Jonathan Poritsky

I’ve been post­ing to this blog for a year now, most intensely for the past few months. And in that time I have but 2 sub­scribed read­ers. Thank you Aaron and Paul. It is a spe­cial albeit silent rela­tion­ship the three of us have…until now. Today I dare to respond directly to half of my fan­base. This is for you lit­tle Paul of Los Angeles.

I’m not writ­ing for the New Yorker because MySpace pays bet­ter. Obviously. The truth is that I write here to prac­tice in hopes of one day being as pro­lific as a Seth Mulliken. If you haven’t read the knowl­edge that spews out of his head, I highly rec­om­mend it. hope­fully he’ll be writ­ing books and New Yorker columns and such real soon. I’d be first in line to get an auto­graph from the man who taught me the con­cept of the panop­ti­con and turned me on to Frank Zappa.

Now, Paul, “Melinda & Melinda” was Allen’s last film in New York, and by last I hope I sim­ply mean most recent. I’d have to dis­agree with your assess­ment of “Deconstructing Harry” as irrel­e­vant to New York. FYI, Allen made about 5 Manhattan films between “Harry” and “Melinda”, so you may want to do your home­work you crunchy left-coast cog in the Hollywood machine. Move back here where there’s less smog and more crime or I shall taunt you again!

“Harry” shows Allen’s con­tin­u­ing inabil­ity to func­tion out­side of Manhattan. Half of the film takes place on a road trip in which he ven­tures fur­ther and fur­ther into the depths of his own mind, but only when he returns to Manhattan can he orga­nize his thoughts into a coher­ent story. In his stu­dio apart­ment (where he nearly loses his life at the begin­ning, seem­ingly set­ting off the quest for dis­cov­ery) at the film’s com­ple­tion he find his rel­e­vance again as a writer, as a cre­ator. this is some­thing that could not be done by an award from his alma mater, the cause for the road trip.

This func­tion­ing idea of New York is a straight line that goes through all of his work, even in his lat­est “Scoop”. As a Brooklynite abroad, he is hardly able to func­tion (even as a libidi­nous old coot: he doesn’t go after the volup­tuous Scarlett Johansson, seem­ingly because some­thing in the London water keeps him from get­ting it up) doing magic tricks overseas.

the issue is that at some point, he lost touch with the peo­ple on the ground, the storm troop­ers of New York. He’s at an age where if he makes films for his con­tem­po­raries they wont make any money, and he is dis­con­nected from younger New Yorkers, although if you see “Anything Else” you’ll see he does an excep­tional job relat­ing. The result is some­thing of a fan­tasy world. He’s no longer the awk­ward mid­dle aged man in Cargo pants and a plaid shirt (though you’ll see this aging char­ac­ter traps­ing all over Manhattan in “Harry).

Like I said before, he’s exper­i­ment­ing with other cul­tures now, which forces him to adapt and become even more orig­i­nal than he’s been in the past. I haven’t been too impressed with the work of Remi Adefarasin as DP on his last 2 films. Allen has enjoyed a career of work­ing with the best DPs on earth, includ­ing two long rela­tion­ships with Gordon Willis and Carlo Di Palma. Willis had the Allen monop­oly in the old days, except for when Sven Nykvyst came on board. And after Di Palma, Darius Khondji took the reigns, and then Vilmos Zsigmond, who thank­fully will be return­ing this fall with Allen’s newest “Cassandra’s Dream”. But Remi, it seems, was part of Allen try­ing to take full con­trol of his craft, being able to mold the DP. Or rather he was try­ing to throw out the visu­als and focus more on direct­ing (see the dou­ble date scene in “Match Point”).

Back to Allen’s New Yorkness, just look at “Annie Hall”. He is less of a man in LA, and the clos­est he comes to over­com­ing impo­tence is get­ting into car accidents.

Paul, if there’s any film­maker that’s fun to study, it’s Allen. He’s got a long list of films, and almost all of them are cheaply made. I con­sider him to be the prog­en­i­tor of our mod­ern (class of ’94) inde­pen­dent film move­ment giv­ing how impor­tant it was for him to be writer/director and mak­ing small dia­logue based pro­duc­tions. If you high­way dri­ving brush­fire prone kids ever have any ret­ro­spec­tives that don’t involve John Huston or John Wayne, maybe you can see the clas­sics on 35mm as I did this past January.

For New York, this Jon Poritsky sign­ing off.