On Woody Allen's Movie Arts

In 1960s, movie industry declined in America when many young directors emerged. Woody Allen, typically among the directors in new Hollywood Movie World, was alone, with his movies characterized by unique features. Integrated as a director, writer and actor, he had directed more than forty movies during his sixty-year-long professional career, having exhibited his value and attitude toward the world through these movies. When Allen is mentioned, most movie fans may just express their respect to such a world famous director with such words as"talent","great"or even "master". In the movies made by Allen, he explored and discussed ethnic, value of love, living difficulties and desires etc. Such movies impress us with kind of estrangement from the main cultural stream. However, the unique style of his movies made him deserve respect as a movie maker.Presently, many home scholars have focused on study of Woody Allen with respect to his image as an intellectual, his Bergman-style tragedies and Chaplinesque comedies, but special study in his movie arts remains almost blank. Therefore, I start with insights into the thoughts and cultural backgrounds in Allen's movies, unscramble his representative works and consequently summarize the thematic thought in his movies.This paper is innovative in first application of affected system nature theory to analyze movie types, and analysis of the philosophy contained in the movies with Jewish view in good and bad and Maslow's motivation theory. In this paper, five parts are presented: Chapter I gives a brief introduction to Woody Allen under Hollywood background; Chapter II describes his transformation regarding his life story as a director on a ten-year basis; Chapter III analyzes the cultural theme in Allen's movies; Chapter IV details the artistic features in Allen's movies, his directing style and depicting methods; Chapter V gives a summary of the above. In a word, this paper aims to present substantial arts in Woody Allen's movies to eyes.