8 - The Silent (Film) Woman: Sweet and Lowdown’s Mute Muse

Summary

Abstract

This paper examines the absence of the female voice and Morton's nostalgic performance style to explore the ways in which Hattie is at once a problematic inclusion in Allen's cinema and a romanticization of the female performances of silent cinema. Woody Allen's cinema is primarily defined through its dialogue rather than its visual or sonic qualities. Similarly, Allen's female characters are often defined through talk or through the quality of their voices. In some regard, therefore, Samantha Morton's performance as Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown (1999) is something of an anomaly in Allen's oeuvre as a lead female character who does not speak.

Keywords: silent film, voice, performance

Claire Dederer's Paris Review blog, ‘What Do We Do with the Arts of Monstrous Men?’ (2017), raises several pertinent questions of the difficulty of consuming work by male artists whose crimes or moral transgressions are public knowledge and how difficult it becomes to continue to praise their work. As she says, the ‘awful thing disrupts the great work’. The piece discusses how Dederer felt ‘betrayed’ by Woody Allen's affair with Soon-Yi Previn and how the subsequent allegations involving Dylan Farrow produced ‘elemental’ feelings in her. Dederer talks subsequently about revisiting Allen's work, of paying to watch Annie Hall (1977), and how she experiences a lack of fairness in having to give up something she sees as ‘the greatest comic film of the twentieth century’, but watching Manhattan (1979) feels so transformed by what came after and she concludes that ‘its pro-girl anti-woman story would be upsetting even if Hurricane Soon-Yi had never made landfall, but we can't know, and there lies the very heart of the matter’. Dederer cannot approach the work without its history, without the accumulative biographical knowledge that makes re-watching or paying for the work feel immoral: ‘What do I do about the monster? Do I have a responsibility either way?