by Carol H. Morgan

Created on: October 11, 2008

The link between Woody Allen and Ingmar Bergman is summed up by an experience nearly every human being has: the existential crisis. This takes place when you have a value system that serves you and comforts you and keeps you from agonizing soul searches, only later to watch it fall apart in utter ruin when you run across something that can't fit into your overall theory. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /

>

You can tell that Bergman was an influence on Allen as he developed his own method of exploring this theme. He often does that with humor or sarcasm. In the comedy movie "Love and Death" he recreates the famous image from The Seventh Seal where death, in the grim reaper getup that these movies made famous, forces souls to dance across the horizon on their way to oblivion. He also enjoys using the occasional Bergman stock actor, such as Max Von Sidow.

In other movies, Allen treats the existential crisis more directly. He often includes flashbacks to his childhood, where a range of intellectuals from practicing Jews to agnostics debate things like the existence of God or the afterlife. Often characters who have taken for granted that meaning or moral structure in the universe experience some kind of trauma that disrupts their way of thinking, like Allen's character's continual hypochondriac episodes (Hannah and her Sisters) or multiple reinventions in midlife when faced with adultery (Husbands and Wives).

The film to most directly explore the existential crisis has all of these elements: "Crimes and Misdemeanors," what will probably go down in history as Allen's masterpiece, as it most clearly typifies his subjects as well as his methods. It has characters that debate the virtue of keeping child-like faith an option (The Rabbi who remains upbeat in the face of blindness) or those that play the system only to get what they can (Judah's criminal brother, Jack, and the Allen character's smarmy brother-in-law).

Many of the characters in Crimes and Misdemeanors have existential crises that cause them to reevaluate or go against their value system, which is disturbing to the Allen character, as it most clearly manifests to him that there IS no real value system to cling to. His sister has a humiliating encounter with a man from a dating service that leads her to consider dating convicted criminals, and his love interest falls for what seems to have someone that she would have been too good for. Continually the Allen character

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>