Annie Hall and Manhattan: Two Different Ways of Looking at New York's Beauty

Near the end of Woody Allen's 1977 film Annie Hall, Diane Keaton's role as Annie says to Allen's character Alvy Singer, "You're just like New York City. You're an island!" However, the link between Alvy Singer and New York City is not simply a fictional creation. Nor is the connection between Allen's character Isaac Davis and New York in his 1979 film Manhattan fictional adoration. Woody Allen loves New York. It is through the various characters he portrays and through a camera lens that he shows New York in the most majestic and beautiful way that he can. However, both films do so in very different ways. In Woody Allen's Annie Hall and Manhattan, Allen uses the camera lens to convey how big and majestic the city can be. This is done in Annie Hall through various long-shots of the main characters or the exclusion of the main characters from the screen. Both films also use shots of New York and the lives within it to convey how the city never sleeps, and how it is always working similar to Allen's ideals of always busying himself. However, Annie Hall characterizes New York as an entity similar to Alvy Singer through a comparison between the setting, weather, and people of New York and Los Angeles. Manhattan also uses weather as a method of portraying the mood of the city and of Isaac Davis, but instead reflects more on powerful still-shots of New York's inner workings and skyline and dialogue through the voice of Isaac Davis off-screen.
One of the most fluent uses of New York's setting is introduced early in Annie Hall. One of the first scenes has Woody Allen's character, Alvy Singer, and Tony Roberts' character, Rob, walking up from a long-distance shot to a half-shot on a New York City sidewalk. This specific camera shot shows the endless sidewalk, and doesn't actually give the audience a clear picture of the main characters until around ten seconds into the scene. Instead, the audience sees a few unnamed New Yorkers walking on the sidewalk. Eventually Alvy and... [continues]

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