| Name | Sigmund Freud |
|---|---|
| Caption | Sigmund Freud, by Max Halberstadt, 1921 |
| Birth name | Sigismund Schlomo Freud |
| Birth date | May 06, 1856 |
| Birth place | Freiberg in Mähren, Moravia, Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic) |
| Death date | September 23, 1939 |
| Death place | London, England, UK |
| Residence | Austria, UK |
| Nationality | Austrian |
| Ethnicity | Ashkenazi Jew |
| Fields | Neurology Psychiatry Psychology Psychotherapy Psychoanalysis |
| Workplaces | University of Vienna |
| Alma mater | University of Vienna |
| Known for | Psychoanalysis |
| Influences | Breuer, Charcot, Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Haeckel, Hartmann, Jackson, Kant, Mayer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Sophocles, J.P. Jacobsen |
| Influenced | John Bowlby Viktor Frankl Anna Freud Arthur Janov Ernest Jones Carl Jung Melanie Klein Jacques Lacan Fritz Perls Otto Rank Wilhelm Reich |
| Awards | Goethe Prize |
| Religion | Atheist |
| Signature | FreudSignature.png |
While many of Freud's ideas have fallen out of favor or been modified by other analysts, and modern advances in the field of psychology have shown flaws in some of his theories, his work remains influential in clinical approaches, and in the humanities and social sciences. He is considered one of the most prominent thinkers of the 20th century, in terms of originality and intellectual influence.
His father, Jacob, was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a previous marriage. His mother, Amalié (née Nathansohn), the second wife of Jakob, was 21. He was the first of their eight children and, in accordance with tradition, his parents favored him over his siblings from the early stages of his childhood. Despite their poverty, they sacrificed everything to give him a proper education. Due to the economic crisis of 1857, Freud's father lost his business, and the family moved to Leipzig before settling in Vienna.
In 1865, Freud entered the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium, a prominent high school. He was an outstanding pupil and graduated the Matura in 1873 with honors.
After planning to study law, Freud joined the medical faculty at University of Vienna to study under Darwinist Prof. Karl Claus. At that time, the eel life cycle was unknown and Freud spent four weeks at the Austrian zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an unsuccessful search for their male reproductive organs.
Freud began smoking at 24; he smoked cigarettes at first, but later switched exclusively to cigars. Freud believed that smoking enhanced his capacity to work and ability to muster self-control, and continued despite warnings from Wilhelm Fliess.
In October 1885, Freud went to Paris on a traveling fellowship to study with Europe's most renowned neurologist and researcher of hypnosis, Jean-Martin Charcot. He was later to remember the experience of this stay as catalytic in turning him toward the practice of medical psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in neurology research. Charcot specialised in the study of hysteria and susceptibility to hypnosis, which he frequently demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience. Freud later turned away from hypnosis as a potential cure for mental illness, instead favouring free association and dream analysis. Charcot himself questioned his own work on hysteria towards the end of his life.
After opening his own medical practice, specializing in neurology, Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886. Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays, chief rabbi in Hamburg.
After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients, Freud abandoned this form of treatment as it proved ineffective for many, he favored treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure" and the ultimate goal of this talking was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected or imprisoned in the unconscious mind. Freud called this denial of emotions "repression", and he believed that it was an impediment to the normal functioning of the psyche, even capable of causing physical retardation which he described as "psychosomatic". The term "talking cure" was initially coined by a patient, Anna O., who was treated by Freud's colleague Josef Breuer. The "talking cure" is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysis.
Carl Jung initiated the rumor that a romantic relationship may have developed between Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who had moved into Freud's apartment at 19 Berggasse in 1896. Psychologist Hans Eysenck suggested that the affair occurred, resulting in an aborted pregnancy for Miss Bernays.
In his 40s, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias". In that time, Freud was exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize a hostility he felt towards his father, Jacob Freud, who had died in 1896. He also recalled "his childhood sexual feelings for his mother, Amalia Freud, who was attractive, warm, and protective." Freud considered this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in his life.
After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1905, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. However, Freud often clashed with those supporters who critiqued his theories, the most famous being Carl Jung, who had originally supported Freud's ideas. Part of the disagreement between the two was in Jung's interest and commitment to religion, which Freud saw as unscientific.
In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss. This led to violent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Vienna, and Freud and his family received visits from the Gestapo. Freud decided to go into exile "to die in freedom". In this goal, he was fortuitously assisted by Anton Sauerwald, a Nazi official given control over all Freud's assets in Austria. Sauerwald, however, was not an ordinary Nazi; while "he had made bombs for the Nazi movement, he had also studied medicine, chemistry and law."
At the University of Vienna, Sauerwald had been a student of Professor Josef Herzig, who often visited Freud to play cards. Sauerwald did not disclose to his Nazi superiors that Freud had many secret bank accounts and disobeyed a Nazi directive to have Freud's books on psychoanalysis destroyed.
Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in England during a service attended by Austrian refugees, including the author Stefan Zweig. His ashes were later placed in the crematorium's columbarium. They rest in an ancient Greek urn that Freud received as a present from Marie Bonaparte, and which he had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After Martha Freud's death in 1951, her ashes were also placed in the urn.
Freud began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna. He took nine years to complete his studies, due to his interest in neurophysiological research, specifically investigation of the sexual anatomy of eels and the physiology of the fish nervous system. He entered private practice in neurology for financial reasons, receiving his M.D. degree in 1881 at the age of 25. He was also an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed long before other researchers of the period began to notice and study it. He also suggested that William Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about lack of oxygen during birth being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom.
Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring repressed thoughts and feelings into consciousness in order to free the patient from suffering repetitive distorted emotions.
Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging a patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is lesser direct involvement on the part of the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, transference, the patient can discover and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts involving parents.
The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Josef Breuer. Freud credited Breuer with opening the way to the discovery of the psychoanalytical method by his treatment of the case of Anna O. In November 1880 Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman (Bertha Pappenheim) for a persistent cough which he diagnosed as hysterical. He found that while nursing her dying father she had developed a number of transitory symptoms, including visual disorders and paralysis and contractures of limbs, which he also diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer began to see his patient almost every day as the symptoms increased and became more persistent, and observed that she entered states of absence. He found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories in her evening states of absence her condition improved, and most of her symptoms had disappeared by April 1881. However, following the death of her father in that month her condition deteriorated again. Breuer recorded that some of the symptoms eventually remitted spontaneously, and that full recovery was achieved by inducing her to recall events that had precipitated the occurrence of a specific symptom. In the years immediately following Breuer's treatment, Anna O. spent three short periods in sanatoria with the diagnosis "hysteria" with "somatic symptoms," and some authors have challenged Breuer's published account of a cure. (A contrary view has been published by Richard Skues.)
In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique" and his newly developed analytic technique of interpretation and reconstruction. According to Freud's later accounts of this period, as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but then came to believe that they were fantasies. He explained these at first as having the function of "fending off" memories of infantile masturbation, but in later years he wrote that they represented Oedipal fantasies.
Another version of events focuses on Freud's proposing that unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse were at the root of the psychoneuroses in letters to Wilhelm Fliess in October 1895, before he reported that he had actually discovered such abuse among his patients. In the first half of 1896 Freud published three papers stating that he had uncovered, in all of his current patients, deeply repressed memories of sexual abuse in early childhood. In these papers Freud recorded that his patients were not consciously aware of these memories, and must therefore be present as unconscious memories if they were to result in hysterical symptoms or obsessional neurosis. The patients were subjected to considerable pressure to "reproduce" infantile sexual abuse "scenes" that Freud was convinced had been repressed into the unconscious. Patients were generally unconvinced that their experiences of Freud's clinical procedure indicated actual sexual abuse. He reported that even after a supposed "reproduction" of sexual scenes the patients assured him emphatically of their disbelief.
As well as his pressure technique, Freud's clinical procedures involved analytic inference and the symbolic interpretation of symptoms to trace back to memories of infantile sexual abuse. His claim of one hundred percent confirmation of his theory only served to reinforce previously expressed reservations from his colleagues about the validity of findings obtained through his suggestive techniques.
Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". This meant that dreams illustrate the "logic" of the unconscious mind. Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it. The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought; its contents could be accessed with a little effort.
One key factor in the operation of the unconscious is "repression". Freud believed that many people "repress" painful memories deep into their unconscious mind. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that repression varies among individual patients. Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a person's consciousness. Thus, people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences.
Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious: the descriptive unconscious, the dynamic unconscious, and the system unconscious. The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific construct, referred to mental processes and contents that are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed, they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement.
Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the ego, super-ego, and id. Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.
Freud originally posited childhood sexual abuse as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently explanatory. He noted finding many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events. During the late 1890s Freud, who never abandoned his belief in the sexual etiology of neuroses, began to emphasize fantasies built around the Oedipus complex as the primary cause of hysteria and other neurotic symptoms. Despite this change in his explanatory model, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had in fact been sexually abused by their fathers. He explicitly discussed several patients whom he knew to have been abused.
Freud also believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object, a process codified by the concept of sublimation. He argued that humans are born "polymorphously perverse", meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development—first in the oral stage (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the anal stage (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the phallic stage. Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. (The term 'Electra complex' is sometimes used to refer to such a fixation on the father, although Freud did not advocate its use.) The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.
Freud's views have sometimes been called phallocentric. This is because, for Freud, the unconscious desires the phallus (penis). Males are afraid of losing their masculinity, symbolized by the phallus, to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus—an unfulfillable desire. Thus boys resent their fathers (fear of castration) and girls desire theirs.
The term ego entered the English language in the late 18th century; Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) described the game of chess as a way to "...keep the mind fit and the ego in check". Freud acknowledged that his use of the term Id (das Es, "the It") derives from the writings of Georg Groddeck. The term Id appears in the earliest writing of Boris Sidis, in which it is attributed to William James, as early as 1898.
