I recently watched Woody Allen's 1983 film Zelig, a mockumentary sharing the cultural impact of one fictional man, Leonard Zelig, who shifts and changes shape to match the people around him. A global phenomenon in the 1920s, this man (or so the premise goes) has fallen into general obscurity. The documentary revives an interest in him, interviewing intellectuals like Susan Sontag to contextualize Zelig for the present-day audience, splicing color interviews with "archival" footage which provides a glimpse of the man himself in newsreels and psychiatric footage. Here, Woody Allen conjures the past—but as a relic of the past—through black-and-white, grainy film, but Allen is a director also prone to glorify the past, reinvigorating it through elaborate period production design that romantically conjures the costumes, texture, and atmosphere of decades long gone.
Just in the past decade, he has created three films that take place in these very roaring decades—Midnight in Paris (2011), Magic in the Moonlight (2014), and Café Society (2016). As a student interested in the art and film of these decades, these films are a treat, but this preoccupation with the past struck me as a fairly committed interest of Allen's that I believe relates to his larger concerns about creativity, celebrity and, ultimately perhaps, his own place in history.
Visually, there are atmospheric qualities that resonate with Allen's thematic nostalgia filter. In Midnight in Paris, the protagonist even remarks that everyone sees the past as a better time—he yearns for the 1920s, while another character years for the fin-de-siècle. When orange lights permeate a room or a sea breeze blows over a luxury car, open to the elements like in every great rendition of Gatsby, the opulence of the age is brought to us immediately before the screen and that's one of Allen's great visual powers as a director.
But, the self-awareness of Midnight in Paris makes that film, perhaps, his most intimate exploration of the meaning of the past. Rather than just show a historic world to us, it is delivered through the musings of a writer (or in Zelig, a filmmaker), who serve as stand-ins for the director himself. The joyous state of being in the past, the celebration that permeates the opulent films by Baz Luhrmann, are absent here when we know the message is mediated, aware that the past is available only through aestheticized glimpses, like these recreated scenes or the freckled newsreels that survive for us. Highlighting that reminds us that reviving the past is a project, and one that filters the lights of the environment but also which subjects it finds there. The gorgeous warm lights define the time travel Allen allows for us, but the people we encounter are as much a part of that contrived atmosphere as the light bulbs.
Allen's engagement with the past is consciously aware of whose stories it is telling. A passing reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald is a must for American audiences, but Allen features less ubiquitous 1920s artists, like the Surrealists depicted above—Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, and (the still recognizable) Salvador Dalí. These are the people art historians remember (with a heavily explicit gendered bias against the women who inspired these men or, more importantly, the prominent early women Surrealists themselves). He revives the story of a muse briefly, having Marion Cotillard's character allude to jealous artist lovers, but his retelling of the past is not radically inclusive. It is curated, but not inventive.
Even when Allen isn't paying homage to the canonized great artists of the modern age, his characters are still caught up in the celebrity apparatus on stage and screen, focusing on magicians and actors in his two most recent works. This is fairly common: writers write about writers, creatives create more creatives. But underneath there is also a preoccupation with the idea of celebrity and, with the historical glance he takes, cultural memory. Celebrity news reels, novels, recordings of great performances are part of our historical archive and their fate rests in our attention. Certain people jump out (F. Scott Fitzgerald) but others (Zelig, if he weren't fictional) fall away.
Is it too much to think that Woody Allen, as early as 1983, was thinking about his place in film history? He has created over forty films, many of which are fantastic and others of which are formulaic. Taking these dives into the past through archival footage and time travel seem to allow him to enter a new relationship to the past. Now the question is, will future artists have to reclaim Woody Allen's history or eagerly chase after him. Will he be a Zelig or a Fitzgerald? Forgotten or immortalized?
Images are film stills from Zelig and Midnight in Paris.