Woody Allen Biography
Allan Stewart Konigsberg (Woody Allen's real name), was born on 1 December 1935 in New York in the Flatbush neighborhood, and over time became the greatest exponent of New York Jewish intellectual comedy. At just fifteen years old he began writing gags for the gossip columns of some of the city's newspapers. His university failures (NY University and City College) pushed him towards the world of entertainment: he worked as a comic presenter in nightclubs and at the same time earned a living by writing comic texts for television programmes, before starting his film career as a screenwriter and actor comedies. His directorial debut took place in 1969 with "Take the money and run away" although in 1966 he had directed some scenes of "What are you doing, steal?". In a few years he made the films that gave him worldwide fame, now very famous titles such as " The Dictator of the Free State of Bananas" (1971), "Everything you wanted to know about sex but never dared to ask" (1972) and "Love and War" (1975). They are films of wild and lightning comedy. In the 1980s, Woody Allen, after the success of "Manhattan" (1979), considered by many to be his masterpiece, and the linguistic experimentation of "Zelig" (1983) gradually began to concentrate behind the camera. this period are "The Purple Rose of Cairo" (1985) and "Radio Days" (1987). Thus begins the so-called "twilight" period of the American director, who is strongly influenced by Bergman's poetics, in which they become increasingly popular. the themes of death and religion are recurring and in which hypochondria is accentuated, automatically thematized in his films. In the early nineties, however, Woody Allen began to go beyond the autobiographical work by creating a series of films which, at least apparently, went beyond the usual themes; this is the case of the citation of German expressionism with "Shadows and Fog" (1991), of the pseudo-detective "Manhattan Murder Mystery" (1993), and of "Bullets Over Broadway" (1994), a comedy that behind the funny behind the scenes of the theater of the 1920s, focuses on the loss of poetic inspiration. Certainly the most European of American directors, his cinema could be summarized in a few words: psychoanalysis, sex, New York, Judaism and jazz music. Only a few other directors such as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni had the same weight in the "high" culture of the second half of the twentieth century.
