Watching all of Woody Allen's films in order: Wild Man Blues (1997)

Then My copy of Wild Man Blues was recorded from analogue S4C (which was the only version of Channel 4 I could pick up at the time on my portable ariel) in 2000 which the ever useful BFI database suggests was in and around the 8th January. It was part of a double bill with Sex*. The ad breaks are a fascinating mix of the Nick Broomfield car promos and low budget adverts for local carpet manufacturers and there are interjections from the course of what looks like a Welsh Golf Tournament. The print they used had a fault, a small white dot near the top right hand corner of the screen which is ever present and watching it again I genuinely thought it was a dead pixel on my new television until it disappeared at the end of the film.

Now Wild Man Blues fits within my on-going assumption that Woody, knowing that he had the capacity to produce a film a year, far more than most auteurs, consciously or otherwise, had decided to work his way through the genres and it was simply time for the documentary. He couldn’t direct it himself, so Barbara Kopple is the person given access, but the film was produced by his then collaborator and friend Jean Doumanian and describes the 1996 European tour of his New Orleans Jazz Band, something which with a few tweeks could just as easily be the plot of one of his films. With its handheld camera style, jazz soundtrack, and unusual situations, this is a Woody Allen film through and through.

To an extent Kopple is deliberately homaging some of the elements of the style of her subject. But even Woody, after some initial wariness, seems to shift into something akin to the version of himself that appears on screen. Less deliberately funny perhaps, but as he stumbles gaping about hotel suites big enough to accommodate swimming pools and greets his adoring fans it eventually becomes increasingly difficult to see the extent to which he’s being himself or deliberately playing for the camera. Certainly his relationship with Soon Yi and his sister Letty Aronson, his constant companions, are analogous to Diane Keaton and Julie Kavner and Kopple seems to have edited in those situations that are of the kind you'd expect to find in one of his films.

The concert footage showcases the style of Woody and his band and though he’s very self-deprecating about his abilities to these lay-ears his technique is very good indeed and certainly good enough to convince one concert goer in Madrid whose cynicism is turned right around. One interesting omission is rehearsal footage and material about the mechanics of creating the tour. The implication is that Woody turns up at the venue each evening and plays which creates a certain mystique, I suppose, but doesn’t quite fit with my understand of how these tours work out. We rarely get the sense of the band as a cohesive unit and as Soon-Yi notes early on, he spends much of his time talking to leader Eddy Davis who then relays his thoughts to the rest of the group.

Whatever the truth or fiction, a very complex figure emerges. On the one hand he seems to shamble about, apparently unable to make decisions and offer some courtesies, such as visiting a crowd who are waiting to see him outside a hotel, without some encouragement from someone in his entourage, yet he’ll jump from a gondola to quietly admonish a photographer who’s paying too close attention to his visit to Venice. But he’s apparently not a prima donna; when he greets partially edible food he tends to make a joke rather than send it back and much of the time approaches the fact that, like a rock star, he can’t walk down most of the streets without a crowd forming with good humour because he knows full well that his later career is built on European adulation.