The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego; it is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected most directly in a person's actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employ defense mechanisms including denial, repression, and displacement. The theory of ego defense mechanisms has received empirical validation, and the nature of repression, in particular, became one of the more fiercely debated areas of psychology in the 1990s.
Freud recognized the death drive only in his later years and developed his theory of it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Freud approached the paradox between the life drives and the death drives by defining pleasure and unpleasure. According to Freud, unpleasure refers to stimulus that the body receives. (For example, excessive friction on the skin's surface produces a burning sensation; or, the bombardment of visual stimuli amidst rush hour traffic produces anxiety.)
Conversely, pleasure is a result of a decrease in stimuli (for example, a calm environment the body enters after having been subjected to a hectic environment). If pleasure increases as stimuli decreases, then the ultimate experience of pleasure for Freud would be zero stimulus, or death.
Given this proposition, Freud acknowledged the tendency for the unconscious to repeat unpleasurable experiences in order to desensitize, or deaden, the body. This compulsion to repeat unpleasurable experiences explains why traumatic nightmares occur in dreams, as nightmares seem to contradict Freud's earlier conception of dreams purely as a site of pleasure, fantasy, and desire. On the one hand, the life drives promote survival by avoiding extreme unpleasure and any threat to life. On the other hand, the death drive functions simultaneously toward extreme pleasure, which leads to death. Freud addressed the conceptual dualities of pleasure and unpleasure, as well as sex/life and death, in his discussions on masochism and sadomasochism. The tension between life drive and death drive represented a revolution in his manner of thinking.
These ideas resemble aspects of the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, expounded in The World as Will and Representation, describes a renunciation of the will to live that corresponds on many levels with Freud's Death Drive. Similarly, the life drive clearly parallels much of Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in The Birth of Tragedy. However, Freud denied having been acquainted with their writings before he formulated the groundwork of his own ideas.
Betty Friedan also criticised Freud and what she considered his Victorian slant on women in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Freud's concept of penis envy was attacked by Kate Millett, whose 1970 book Sexual Politics accused him of confusion and oversights. Naomi Weisstein writes that Freud and his followers erroneously thought that his "years of intensive clinical experience" added up to scientific rigor. Juliet Mitchell defended Freud against Friedan, Millett and other feminist critics, and accused them of misreading him.
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen writes in a review of Han Israëls's book Der Fall Freud published in The London Review of Books that, "The truth is that Freud knew from the very start that Fleischl, Anna O. and his 18 patients were not cured, and yet he did not hesitate to build grand theories on these non-existent foundations...he disguised fragments of his self-analysis as ‘objective’ cases, that he concealed his sources, that he conveniently antedated some of his analyses, that he sometimes attributed to his patients ‘free associations’ that he himself made up, that he inflated his therapeutic successes, that he slandered his opponents."
David Stafford-Clark writes that, "Psychoanalysis was and will always be Freud's original creation. Its discovery, exploration, investigation, and constant revision formed his life's work. It is manifest injustice, as well as wantonly insulting, to commend psychoanalysis, still less to invoke it 'without too much of Freud'." It's like supporting the theory of evolution 'without too much of Darwin'. If psychoanalysis is to be treated seriously at all, one must take into account, both seriously and with equal objectivity, the original theories of Sigmund Freud.
Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe write that, "The story of Freud and the creation of psychodynamic therapy, as told by its adherents, is a self-serving myth".
Jacques Lacan saw attempts to locate pathology in, and then to cure, the individual as more characteristic of American ego psychology than of proper psychoanalysis. For Lacan, psychoanalysis involved "self-discovery" and even social criticism, and it succeeded insofar as it provided emancipatory self-awareness.
One influential post-Freudian psychotherapy has been psychologist Arthur Janov's primal therapy. Joel Kovel writes that Janov's work was compared to Freud's by the Chattanooga Times and the Berkeley Gazette. According to Kovel, primal therapy resembles psychoanalytic therapy in its emphasis on early childhood experience, but nevertheless has profound differences with it. While Janov's theory is akin to Freud's early idea of Actualneurosis, he does not have a dynamic psychology but a nature psychology in which need is primary while wish is derivative and disepensible when need is met. Despite its surface similarity to Freud's ideas, Janov's theory lacks a strictly psychological account of the unconscious and belief in infantile sexuality. While for Freud there was a hierarchy of danger situations, for Janov the key event in the child's life is awareness that the parents do not love it.
Freud's model of the mind is often considered a challenge to the enlightenment model of rational agency, which was a key element of much modern philosophy. Freud's theories have had a tremendous effect on the Frankfurt school and critical theory. Following the "return to Freud" of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Freud had an incisive influence on some French philosophers.
Freud once openly admitted to avoiding the work of Nietzsche, "whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing way with the laborious findings of psychoanalysis".
