The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen
and Shadows and Fog both offer a real world middle ground between the polar opposites of reality and fantasy: a brothel. The kindly whores of Purple Rose, unaware that they’re encountering a fantasy projection in Tom Baxter, offer him all sorts of fantasy gratifications free of charge. The prostitutes of Felice’s Place in Shadows and Fog are even more self-conscious about their roles as facilitators of male fantasy. Dory (Jodie Foster) comments on the disparity between worlds: “They look so innocent and dignified when they walk in here … and then the things they want you to do !” The brothel madam, Felice (Lily Tomlin) offers a parable of a man who likes to be ridden by a naked woman as she digs her spurs into his sides, and who achieves a “marriage made in heaven” when he finds a woman who enjoys riding him. The brothel clearly is a place where reality and fantasy effectively converge. The prostitutes’ forthrightness about sexual realities contrasts with the legerdemain and prevarication of the townsmen, while partaking of the circus’s gratification of fantasy, thus accounting for Allen’s characterization of the film’s emotive dynamic: “The thing that tied it all together was that there was the shadows and fog going through the night all the time. And then there was the occasional respite in the brothel. An occasional warm respite indoors” (Bjorkman, p. 235).
    16. Quoted in Frank Gado, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman [Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1986], p. 239.) Bergman’s influence on Shadows and Fog is less obvious than that of German Expressionist film, and yet the preoccupation of Bergman’s The Magician with the absolute disparity between human magic tricks and the Christian miracle of resurrection seems to be echoed in the failure of Irmstedt’s magic to capture the killer/arrest the process of death.
    17. Given the negativity of Allen’s characterization of Paul early in the film, his comment to Stig Bjorkman about clowns is illuminating: “I never liked clowns—unlike Fellini. And this may be because what we get in the United States is radically different from European clowns. I’ve never enjoyed clowns.” Bjorkman, p. 5.
    18. Woody Allen, Husbands and Wives (Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1992).
    19. Allen’s concurrence with Kleinman’s judgment that the inevitability of death prevents anything good from happening pervades his work. “There is no other fear of significant consequence,” he told Stig Bjorkman, as the fear of death. “All other fears, all other problems, one can deal with. Loneliness, lack of love, lack of talent, lack of money, everything can be dealt with. In some way, there are ways to cope. You have friends that can help you, you have doctors that can help you. But perishing is what it’s all about” (Bjorkman, p. 106).
    20. Michael Kerbel’s Cineaste essay, “The Redemptive Power of Art,” suggests that, “Unlike the ending of Deconstructing Harry this conclusion [of S&F ] proclaims both the power and the evanescence of our artistic creations.” In addressing Harry I will argue that that film is no less ambivalent in its claims about art than is Shadows and Fog .
    12. Poetic License, Bullshit: Bullets Over Broadway
    1. Allen characterized that film style in describing the first Bergman film he saw as a teenager, his description anticipating the mise en scene he would attempt to create in Shadows and Fog: “I never knew who directed the film, nor did I care, nor was I sensitive at that age to the power of the work itself—the irony, the tensions, the German Expressionist style with its poetic black-and-white photography and its erotic sadomasochistic undertones.” “Through a Life Darkly,” p. 29.
    2. Fox, p. 243.
    3. The Doctor in Shadows and Fog makes a similar argument conjoining artistic and destructive tendencies: “Sometimes certain impulses that inspire an insane man to murder inspire others to highly creative ends.” In

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