Symfonia wielkiego miasta. O wizerunku Nowego Jorku w Manhattanie Woody’ego Allena

• Authors: Magdalena Karkiewicz

Title variants

EN

Symphony of a Big City. The Image of New York in Woody Allen’s Manhattan

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

One of the major objective of this essay is to show that Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) is a renewal of an old film genre called the city symphony. In this movie, the director outlined a suggestive portrait of his beloved New York City. After Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan is the second most com- plete expression of the specificity of Allen’s style, which consists of comic and tragic elements. Another object of this essay is to demonstrate that while creating the image of the metropolis the director particularly exploits the tools of film expression. Audiovisual layer of Allen’s work allows to juxta- pose Manhattan with the city symphony (genre which came into being in the twenties as an innovative combination of documentary and avant-garde forms). The similarity between Manhattan and the original city symphonies is visible at the very beginning of the film, because of black and white, kaleidoscopic shots of metropolis as well as the backing sound (Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin). Allen’s picture is not only a sophisticated portrait of New York, but also the critical study of the society.

Keywords

EN

Woody Allen,; the city symphony genre; films of 20’s; city in the movie; American cinematography

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Kardynała Stefana Wyszyńskiego w Warszawie
• Journal: Załącznik Kulturoznawczy
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 215-241

Contributors

author

Magdalena Karkiewicz

• Wydział Nauk Humanistycznych UKSW