Freud used pseudonyms in his case histories. Many of the people identified only by pseudonyms were traced to their true identities by Peter Swales. Some patients known by pseudonyms were Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim, 1859–1936); Cäcilie M. (Anna von Lieben); Dora (Ida Bauer, 1882–1945); Frau Emmy von N. (Fanny Moser); Fräulein Elisabeth von R. (Ilona Weiss); Fräulein Katharina (Aurelia Kronich); Fräulein Lucy R.; (Herbert Graf, 1903–1973); Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer, 1878–1914); and Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff, 1887–1979). Other famous patients included H.D. (1886–1961); Emma Eckstein (1865–1924); Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), with whom Freud had only a single, extended consultation; and Princess Marie Bonaparte. Critics of Freud argue that, among all his patients, Freud was "unable to document a single unambiguously efficacious treatment".
People on whom psychoanalytic observations were published, but who were not patients, included Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911); Giordano Bruno, Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), on whom Freud co-authored an analysis with primary writer William Bullitt; Michelangelo, whom Freud analyzed in his essay, "The Moses of Michelangelo"; Leonardo da Vinci, analyzed in Freud's book, Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood; Moses, in Freud's book, Moses and Monotheism; and Josef Popper-Lynkeus, in Freud's paper, "Josef Popper-Lynkeus and the Theory of Dreams".
Around 1910, Alfred Adler began to pay attention to some of the conscious personality factors and gradually deviated from Freud's basic ideas, including the perceptions of the importance of infant hunger for life and the driving force of unconscious cruelty. Adler eventually realized that his views were different from Freud's, and started a system he called Individual psychology. In 1912 Jung published Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (published in English in 1916 as Psychology of the Unconscious) and it became clear that his views were taking a direction quite different from those of Freud. To distinguish his system from psychoanalysis, Jung called it analytical psychology.
Another follower of Freud was Karen Horney, one of whose primary contributions was to introduce a new method of psychoanalysis—introspection. Horney believed that in some cases, the patient is able to continue the analysis without the supervision of the doctor, if he has already mastered the technique. She claimed that some people can achieve a clear understanding of their unconscious stress without the supervision of experienced analysts. Horney is now considered a Neo-Freudian.
Category:Austrian psychoanalysts Category:Narcissism Category:Foreign Members of the Royal Society Category:Jewish atheists Category:Austrian atheists Category:Jews who emigrated to the United Kingdom to escape Nazism Category:Austrian Jews Category:People from Příbor Category:People of the Edwardian era Category:1856 births Category:1939 deaths
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| Name | Shepard Smith |
|---|---|
| Caption | Shepard Smith hosting Studio B |
| Birthname | David Shepard Smith Jr. |
| Birth date | January 14, 1964 |
| Birth place | Holly Springs, Mississippi, USA |
| Education | University of Mississippi (did not graduate) |
| Occupation | News anchor for Fox News Channel |
| Alias | Shep |
| Salary | US$7 to 8 million |
| Credits | • Studio B anchor • The Fox Report anchor |
| Url | http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,1260,00.html |
David Shepard Smith, Jr. (born January 14, 1964), known better as Shepard Smith, is an American television news anchor. He is host of Fox Report with Shepard Smith and Studio B weekdays on Fox News Channel. In addition, he anchors the 5:00 p.m. ET weekday news update on Fox News Radio, also titled Fox Report.
Smith has been assigned to cover many major news stories during his career. In 1997, he reported on the death and funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. In November 2000, he was sent to Florida to cover the Florida ballot counting controversy during the United States Presidential election. In 2001, he traveled to Terre Haute, Indiana, to be one of the media witnesses to the execution of Timothy McVeigh. In late August 2005, he spent a little over a week in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, to provide news reports on the events and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
The Fox Report with Shepard Smith remains the top-rated newscast in cable news and is ranked third in the top programs in U.S. cable news. Shepard Smith tied for second (along with Dan Rather and Peter Jennings) as the most trusted news anchor on both network and cable news in a 2003 TV Guide poll. In addition to anchoring Fox News Channel's flagship news program, Smith also anchors most prime time news presentations provided by Fox News for the Fox television network.
On November 19, 2007, The New York Times reported that Smith had signed a three-year contract giving him between US$7 and 8 million per year. This contract places Smith into the same pay league as anchor Brian Williams of NBC and former anchor Charles Gibson of ABC.
Category:1964 births Category:American television news anchors Category:American television reporters and correspondents Category:Fox News Channel Category:Living people Category:People from Holly Springs, Mississippi Category:Fox News Channel people
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
| Name | Woody Allen |
|---|---|
| Caption | Allen at the 2009 premiere of Whatever Works |
| Nationality | |
| Birth name | Allen Stewart Konigsberg |
| Birth date | December 01, 1935 |
| Birth place | Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor Director Screenwriter Comedian Musician Playwright |
| Years active | 1950–present |
| Spouse | Harlene Rosen (1954–1959) Louise Lasser (1966–1969) Soon-Yi Previn (1997–present) |
Woody Allen (born Allen Stewart Konigsberg; December 1, 1935) is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright.
