Alvy Singer: I've gotta see a picture exactly from the start to finish, 'cause, 'cause I'm anal. Annie Hall: That's a polite ...word for what you are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My philosophy is that to be a director you cannot be subject to anyone, even the head of the studio. I threatened to quit each tim...e I didn't get my way, but no one ever let me walk out.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In movies about women, all important historical and natural events are translated into the terms of a woman's daily life. World Wa...r I is not about the Allies versus the Kaiser. It's about how unmarried women become pregnant when they have sex. The Depression is not about an economic collapse. It's about runs in stockings, no money for carfare, and being forced out into the streets. Natural disasters like earthquakes and cholera epidemics are defined by miscarriages and dying children. Everything is couched in terms of what are presumed to be the major events of a woman's life: men, marriage, motherhood, and all the usual "feminine" things. At the same time that big events are made small, personal, small events are made huge.... Thus, the woman's film is a genre that generously empowers a sex that society has relegated to secondary status.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The woman's world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what ...the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the movie woman's world is designed to remind us that a woman may live in a mansion, an apartment, or a yurt, but it's all the... same thing because what she really lives in is the body of a woman, and that body is allowed to occupy space only according to the dictates of polite society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a ...monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, ...dreaming the same dream in unison.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »