Gerald Sim Interview: Part I

Gerald Sim is a graduate student in film studies at the University of Iowa and an instructor who has taught a course on the films of Woody Allen. Below is the transcript of Part I of our interview with him, which we had intended to play during last week's podcast.

AK: When you were putting together your syllabus for "The Films of Woody Allen," which films were the no-brainers? Which did you feel were absolutely essential?

GS: One of the earlier comedies, and "Annie Hall" had to be on there... one of the Bergman-esque films [such as "Interiors"], "Crimes and Misdemeanors," the musical ("Everyone Says I Love You")...

AK: Why the musical?

GS: Because it’s different -- and the critical question in class was, well, how different? Eventually, as I was putting together my own thoughts on what his films are about, I came up with a narrative and that narrative necessitated the inclusion of things like "Manhattan" and "Alice" and eventually "Sweet and Lowdown" (1999), which I think brings to a conclusion a lot of the questions he raised in his earlier films in the 70s.

SH: In earlier Woody Allen films, the character played by Allen is pre-occupied by death. Do his recent films, the comedies, reflect a retreat from that subject as Allen himself gets closer to death?

GS: No, I don't think so. The death you refer to is not just physical death, but really the winding down of life, the death of art, the death of physical existence -- which for him constitutes life. My argument is that he eventually resolves it (the question of death, in all its forms) with "Sweet and Lowdown," and after "Sweet and Lowdown" he starts on new avenues of inquiry. The question of death comes from a lot of places. It comes from psychoanalysis, from being Jewish, from being a comedian; to be a good comedian, you have to be dark.

So when Sean Penn smashes his guitar at the end of "Sweet and Lowdown," that's the death of everything, really. [There's] the ambiguity at the ending of "Manhattan," for example, when he is rejected by this pure figure (Mariel Hemingway), who is represented in different films by different women. In "Sweet and Lowdown," when he is turned down by Samantha Morton, he decides, well, that's the end of everything. When Penn's character smashes the guitar, it's really a form of suicide, in my mind.

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