Annie Hall Hollywood Legend

This popular version of the Hollywood legend is complemented by another legendary discourse about the film community that relates Hollywood to the intellectual landscape of the nation and to its cultural hierarchies. This second Hollywood legend is different from the one created by the “fan-zines” and yet is just as fictive. While fan magazines rose-tinted Hollywood into a “Venice without canals,” American literati have crafted a different image of Hollywood marked by desperation and loneliness. In the New Deal era, the attitude of many New York modernist intellectuals toward Hollywood was certainly ambiguous and largely unscathed by what Andreas Huyssen has called the contemporary “anxiety of contamination” between “high and low,” mass culture and

There was Robert Gessner at NYU and not to many others” (Gunning 1992, 62). By 1960, Gessner, a New Theater veteran, was complaining that in the United States film criticism was underdeveloped especially in comparison with the French and Italian critics. One of the themes of Woody Allen’s Academy Award - winning Annie Hall (1977) is an invidious intellectual comparison between New York and Los Angeles. The film reflects quite well the conundrum and contradictions of contemporary New York filmmakers. While it is anti Los Angeles, Annie Hall is not avant-garde, at least in the sense intended by the New American Cinema manifesto of 1960. The film shares less with Pull My Daisy than with the Hollywood comedies of Preston Strurges. Unlike for the thirties generation, the lure of Hollywood no longer necessarily prompted physical migration but was instead revealed by concerns for narrative cinema, the fundamental lexicon of classical Hollywood films. The new hybridizationists feel the lure of Hollywood less for political than for linguistic reasons. As an openly political cinema able to address directly the issues of the