The Sum of Diane Keaton's Extraordinary Filmography
Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle discusses the late star’s enduring power and influence, plus her own approach to programming.
Wow. Bad Bunny. That was the best Super Bowl halftime performance I can remember — and that’s even without the added benefit of imagining the horrified reactions of JD Vance and Stephen Miller. Art — even cleverly radical art on the biggest stage — is not going to be our salvation from fascism. But it sure feels good to experience an increasingly rare moment of exultation.
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LA-DI-DA
The Sum of Diane Keaton’s Extraordinary Filmography
Film at Lincoln Center programmer Madeline Whittle discusses the late star’s enduring power and influence.
After Annie Hall was released, in 1977, Diane Keaton noticed people imitating her character, using the phrase “La-di-da” in daily life. “I don’t like it, you know?” she told a New Yorker profiler the following year. “It’s not a good idea to be identifiable, though it’s reassuring. It feels safe in most ways, and that’s bad, because it means that you’re accepted, and once that happens that’s where you stay. You have to watch yourself. I’d like a life like Katharine Hepburn’s in terms of work. She matured. She made the changes. Like Martha Graham.”
If Keaton never quite eclipsed the singular high of Annie Hall, over the next 47 years she certainly succeeded at changing and maturing. She took on roles that were challenging and provocative (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Interiors, Reds) and, later in life, found new shades to her unique persona (The First Wives Club, Something’s Gotta Give, The Family Stone); she worked through weighty questions concerning feminism, morality, and meaning in her work; and she also directed, most notably, the collage-style afterlife-exploring documentary, Heaven, and an episode of Twin Peaks. Today, you can see her profound influence both in some of our greatest working actresses (would we have Frances Ha or The Worst Person in the World without her?) and in her countless unsuccessful imitators.
This week, Film at Lincoln Center will be commemorating Keaton with “Looking for Ms. Keaton,” a 15-film retrospective that explores the full spectrum of her work, running from Feb. 13 - 19. I spoke to series curator Madeline Whittle about Keaton’s career, life, and legacy. Whittle has been a programmer at FLC for most of the past decade, working heavily on festivals’ and series’ like New Directors / New Films, Rendezvous with French Cinema, and Scary Movies. In addition to talking about Keaton, Whittle discussed her approach to programming, some favorite up-and-coming filmmakers, and where she sees hope for the future of the art form. For now, that latter part of the conversation will be a bonus for paid subscribers. I hope you’ll become a premium subscriber and share the newsletter with friends.
Do you remember where you were and what you thought when you found out Diane Keaton had died?
Madeline Whittle: I’m pretty sure I was home. My colleagues and I have a group chat, and often the news comes to me through that channel. And I think immediately my colleagues and I were all stopped in our tracks. Certainly I was startled to think that it was even possible that we could lose Diane Keaton. I think on some level I perceived her as being ageless. It seemed impossible that we would’ve seen this coming. And yet, you look at her body of work and recognize the robustness of it. She has been a presence and a force in the American cinematic landscape for half a century.
I think part of what was so shocking about losing her is she is an embodiment of a generation — or an expression of a generation. She was born in 1946, so truly in the purest sense of the word she was a Baby Boomer. She was a product of the immediate aftermath of World War II and the immediate economic moment that gave rise to the baby boom. And the stories she was drawn to telling over the course of her on screen career had a real knack for expressing what women in her moment of American history were going through — and in incredibly specific roles that she embodied with absolute precision and uniqueness. She somehow managed to build a body of work that expressed a certain spectrum of women’s experience from the beginning of the 1970s to the new millenium. I think the outpouring of love and affection for her that we saw in the aftermath of her death really captured the extent to which she represented to audiences not just a particular star persona or approach to the work of acting, but that she really tapped in to social and cultural currents that we’re still reckoning with.
What was her significance to you personally? Do you have a favorite performance?
