Woody Allen

Woody Allen directed Sweet and Lowdown of 1999 and appears in it himself, as one of the experts discussing the jazz guitarist it is about. Jonathan Romney read the film as a correction of his previous one: coming after the shapeless agitation of Celebrity, it proved for him that Allen is interested not in fame and the noisy present but in uncertainty and the sublime mysteries of the forgotten. Romney also gave a name to this vein of the filmography, occasional musings on the apocryphal corners of modern American history, and counted its members: Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo. His comparison came from literature rather than cinema, from E. L. Doctorow. By that reading the construction lets Allen test how hard it is to understand the artists of the past, whether through their work or through the stories told about them.