Essay #1: Moments of Meaning Scene Analysis--First Outline

I have the bulk of my ideas about Midnight in Paris sketched out.  I still need to find more quotations to back my claims, but I do have claims I feel represent the film using the formalist approach.  Here's my first outline:

Main Argument: I believe the formalist approach best describes the film, Midnight in Paris.  Through the use of shot, character, and dialogue in the scene involving Gil, Inez, Paul and Paul’s wife talking about Gil’s nostalgia shop book, Allen attacks a genre he helped perfect, and subversively sets the stage for the audience to grasp the ironic stance he has on his own film.

Claim #1: Using a single-shot and having the characters roam allows for them to speak freely on the matter of Gil’s nostalgia shop, and more correctly about longing for the past; instead of the hesitancy that comes with having a direct conversation, it creates a more professorial attitude, one that allows them to speak without the intimacy and negative reaction of the people around them.

Claim #2: The characters Allen uses in this scene—Paul and Inez, the realists, and Gil, the dreamer—represent the dichotomy of personality and lifestyle in the world; the one who dreams for big things, and the other who is steeped in reality.  Also, it shows the duality of ways the audience views film; they either become lost, like Gil, or they take a critical, objective view of its significance and its flaws, like Paul and Inez.

Claim #3:  The dialogue itself—talking about Gil’s story idea—launches Allen’s criticism of the escape of cinema and the romantic-comedy genre.  As the man who essentially perfected the genre, he now attacks it.  Just as Paul and Inez criticize the idea of a man working in a nostalgia shop and the longing of times past, Allen criticizes the audience for not thinking objectively, instead “escaping” into a fantasy world.

Blog #2: "Moment" in Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen introduces his film Midnight in Paris with a montage-style sequence of Parisian images depicting life as the city turns from day to night, followed by Gil and Inez at a Monet-inspired pond walk; Gil seems disillusioned and deeply affected by Paris’ magnetic power from the start.  Allen sets the stage for typical American cinematic fare, or so it seems. Because of this, we have to wonder—more accurately speculate—whether Allen simply accepted the cinematic norms he fought for so many years or if he concocted an elaborate hoax to make us think he did.

I highlight one “moment,” while subtle, that points to Allen acting more as magician than filmmaker.  Gil is walking with his fiancée, Inez, and her mother.  The mother remarks about seeing an American film while they are in Paris.  She seems indifferent to the film, and Gil remarks that the average film she saw sounds like something he could have written.  We could take this as criticism of the American tourist, who simply reenacts his typical life rather than immersing himself into the foreign culture.  I believe, though, that Allen subversively attacks the notion that he succumbed to creating passive film experiences.  While the simplicity of the overall plot points to a lack of refined filmmaking, the hints he buries in the dialogue crack at an industry, and more specifically, a genre of film that often repeats itself.

That genre of film, the romantic comedy, which sits at the top of the film’s Wikipedia page interestingly enough, generally involves boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy loses girl but eventually gets her back.  On the surface, we see that boy, Gil, and the girl he appears to desire, Marion Cotillard’s character Adriana.  Unbeknownst to the typical rom-com audience, this relationship has no significance in Allen’s eyes, harkening back to the opening montage.  The true romance on display is between Gil and the city of Paris; any feelings he portrays to the female characters merely distracts from his genuine love in the film.  Allen creates this film with an entirely separate, submerged story, and in doing so, creates a film that both embraces and attacks the straight-lined American romantic comedy.  He forces the audience to answer one simple question: What film did you see?