use of the split-screen during the dinner scene to powerfully exaggerate the contrast between the Jewish and the gentile family.
Although the film is not essentially experimental, at several points it undermines the narrative reality. James Bernardoni notes Allen’s way of opening the film by facing the camera, which immediately intrudes upon audience involvement in the film. In one scene, Allen’s character, in line to see a movie with Annie, listens to a man behind him deliver misinformed pontifications on the significance of Fellini’s and Marshall McLuhan’s work. Allen pulls McLuhan himself from just off-camera to correct the man’s errors personally. Later in the film, when we see Annie and Alvy in their first extended talk, “mental subtitles” convey to the audience the characters’ nervous inner doubts. An animated scene—with artwork based on the comic strip Inside Woody Allen—depicts Alvy and Annie in the guise of the Wicked Queen from Snow White. Although Allen uses each of these techniques only once, the “fourth wall” is broken several other times when characters address the camera directly. In one, Alvy stops several passers-by to ask questions about love, and in another, he shrugs off writing a happy ending to his relationship with Annie in his autobiographical first play as forgivable “wish-fulfillment.” Allen chose to have Alvy break the fourth wall, he explained, “because I felt many of the people in the audience had the same feelings and the same problems. I wanted to talk to them directly and confront them.”