“Thank God the French exist”: Exploring the Referentiality of the Formal Elements of Film in Deconstructing Harry

Abstract

Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry (1997) is a fascinating, frenetic, and fruitful pastiche of numerous telling flights of fancy, which combine to represent the bizarre tapestry that is the life of neurotic writer Harry Block. This film powerfully exudes the sense of referentiality that habitually forms an integral portion of Allen’s work, with the referentiality here being a fundamental component of both the narrative and the formal filmmaking process. This work will consider the film through the critical lens of referentiality, understanding that Allen’s work does not only use intertextuality and systematic reference to other works, genres, and forms as an anchor point for his narrative within Deconstructing Harry, but that this approach is also evident throughout his cinematic technique and his employment of the formal elements of film. Allen’s film invariably makes reference to both other cinematic works and indeed his own, and it is through this referentiality that Allen constructs meaning and builds the content of his profound and at times philosophical film. This film not only explores referentiality textually, in questioning its importance for the protagonist’s very existence, but also, as we have come to expect with Allen, the film references the director’s previous works, and pays homage to a number of other eminent directors.