February 13 – Melinda and Melinda – Film series: Woody Allen: portraits, stories and memories – Ateneo de Santander

“Melinda and Melinda” (VOS)

Director: Woody Allen, 2004

Cast: Radha Mitchell, Will Ferrell, Amanda Peet, Chloë Sevigny, Wallace Shawn, Zak Orth, Brooke Smith, Vinessa Shaw, Jonny Lee Miller, Chiwetel Ejiofor.

SYNOPSIS:

Melinda (Radha Mitchell) suffers two completely different crises that give rise to comic and dramatic situations, which serve to address recurring issues in Allen’s cinema: the fragility of love, infidelity within marriage, sophisticated romance, lack of communication.

Free entry with mandatory sanitary measures.

Woody Allen: portraits, stories and memories

Woody Allen’s auteur universe, as well as his most recurring thematic and stylistic concerns, will be addressed in a monographic cycle of six films during the months of January and February at the Ateneo de Santander.

Allen is one of the longest-serving active directors (fifty feature films since his debut in 1969) and one of the most internationally prestigious (four Oscars from the Hollywood Academy, three of them as a screenwriter and Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2002 ).

Throughout five decades, Allen has touched all genres (comedy, psychological drama, melodrama, musical, thriller…) and adopted a great diversity of narrative and visual forms, testing the conventions of classic genres with different conceptual purposes and methods. . On the other hand, he pampers the acting aspect by carefully choosing the actors and actresses, whom she masterfully directs.

Allen created an archetype that he updated over time: that of a Jewish intellectual, neurotic, shy, insecure, vulnerable, with difficulties establishing lasting relationships with women, a hypochondriac, also obsessed with death, addicted to the asphalt culture and a lover of cinema and jazz.

It will be an opportunity, therefore, to investigate some of the constants of his cinema: relationships, psychoanalysis, fear of aging, religion and the existence of God…

As usual, the screenings of the cycle, in the original version with subtitles, will be preceded by presentations by

The projections of the cycle, in the original version with subtitles, will be preceded by presentations by the journalist and film critic Guillermo Balbona and the director of the Cinema Classroom of the University of Cantabria, Guillermo Martínez, who will carry out a historical contextualization of the works, to then comment in the subsequent talk-discussion on issues related to the most relevant thematic and stylistic aspects of each film.

Santander Athenaeum.