I think the first two Godfather films are two of the most rewatched films in my adult life. My mom’s family is of Italian ancestry and my great grandparents came through Ellis Island. So the Godfather mythology always loomed large in our family. We’re also a big movie family. And every time I revisit those films in adulthood I’m more struck by the character of Kay Corleone, who’s played by Diane Keaton. In some ways, it’s a very small role. And certainly it’s a role that encapsulates the way that women were marginalized in this very specific milieu of Italian-American mafia families, but the particular quality that Keaton imbued in that role made Kay a much less passive observer than the role was written for her to be. Without delivering many monologues, her status as a moral observer to the goings-on and the choices she makes in the role become the moral center of gravity of the trilogy. And it allows the viewer to find a way in and a perspective on the events that you wouldn’t necessarily have if the film was more narrowly focused on the experience of the men in the family.
Another one I saw early on was Something’s Gotta Give, I remember watching that with my grandparents, who gave me an education in ‘90s romantic comedy. And of course, she’s working in an entirely different register in that film than The Godfather, in a very self-deprecating, comedic mode. But in a way I think you can trace a through line from her roles in the ‘70s, like in Annie Hall or Looking for Mr. Goodbar, to her work in late middle age as an aging baby boomer who’s still grappling with these questions of work-life balance and how much importance a woman should place on her sexuality and her love life. I think encountering her in these roles at a fairly young age opened my eyes to how a movie star can build an argument over the course of their work. Through different roles and different dramatic registers, you can see a working through of these questions. Working on this series I was blown away by both the thoroughness of her inquiry but also how effortless she made it look. Now looking back at her life, it’s a really beautiful and well-rounded, coherent picture that she’s left us with.
In preparing this series was there anything about Keaton and her career that surprised you?
I think I was surprised to discover, in reading her words in interviews and profiles over the years, just how unselfconscious she seemed to be as a person. Looking at her filmography and sensing this remarkable coherence, I found it a bit startling and endearing just how guileless her self-presentation was throughout. In many ways Diane Keaton the person reads to us now as a Diane Keaton character, with the earnestness and guileless curiosity. For someone whose career in retrospect could look quite strategically constructed, it’s very clear that she was just feeling her way through a lifetime of artistic expression. Following her own curiosity, following her own affection or befudlement about the characters she was playing. And finding her way to the truth of these women — not by accident, but without a calculating approach.
I think there’s something about spending time with her as a person and an artist that sheds more light on the characters she played and the particular ingenuity she brought to her performances. She’s just a force of nature. And she very much understood her own work and contribution. But I wonder if she was conscious of just how effectively she was channeling these experiences that hadn’t been articulated by a whole generation of women.
How do you see her influence on future actors and directors? Who are some of her acolytes?
I think her legacy provided a model for acting in a self-deprecating mode that never surrendered self respect. If you look at a character like Annie Hall, who’s so sui generis, part of what makes a character like that so endearing and powerful is that Keaton was hyperaware of the silliness and absurdity inherent to the character, but also how that absurdity was grounded in a real human being and the specificity of a real human’s experience and sense of humor and outlook on life. I think she was not afraid to be the butt of the joke while also being the engine of the joke.
I look at stars today like Emma Stone and Jennifer Lawrence, and I think they’re fully borrowing from the Diane Keaton playbook in terms of being fully self-possessed and fully in control, but perhaps creating an illusion or impression of being a little kooky or awkward. And not being afraid to zig when they’re expected to zag because sometimes letting an organic feeling take you to an unexpected place can create a much more powerful effect than adhering to convention or expectation. I very much see her example redounding in our new generation of actresses.
Tell me about your background and how you got into programming?
I’m actually coming up this month on ten years working with the programming team at FLC. I studied film as an undergrad and wanted to find a way to work with films, and in this industry, without making films. And the form that ended up taking was I worked as a research assistant. I contemplated an academic path after college. But ultimately, I gravitated to the New York film culture scene. I began to acquaint myself with this world of festivals. After studying a bit in Paris, I had a sense for what a really robust film culture within a city could look like. And it became clear that New York was the place in our neck of the woods to participate in a film culture on that scale. I was very fortunate that while I was working as a research assistant and doing some freelance translation work, an entry-level position opened up with the team at Film at Lincoln Center. I moved to New York to take that job, and I have been part of that team ever since. And I’ve really benefited from team leaders who have cultivated talent and put effort into training junior programmers on the job.
How would you describe your taste and philosophy as a programmer?
I’ve been very fortunate working at a place like FLC that has year-round programming, alternating between festivals, mainly comprising of films that have never shown in New York before and rep cinematech programming, which tends to focus on reintroducing an audience to a filmmaker with which they were acquainted but hadn’t been prompted to do a deep dive in a body of work before. Or sometimes we’ll do a thematic retrospective that’s older films from a number of different artists that are tied together within a particular historic moment or thematic grouping. All of which is to say I’ve had the opportunity to figure out exactly what my taste and sensibility is over time.
And I have different priorities within my programming work. When it comes to festival work, I’m always excited to sniff out new talent and new voices who have not had the opportunity to connect with an audience in a deeper way. New Directors / New Films is a great space for this. It’s a festival that’s all about discovery. It’s all about connecting our audience with filmmakers they may never have heard of because they’re on their first or second film.
Are there any particular films you’re proud of helping to champion?
In recent additions of New Directors / New Films, I’ve been excited to work with filmmakers like Theda Hammel. We showed Stress Positions a couple years ago, and I think she’s just an incredibly specific sort of perspective and sensibility. And she also happens to be a big rep cinema enthusiast. We see her at our theaters often.
A number of young filmmakers have also come through Rendezvous with French Cinema, which is a program I work on. That is just returning for its next edition next month.
I also work on a festival called Scary Movies that we brought back after a hiatus. Last year’s edition opened with It Ends, directed by Alex Ullom, who’s a first time feature director. He’s a really young guy who’s incredibly smart and focused on navigating this changing landscape of film production and distribution — how you make a film and then deliver it to an audience. His film didn’t have a distribution deal yet when we showed it last summer, and a great development at the end of 2025 was that the film got play on the new Letterboxd Video Store and then was picked up by Neon. These are the things that make the work exciting on an ongoing basis — being able to keep an ear to the ground and catch the exciting new personalities just as they’re coming onto the scene.
Being that you see so much new work from up-and-coming filmmakers, what’s your take on where independent cinema is at and where it’s going?
It’s a big question. I just got back from the Sundance Film Festival, which is very much a space where these questions are being asked. It might seem like a simplistic answer to the question, but as much as we’re seeing so much turmoil and uncertainty with regards to technologies of production and distribution and AI and streaming and corporate consolidation — all of these forces that effect the work that goes into the making of movies and the process by which those movies reach an audience — what a filmmaker like Alex Ullom or Theda Hammel demonstrate is that there continue to be young people who have something to say, who are really passionate about the art form of cinema, where this art came from, how it developed over time, and how it led us to where we are now. And as long as these artists are able to learn from each other and draw on each other’s experience and examples — how to find funding, how to make due with very little funding, how to adapt a particular idea to the constraints imposed by, say, the need to make rent — that gives me hope.
The filmmakers who give me hope tend to be the ones who are very scrappy and resourceful and adaptable and really committed to finding an audience — to not just have a vision and pursue it at all costs, but have a vision they want to share. If you look at the filmmakers who made the greatest impact at his year’s Sundance, for instance, they’re not trying to rehash what’s already been done. And maybe there are certain expectations you have for a Sundance film, but the films that do make an impact are the ones that are not afraid to diverge from what’s come before while also taking lessons from predecessors. The film that won several awards at this year’s festival, Josephine, by a second-time filmmaker named Beth de Araujo, is telling a story that hasn’t been told before, in a way that’s very rooted in the personal. It’s also very thoughtfully engaging with film form and thinking about ways to communicate something essential about its subject matter through artful means that are in conversation with a genre or tradition but also ways to bring about something new and specific and personal.