12 - Keaton and Allen: Collaboration and the Screwball Couple in Annie Hall and Manhattan Murder Mystery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
Summary
Abstract
This chapter examines the working relationship between Allen and Keaton, questioning her status as a ‘muse’ and exploring how her performance style and creative involvement in their films together evolved over a quarter of a century. This chapter will explore how their work together was informed by the tradition of screwball couples, inflected by the shifting discourses regarding gender and ageing during the final decades of the twentieth century. Despite Keaton's prolific film career independently of Allen since the 1960s, which encompassed many celebrated roles, she continues to be labelled as Allen's muse.
Keywords: comedy, partnership, age
Film academic Rebecca Harrison (2018) passionately argued that a revision of the film canon was long overdue to challenge the patriarchal culture of the industry, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement and the exposure of the extent to which gender inequality was ingrained in the abusive culture of Hollywood. Harrison argued that it was time to ‘look beyond the “auteur” and consider the hidden labour of women in seemingly male-dominated projects’. Her article goes on to namecheck a shockingly long list of male directors, producers and actors who have been accused of sexual abuse in the press, including Woody Allen, whose resistance to the accusations made against him have increasingly rendered him notorious rather than a genius. This chapter aims to challenge the orthodoxy by questioning the creative collaboration between Allen and Diane Keaton, a relationship that has rested on the status of Allen as an auteur of independent American cinema and Keaton as his muse. Over 40 years since the release of Annie Hall (1977), the film that consolidated this artist/muse dynamic, Keaton continues to perform the role of Allen's muse in her support of the beleaguered director in the face of allegations of abuse and in perpetuating his status as a ‘genius’ (YouTube 2014). The muse is a problematic role, regarded by feminists with cynicism in perpetuating the essential objectification of women and negating female labour in the creative process. The films made with Keaton were to define Allen's career, being the benchmark against which all his later films would be judged.
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- Women in the Work of Woody Allen , pp. 243 - 262Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022