Allen’s distinctive films, which run the gamut from dramas to screwball sex comedies, have made him a notable American director. He is also distinguished by his rapid rate of production and his very large body of work. Allen writes and directs his movies and has also acted in the majority of them. For inspiration, Allen draws heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema, among a wealth of other fields of interest.
Allen developed a passion for music early on and is a celebrated jazz clarinetist. What began as a teenage avocation has led to regular public performances at various small venues in his hometown of Manhattan, with occasional appearances at various jazz festivals. Allen joined the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the New Orleans Funeral Ragtime Orchestra in performances that provided the film score for his 1973 comedy Sleeper, and performed in a rare European tour in 1996, which became the subject of the documentary Wild Man Blues.
To raise money he began writing gags for the agent David O. Alber, who sold them to newspaper columnists. According to Allen, his first published joke read: “Woody Allen says he ate at a restaurant that had O.P.S. prices – over people’s salaries.”
He began to call himself Woody Allen. He was an extremely talented young comedian and would later joke that when he was young he was often sent to inter-faith summer camps, where he “was savagely beaten by children of all races and creeds.”
After high school, he attended New York University (NYU), where he studied communication and film. He was never a committed student: he failed a film course and was eventually expelled. He later briefly attended City College of New York and eventually taught at The New School. He also studied with writing teacher Lajos Egri.
In 1961, he started a new career as a stand-up comedian, debuting in a Greenwich Village club called the Duplex.
Allen wrote for the popular Candid Camera television show, and appeared in some episodes. Together with his managers, Allen developed a neurotic, nervous, and intellectual persona for his stand-up routine, a successful move which secured regular gigs for him in nightclubs and on television.
Allen started writing short stories and cartoon captions for magazines such as The New Yorker; he was particularly inspired by the tradition of four prominent New Yorker’s humorists, S. J. Perelman, George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley and Max Shulman, whose material he modernized. Allen is also an accomplished author having published four collections of his short pieces and plays. These are Getting Even, Without Feathers, Side Effects and Mere Anarchy. His early comic fiction was heavily influenced by the zany, pun-ridden humour of S.J. Perelman. Allen brought significant innovation to the comedy monologue genre and his stand-up comedy is considered highly influential.
He has written several one-act plays, including 'Riverside Drive' and 'Old Saybrook' which both explore well-known Allen themes. They have been produced in England for the first time by The Nuffield Theatre, a south-coast art house theatre, Southampton (September 2010) and directed by Patrick Sandord.
Allen directed Take the Money and Run in 1969. That same year he starred in his own TV special, The Woody Allen Special. On the show he performed standup comedy routines before a live audience and acted in a sketch with Candace Bergen in which they appeared nude but their bodies were kept hidden from view by the camera. The special also had guest appearances by the pop vocal group The 5th Dimension singing their hit singles “Workin’ On A Groovy Thing” and “Wedding Bell Blues”. The show’s sponsor, Libby's, broadcast comical commercials starring Tony Randall as a detective.
From 1971 to 1975 Allen directed Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), Sleeper, and Love and Death. Take the Money and Run and Bananas were co-written by his childhood friend, Mickey Rose.
Stardust Memories features Sandy Bates, a successful filmmaker played by Allen, who expresses resentment and scorn for his fans. Overcome by the recent death of a friend from illness, the character states, “I don’t want to make funny movies any more” and a running gag has various people (including a group of visiting space aliens) telling Bates that they appreciate his films, “especially the early, funny ones.” Allen believes this to be one of his best films.
By the mid-1980s, Allen had begun to combine tragic and comic elements with the release of such films as Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which he tells two stories that connect at the end. He also produced a vividly idiosyncratic tragi-comical parody of documentary, titled Zelig.
He made three films about show business; Broadway Danny Rose, in which he plays a New York show business agent, The Purple Rose of Cairo, a movie that shows the importance of the cinema during the Depression through the character of the naive Cecilia, and Radio Days, which is a film about his childhood in Brooklyn and the importance of the radio. Purple Rose was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best films of all time and Allen has described it as one of his three best films, along with Stardust Memories and Match Point. (Allen defines them as “best” not in terms of quality but because they came out the closest to his original vision.)
Before the end of the ‘80s, he made other movies that were inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s films. September resembles Autumn Sonata and Allen uses many elements from Wild Strawberries in Another Woman. Similarly, the Federico Fellini classic Amarcord strongly inspired Radio Days. In 1989, Allen teamed up with directors Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese to make New York Stories, an anthology film about New Yorkers. Allen's short "Oedipus Wrecks" was about a neurotic lawyer and his critical mother. His short pleased critics, but New York Stories had bombed at the box office.
