While he has had a career that has lasted more than half a century, you can easily divide Woody Allen’s work into clearly defined periods, each one distinct and clear in how they showcase the specific artistic curiosities and concepts that fascinated the director at any given moment. At some point in the late 1970s, he decided to start experimenting more, moving away from broad comedies that bordered on slapstick (undoubtedly a result of Allen’s admiration for vaudeville comics, as well as his years working under comedians like Sid Caesar and the pairing of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, whose style had a big influence on his early films) and instead chose to do slightly more complex work, even though they were mostly still comedies during this period, except Interiors, which essentially introduced this new stage in his career. Throughout the 1980s, Allen would push the boundaries of his craft, paying tribute to various artists like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, as well as entire genres and film movements. Perhaps his most experimental film is Zelig, which is not only a major departure in style for Allen, but one of the most original films of the period, a fact that has made it quite divisive, to the point where even his most fervent fans are divided on whether it is a singular work of his unhinged genius, or simply a brief foray into more abstract filmmaking that only came about through the director seeing if it was possible. It may be slightly polarizing (although more constructively – it’s not a matter of whether this is good or bad, but rather the extent to which it is successful at examining a key set of ideas embedded right at the heart of the story), but it is undeniably one of Allen’s most ambitious productions, a film that has a lot of fascinating ideas that are carefully explored and discussed in engaging ways.

It is important to remember that despite its widespread popularity in recent years, in 1983 the concept of mockumentaries and found-footage films were very scarce. It wasn’t entirely non-existent, since many films factored it into this filmmaking going back to the 1950s (although they were rarely mainstream efforts, and just amusing experiments more than anything else), but it was still not a common method of storytelling. Between This is Spinal Tap and Zelig, we saw the birth of the mockumentary as a legitimate form of filmmaking, and one that would become a genre itself in the years that followed. Taking its cue from the rise of the cinéma vérité movement that had slowly integrated itself into the global culture, this film aims to present us with a factual retelling of a fictional character, the most famous person we had never heard of, primarily because he simply did not exist. This alone is a fascinating premise, but one that needed someone with both a strong directorial approach and meticulous attention to detail to execute, since such a story requires a lot more work than usual to seem authentic, which was the driving force behind the film. Allen’s intentions seem to be quite simple – come up with someone who has never existed, and make a film that seems so genuine, those who go in without any knowledge (or perhaps don’t have any awareness of the director’s work) will think it is a real documentary, which is an approach that has seemingly been lost as the genre has become more comedic, losing that lustre of authenticity and instead leaning into the humour, which is understandable considering how challenging it is to fool audiences, with even this film stretching the limits of plausibility in very creative ways. There is a fascinating sense of humour that underlies this film and makes it so engaging, and Allen ensures that he is well-equipped to handle some of the more challenging material, as well as crafting a story that is as stimulating as it is funny since his humour at the time was as much about provoking thought as it was making the audience laugh, the oscillation between the two is the main reason so many of his greatest comedies were made during this decade.

Zelig is Allen’s first and only foray into the mockumentary genre, which is a peculiar fact considering he demonstrated such an aptitude for the style of filmmaking that you would imagine he would return to it in some form sometime in his career. However, he was always trying new methods of filmmaking, so it was likely he just decided to pursue other styles, which is easy to justify considering his body of work from around this time. For a discussion of this film, we’ll once again revive that taut but relevant ideology, in which Roland Barthes once stated that “the text is a tissue of quotations, drawn from innumerable centres of culture”, which aligns with the key artistic values of this film, which is a lot more engaging when it is at its most experimental. Zelig is one of the purest examples of postmodernism in cinema since it quite literally builds itself from fragments of existing works – in this regard, we can see some correlation between this film and Allen’s first directorial outing, What’s Up Tiger Lily, in which he took a low-budget, foreign film and not only reconfigured it to change the order of scenes but added new dubbed dialogue that essentially changed the entire story. In both films, we see the director using existing works that he manipulates to tell a different story – the only difference is here it is more structured, and naturally done with a lot more artistic integrity, more than just redubbing and slicing an old, irrelevant film. Allen quite literally inserts himself into the past, utilizing groundbreaking technology, as well as making use of archaic methods of filming to create the illusion that Zelig was an extended newsreel made in the 1930s, half a century before audiences would have first come into contact with the material. It was a laborious process, and it feels a lot more aloof than most of his other films, but Allen’s efforts do not go unnoticed, and this film serves to be a resounding celebration of his remarkable gifts as not only a great writer but an extraordinarily gifted and unquestionably ambitious filmmaker, many of the ideas embedded in this film bordering on revolutionary.

Considering the amount of work he had to do as a writer and director, it is easy to overlook the fact that Allen is also turning in an unexpectedly great performance in Zelig, albeit not one that is traditional by any means. He seems to be trying an entirely new kind of performance, one in which he is integrated into existing material, both video and photographic, and where the impact is not in the more traditional performance-based moments, but instead in those that exist in between, the more high-concept and detailed elements that would normally not register in any other film. His performance in Zelig is hilarious in that it seems to lovingly make fun of those actors who are credited as appearing in photographs or archival footage, with the idea here being to craft an entire film around one of these characters – bit players that barely have a career in Hollywood and exist just to be padding for the vanity of other actors, people who appear in the background and whose entire existence in a film seems to be entirely incidental, rather than having any real consequences on the outcome of the story. This also allows Allen to expand on his acting skills, where it isn’t his vocal delivery nor his distinct neurotic persona that defines the character, but rather his expressivity – he speaks only a few lines of dialogue in the film, most of it being constructed as voiceover recordings. We don’t see much traditional acting from him or Mia Farrow, and the bulk of the film is carried by the real-life experts who appear as talking heads throughout, and Patrick Horgan as the narrator, who adds an admirable level of authenticity. Farrow and Allen instead function as motifs rather than characters, which must have been a terrific opportunity for them to develop their skills in a way that was not previously found in their other collaborations, which were more driven by dialogue.

Regardless of where one falls on Zelig, it is impossible to deny this film’s influence and impact on contemporary filmmaking. Essentially, we can view this film as a feature-length version of those expositionary newsreels that usually start more mainstream films and serve to be a direct way of setting the tone and establishing a clear narrative foundation for the plot – one has to wonder how many viewers wandered into this film with the belief that they were seeing one of his hip, urbane comedies, and grew uncomfortable when the pre-film newsreel lasted a bit too long, only to realize midway through that this was the main attraction. It is a hilarious effort to make a more playful, experimental comedy, and Allen’s ability to fit into the archival footage is quite remarkable since he puts in a lot of effort to look and act like he comes from the era being explored, which is a fascinating achievement, and something that easily makes Zelig one of his more intriguing films, and one that has earned its place as a cult classic, especially for those who like their comedies to be slightly off-kilter and more deranged than usual, which is fully encapsulated in this film. Hilariously funny and wonderfully provocativer, Zelig is one of the more effectively biting satires of its era, a film that is so ambitious in both style and substance, that it seems absurd to imagine that Allen didn’t return to this genre – we can delude ourselves into believing that it was because he achieved perfection with this film, but there is always more to see with his work, so it would not be unwelcome to see another foray into the mockumentary genre. It’s not as towering a masterpiece as some of his other films from this era, but as an experiment, Zelig is a very special film, and all the proof we need to support Allen’s claim to being one of the true comedic geniuses of his generation, and someone whose work is always teetering dangerously close on being revolutionary.