Pauline Kael once wrote that cinephiles "are all night people and we can pick each other out of crowds." Shadows and Fog (1992) plays to Kael's constituency in substance and in spirit, emphasizing the allusive and illusory nature of cinematic experience. Whilst Zelig (1983), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and Radio Days (1987) were set in past worlds, they were derived from concrete experience. But like the insubstantials of its title, Shadows and Fog is oneiric, a studio-bound movie realm captured in monochrome aspic. Whilst similar characters can be found in other Allen films, equally these could live nowhere but here.

In Allen's New York comedies of contemporary manners, we are used to protagonists being, vaguely, academics, writers, media types. Such professions come with the territory. Here, Irmy is a sword swallower. Paul is a clown. Mr Mintz "does quality circumcisions." Peter talks like that because he's a student. There is an emphasis upon social identities - Chaucerian characters were thus defined - which is reminiscent of the hermetic world of fairytales, allegories or anecdotes. Contemporary Allen characters have been confused about their purposes, and Kleinman's insecurity resonates with the standard Allen nebbish. In German 'Kleinmann' means 'little man', suggesting the universality of insignificance. By night, he is an ink-stained wretch dragooned into a vigilante mob's "Plan" to catch a notorious strangler, but never told his exact role. By morning he is about to become a magician's apprentice. But finding direction is about so much more than social standing: "You can tell a lot about an audience by how they respond to a good sword swallower", says Irmy. If their stations enable other characters to live with illusions, Kleinman learns to live with his humanity by apprenticing himself to an illusionist. Meanwhile, Allen the professional filmmaker rediscovered the cinephiles he has traditionally cultivated at a time when his personal life was a scandal sheet.

The film resonates like the wispy recollections of dream. Shadows and Fog begins as Kleinman is woken from a deep sleep and ends as he and Armstedt the Magician disappear. Kafka's work is similarly oneiric, and it was only a matter of time before Allen made a truly Kafkaesque film. As in The Trial, (K)leinman walks medieval streets without an apparent purpose. As in Amerika, characters have second-hand 'American' characteristics. A cop talks with a gruff Manhattan burr. Yet his uniform places him in prewar Prague or Kraków. This is a sprightly horror film, but it is suffused with the figurative. Death is a serial killer striking at random across the community. The unknowable "Plan" could be experience itself.

Shadows and Fog derives its mise-en-scène from Weimar 'street films', and takes its scenario from Lang's M (1931). Expressionism is most associated with cinema's exploration of psychological states. In few Allen films is the mise-en-scène so archetypal. Recalling Murnau, Carlo DiPalma's legato shooting style is designed to extend this resonant space. Mews bathed in fog, a moon seen in a puddle, resemble woodcuts in a German edition of Kafka, inviting you to 'read' on. Recalling the bizarre faces of Allen's own Stardust Memories (1980), the clairvoyant Spiro, Paul's face distorted in a mirror, stick in the mind like incubi. Allusions draw attention to film's status as illusion. "Illusions - they need them like they need the air" the Magician tells Kleinman, and Allen's film revolves around a community encouraged to the illusory by the circus, bound to it by the ubiquitous fog. Like these characters driven by the hollow cheer of the film's Kurt Weill melodies, Allen's cinephiles see themselves in the shadows.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002