He returned to lighter movies like Bullets Over Broadway (1994), which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Director, followed by a musical, Everyone Says I Love You (1996). The singing and dancing scenes in Everyone Says I Love You are similar to many musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The comedy Mighty Aphrodite (1995), in which Greek drama plays a large role, won an Academy Award for Mira Sorvino. Allen’s 1999 jazz-based comedy-drama Sweet and Lowdown was also nominated for two Academy Awards for Sean Penn (Best Actor) and Samantha Morton (Best Supporting Actress). In contrast to these lighter movies, Allen veered into darker satire towards the end of the decade with Deconstructing Harry (1997) and Celebrity (1998). Allen made his only sitcom “appearance” to date (2009) via telephone on the show Just Shoot Me! in a 1997 episode, “My Dinner with Woody” which paid tribute to several of his films. Allen also provided the lead voice in the 1998 animated film Antz, which featured many actors he had worked with and had Allen play a character that was similar to his earlier neurotic roles.
Allen returned to London to film Scoop, which also starred Johansson, Hugh Jackman, Ian McShane, Kevin McNally and Allen himself (which remains to be the last film Allen has acted in). The film was released on July 28, 2006 and received mixed reviews. He has also filmed Cassandra's Dream in London. Cassandra’s Dream was released in November 2007 and stars Colin Farrell, Ewan McGregor and Tom Wilkinson.
After finishing his third London film, Allen headed to Spain. He reached an agreement to film Vicky Cristina Barcelona in Avilés, Barcelona and Oviedo, where shooting started on July 9, 2007. The movie stars Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Rebecca Hall and Penélope Cruz. Speaking of his experience there, Allen said: “I’m delighted at being able to work with Mediapro and make a film in Spain, a country which has become so special to me.” Vicky Cristina Barcelona was well received, winning “Best Musical or Comedy” at the Golden Globe awards. Penélope Cruz received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the film.
Allen has said that he “survives” on the European market. Audiences there have tended to be more receptive to Allen’s films, particularly in Spain, France and Italy; countries where he has a large audience (something joked about in Hollywood Ending). “In the United States things have changed a lot, and it’s hard to make good small films now”, Allen said in a 2004 interview. “The avaricious studios couldn’t care less about good films – if they get a good film they’re twice as happy but money-making films are their goal. They only want these $100 million pictures that make $500 million.”
In April 2008, he began filming for a movie focused more towards older audiences starring Larry David, Patricia Clarkson and Evan Rachel Wood. He revealed in July 2008 the title of this film, to be released in 2009: Whatever Works, described as a dark comedy, follows the story of a botched suicide attempt turned messy love triangle. Whatever Works was written by Allen in the 1970s and the character now played by Larry David was originally written for Zero Mostel, who died the year Annie Hall came out.
Annie Hall won four Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Actress). The film received a fifth nomination, for Allen as Best Actor. Hannah and Her Sisters won three, for Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories; it was nominated in four other categories, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Despite friendly recognition from the Academy, Allen has consistently refused to attend the ceremony or acknowledge his Oscar wins. He broke this pattern only once. At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2002, Allen made an unannounced appearance, making a plea for producers to continue filming their movies in New York City after the 9-11 attacks, where he stated, “I didn’t have to present anything. I didn’t have to accept anything. I just had to talk about New York City.” He was given a standing ovation before introducing a montage of movie clips featuring New York.
In the ‘70s, Allen wrote a number of one-act plays, most notably God and Death, which were published in his 1975 collection Without Feathers.
In 1981, Allen’s play The Floating Light Bulb opened on Broadway. The play was a critical success but a commercial flop. Despite two Tony Award nominations, a Tony win for the acting of Brian Backer (who also won the 1981 Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award for his work), the play only ran for 62 performances. As of January 2008, it is the last Allen work that ran on Broadway.
After a long hiatus from the stage, Allen returned to the theater in 1995 with the one-act Central Park West, an installment in an evening of theater known as Death Defying Acts that was also made up of new work by David Mamet and Elaine May.
For the next couple of years, Allen had no direct involvement with the stage, yet notable productions of his work were being staged. A production of God was staged at The Bank of Brazil Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro, and theatrical adaptations of Allen’s films Bullets over Broadway and September were produced in Italy and France, respectively, without Allen’s involvement. In 1997, rumors of Allen returning to the theater to write a starring role for his wife Soon-Yi Previn turned out to be false.
In 2003, Allen finally returned to the stage with Writer’s Block, an evening of two one-acts – Old Saybrook and Riverside Drive – that played off-Broadway. The production marked the stage-directing debut for Allen. The production sold out its entire run.
Also that year, reports of Allen writing the book for a musical based on Bullets over Broadway surfaced, but no show ever formulated. In 2004, Allen’s first full-length play since 1981, A Second Hand Memory, was directed by Allen and enjoyed an extended run off-Broadway. – which debuted at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on September 6, 2008. Commenting on his direction of the opera, Allen said, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” His production of the opera opened the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, in June 2009.
