Philosophical humor
December 1, 1935 Allan Stewart Konigsberg (Woody Allen's real name), born on 1 December 1935 in New York in the neighborhood of Flatbush, and became over time the greatest exponent of comedy new York Jewish intellectual. His parents, Martin and Nettie, were Jewish Americans while the grandparents were from Eastern Europe. Family and economic point of view, he had a childhood and adolescence fairly quiet, though, as said in some interview, relations between her parents were rather quarrelsome (that represents them in "Radio Days", one of his most autobiographical film although there acting personally). Just fifteen years began writing gags for some gossip books newspapers of the city. His academic failures (NY University and City College) push him toward show business: she works as a presenter comedian in nightclubs and at the same time makes a living writing comic texts for television shows, before beginning his movie career, as a writer and actor of comedies ("Hello Pussycat", 1965). The directorial debut takes place in 1969 with "take the money and run" though in 1966 had directed some scenes of "what up, Tiger Lily?". In the same year he married for a second time to actress Louise Lasser. In a few years the films that give him world-wide fame, now 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 death" (1975). Are films of a comedy unleashed and withering. In 1977 the breakthrough. "Annie Hall" is definitely a film still very funny, but with light bitter and disenchanted theme treatment. The movie also like the detested "enclave" of Hollywood, a world that Woody has always had little in common, which assigns four Oscars: best picture, Best Director, best screenplay and best actress Diane Keaton, who is his new companion in life. In the 1980s, after the success of Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), considered by many to be his masterpiece, and the linguistic experimentation of Zelig (1983) gradually begins to focus behind the camera and to entrust the title role several alter egos who give succour to Mia Farrow, the new girlfriend of the Director. Most original films of this period include: "the Purple Rose of Cairo" (1985) and "Radio Days" (1987). Thus began the so-called period of "Twilight" by American Director, which strongly reflects the influence of the poetic Word, where more and more recurring themes of death and religion (exorcised with the filter of irony), and that it accentuates the hypochondria, automatically thematized in his films. In the early 1990s, however, Woody Allen begins to exceed the autobiographical work crafting a series of films that, at least apparently, outside the usual issues; This is the case of citation of German Expressionism with "shadows and fog" (1991), pseudo-policial "Manhattan murder mystery" (1993), and "bullets over Broadway" (1994), a comedy behind the zany backstage of the theatre of the 1920s, focuses on the loss of poetic inspiration. In any case, for the filmmaker, is all the more difficult to distinguish life and cinema, being the one faithful translation into images of each other: in his films meet the parents want for her son, who is an obsessive future by pharmacist or banker, loves victims (three weddings, the first in 19 years and last "outrageous" with the adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn); not to mention the endless sessions of psychoanalysis, individual and group, passion for jazz music and the clarinet, the continual reference to New York ("my island. There I feel safe. There are my favorite restaurants, my movies, my job, my friends. ") and the quote of his great movie myths, the Marx Brothers, Bergman, Fellini and Humphrey Bogart. Certainly the most European of American filmmakers, its cinema could be summarized in a few words: psychoanalysis, gender, New York, Judaism and jazz music (he himself performs on clarinet every Monday night at Michael's Pub in New York). Only few other directors (Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, all dear to our authors) had the same weight in the "high" culture of the second half of the 20th century.