Zelig (1983), directed by Woody Allen, is a fictive documentary that presents the story of Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen), a Jew who has a peculiar feature: the ability to transmute, i.e., to acquire the appearance, the gestures and the speech of the person who is next to him. The "human chameleon", as he is called in the movie, is cured by a treatment with a psychiatrist Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) and becomes a national hero to escape the Nazis.
According to Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, in “Zelig and Contemporary Theory: Meditation on the Chameleon Text”, Zelig breaks down the frontiers between fiction and history. The movie has the appearance of a conventional documentary, but shows the life of a fictional character. Television compilation films, newsreels, photographs and the news about the protagonist are false. Zelig’s images are artificially aged and combined with the images of another epoch. Like fiction, documentary also uses narrative tools to cause a likelihood effect. Thus, Allen discusses that documentary presents part of reality - or a fabricated …show more content…
Our view, however, is that while Zelig the character, at least in his chameleon phase (and it could be argued that Zelig never leaves his chameleon phase), does represent the postmodern, Zelig the film cannot be characterized. Zelig does not so much trivialize history, as has sometimes been charged, as she light on the constructed, manipulable nature of history as mediated by the culture industry. While it would be an exaggeration to call Zelig an example of what Hal Foster calls “oppositional post-modernism”, it is still possible to coax an oppositional, anticipatory reading out what is in some ways a recalcitrant text (p.
According to Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, in “Zelig and Contemporary Theory: Meditation on the Chameleon Text”, Zelig breaks down the frontiers between fiction and history. The movie has the appearance of a conventional documentary, but shows the life of a fictional character. Television compilation films, newsreels, photographs and the news about the protagonist are false. Zelig’s images are artificially aged and combined with the images of another epoch. Like fiction, documentary also uses narrative tools to cause a likelihood effect. Thus, Allen discusses that documentary presents part of reality - or a fabricated …show more content…
Our view, however, is that while Zelig the character, at least in his chameleon phase (and it could be argued that Zelig never leaves his chameleon phase), does represent the postmodern, Zelig the film cannot be characterized. Zelig does not so much trivialize history, as has sometimes been charged, as she light on the constructed, manipulable nature of history as mediated by the culture industry. While it would be an exaggeration to call Zelig an example of what Hal Foster calls “oppositional post-modernism”, it is still possible to coax an oppositional, anticipatory reading out what is in some ways a recalcitrant text (p.