After Allen and Farrow separated, a long public legal battle for the custody of their three children began. During the proceedings, Farrow alleged that Allen had sexually molested their adopted daughter Dylan, who was then seven years old. The judge eventually concluded that the sex abuse charges were inconclusive but called Allen’s conduct with Soon-Yi “grossly inappropriate”. She called the report of the team that investigated the issue “sanitized and therefore, less credible” and added that she had “reservations about the reliability of the report”. Farrow won custody of their children. Allen was denied visitation rights with Malone and could see Ronan only under supervision. Moses, who was then 14, chose not to see Allen.
In a 2005 Vanity Fair interview, Allen estimated that, despite the scandal’s damage to his reputation, Farrow’s discovery of Allen’s attraction to Soon-Yi Previn by finding nude photographs of her was “just one of the fortuitous events, one of the great pieces of luck in my life. [...] It was a turning point for the better.” Of his relationship with Farrow, he said, “I’m sure there are things that I might have done differently. [...] Probably in retrospect I should have bowed out of that relationship much earlier than I did.”
Allen and Previn married on December 24, 1997, in the Palazzo Cavalli in Venice. The couple has adopted two daughters, naming them Bechet and Manzie after jazz musicians Sidney Bechet and Manzie Johnson.
Allen and Farrow’s biological son, Ronan Seamus Farrow, said of Allen: "He's my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression. I cannot see him. I cannot have a relationship with my father and be morally consistent... I lived with all these adopted children, so they are my family. To say Soon-Yi was not my sister is an insult to all adopted children."
and Simon Wettenhall performing at Vienne Jazz Festival, Vienne, France, September 20, 2003]]
Woody Allen and his New Orleans Jazz Band play every Monday evening at Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel, specializing in classic New Orleans jazz from the early twentieth century. The documentary film Wild Man Blues (directed by Barbara Kopple) documents a 1996 European tour by Allen and his band, as well as his relationship with Previn. The band has released two CDs: The Bunk Project (1993) and the soundtrack of Wild Man Blues (1997).
Allen and his band played the Montreal Jazz Festival on two consecutive nights in June 2008.
Waiting for Woody Allen is a 2004 short film, starring Modi Rosenfeld, parodying Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. From 1976 to 1984, Stuart Hample wrote and drew Inside Woody Allen, a comic strip based on Allen’s film persona. Central Park West Stories (Baldini Castoldi Dalai publisher, 2005) by Glauco Della Sciucca (Italian contributor to Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker, and The Jewish Week, since September 2003) are inspired by Allen. “Death of an Interior Decorator” is a song on Death Cab for Cutie’s album Transatlanticism that was inspired by Woody Allen’s Interiors. Andy Hull, singer and songwriter for Manchester Orchestra, cites Allen as his top musical inspiration, and has written several songs in observance including: “Alice and Interiors”, “Play it Again Sam! You Don’t Have Any Feathers”, “Golden Ticket”, and “Sleeper 1972”. In Love Creeps, a novel by Amanda Filipacchi, a group of birders in Central Park spot Woody Allen and Soon-Yi stepping out onto their balcony and get very excited, which torments a nearby group of recovering stalkers from Stalkaholics Anonymous, causing one of them to suddenly lose his sobriety by grabbing the binoculars from around the neck of a birder to stare at Woody Allen and Soon-Yi.
In 1998, the Spanish novel Yo-Yo Boing! by Giannina Braschi features a party scene in which Woody Allen fidgets and stammers while explaining literary classics and the films of Federico Fellini. In 1967, Woody Allen was a featured character (playing himself, of course) in Showcase Comics #71, which featured the one-shot mythical pop group, The Maniaks. The comic book was published and distributed via DC Comics (National Periodical Publications). In 2003, Keith Black wrote, directed and starred in the award-winning film Get the Script to Woody Allen. The feature was about a neurotic young man who is obsessed with getting his script to Woody.
In 2010 the independent British romantic comedy Mancattan was released. The plot features directors Phil Drinkwater and Colin Warhurst playing fictional versions of themselves having travelled to New York from their native Manchester in order to make a documentary about Woody Allen and how his cinema has influenced them from the other side of the world.
While not making a case for direct influence or affinity while reviewing American Splendor inspired by/about graphic artist Harvey Pekar, columnist Jaime Wolf drew attention to formal parallels between the film and subject, on one hand, and Allen, Annie Hall, and other Allen films, on the other.
Moment Magazine says, “It drove his self-absorbed work.” John Baxter, author of Woody Allen – A Biography, wrote, “Allen obviously found analysis stimulating, even exciting.”
Allen says he ended his psychoanalysis visits around the time he began his relationship with Previn. He says he still is claustrophobic and agoraphobic. |- | style="text-align:center;"| 1975 | God | Writer | style="text-align:center;"|— |- | style="text-align:center;"| 1975 | Death | Writer | style="text-align:center;"|— |- | style="text-align:center;"| 1981 | The Floating Light Bulb | Writer | style="text-align:center;"|Vivian Beaumont Theatre |- | style="text-align:center;"| 1995 | Central Park West | Writer | style="text-align:center;"|Variety Arts Theatre |- | style="text-align:center;"| 2003 | Old Saybrook | Writer, Director | style="text-align:center;"|Atlantic Theatre Company |- | style="text-align:center;"| 2003 | Riverside Drive | Writer, Director | style="text-align:center;"|Atlantic Theatre Company |- | style="text-align:center;"| 2004 | A Second Hand Memory | Writer, Director | style="text-align:center;"|Atlantic Theater Company |}
Category:Film theorists Category:Independent Spirit Award winners Category:Jewish actors Category:Jewish American musicians Category:Jewish American writers Category:Jewish comedians Category:Jewish comedy and humor Category:Jewish dramatists and playwrights Category:Living people Category:O. Henry Award winners Category:People from Brooklyn Category:Writers Guild of America Award winners
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| Name | Nicholas Ray |
|---|---|
| Imagesize | 210px |
| Birth date | August 07, 1911 |
| Birth place | Galesville, Wisconsin, U.S. |
| Death date | June 16, 1979 |
| Death place | New York City, NY, U.S. |
| Occupation | Film director |
Coming from a radio background, Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington musical Beggar's Holiday, in 1946. One year later, he directed his first film, They Live By Night. It was released two years later due to the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes' takeover of RKO Pictures. An almost impressionistic take on film noir, it was notable for its extreme empathy for society’s young outsiders (a recurring motif in Ray’s films). It was influential on the sporadically popular sub-genre often called 'love on the run' movies, concerning as it does two young fugitive lovers on the run from the law. (Other examples are Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Robert Altman’s 1974 remake of They Live By Night, Thieves Like Us.) The New York Times gave the film a positive review (despite calling Ray's trademark sympathetic eye to rebels and criminals "misguided") and acclaimed Ray for "good, realistic production and sharp direction...Mr. Ray has an eye for action details. His staging of the robbery of a bank, all seen by the lad in the pick-up car, makes a fine clip of agitating film. And his sensitive juxtaposing of his actors against highways, tourist camps and bleak motels makes for a vivid comprehension of an intimate personal drama in hopeless flight."
Ray made several more contributions to the film noir genre, most notably the 1950 Humphrey Bogart movie In A Lonely Place about a troubled screenwriter and On Dangerous Ground, a police thriller.
Other minor films noir he directed in this period were Born to Be Bad and A Woman's Secret.
Ray's most productive and successful period was the 1950s. In the mid-Fifties he made the two films for which he is best remembered. Johnny Guitar (1954) was a Western starring Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge in action roles of the kind customarily played by men: highly eccentric in its time, it was much loved by French critics (François Truffaut called it "the beauty and the beast" of the western). In 1955, Ray directed Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean in what proved to be his second and most famous role. When Rebel was released, soon after Dean's early death in an automobile crash, it had a revolutionary impact on moviemaking and youth culture, virtually giving birth to the contemporary concept of the American teenager. Looking past its social and pop-cultural significance, Rebel Without a Cause is the purest example of Ray’s cinematic style and vision, with an expressionistic use of colour, dramatic use of architecture and an empathy for social misfits.
Rebel Without a Cause was Ray's biggest commercial success, and marked a breakthrough in the careers of child actors Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo. Ray engaged in a tempestuous "spiritual marriage" with Dean, and awakened the latent homosexuality of Mineo, through his role of Plato — who would become the first gay teenager to appear on film. During filming it was rumored that Ray began a short-lived affair with Wood, who at age 16 was 27 years younger than him. This created a tense atmosphere between Ray and Dennis Hopper, who was also involved with Wood at the time, but they were reconciled later in life.
In 1956, Ray directed the melodrama Bigger Than Life starring James Mason as a small-town school teacher driven insane by the misuse of a new wonder-drug, Cortisone. In 1957, he directed The True Story of Jesse James which was supposed to have featured Dean but starred Robert Wagner instead.
A heavy user of drugs and alcohol, Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s. He kept on working, but the later films did not get the attention he needed, and films like The Savage Innocents and the story of Jesus of Nazareth, King of Kings, got panned by critics. After collapsing on the set of 55 Days at Peking (1963), he would not direct again until the mid-1970s. In 1970 at a Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore East, Ray ran into Dennis Hopper, who asked Ray to join him at his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where he was editing his new film, The Last Movie. Hopper helped Ray secure a position at Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton University in upstate New York. (She and Tony Ray would marry in 1960.) Grahame and Nicholas Ray had one son, Timothy Ray.
A film about Ray, Interrupted, was announced for 2007, to be directed by Philip Kaufman.
In the decades after his professional peak, Ray continues to influence directors to this day:
Category:1911 births Category:1979 deaths Category:American film directors Category:Cancer deaths in New York Category:Deaths from lung cancer Category:American people of German descent Category:LGBT directors Category:LGBT people from the United States Category:People from La Crosse County, Wisconsin Category:People from Trempealeau County, Wisconsin Category:Western (genre) film directors
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