Another Woody Allen film that I believe no one's yet mentioned that has a main
character involved in filmmaking is _Crimes and Misdemeanors_.  There are also
  several "New German films" (e.g. by such directors as Fassbinder and Kluge,
as well as Wenders, as Carol Beck already mentioned) that fit within the
narrow parameters that Henry Breitrose specified. (Bengali Mrinal Sen's 1980
_In Search of Famine_ is another title that comes to mind.)
But I'm curious about those parameters -- which have slipped and shifted quite
creatively as the conversation has continued, it seems to me, reading this
correspondence all in one sitting.  We've certainly established that there are
numerous films, internationally, that feature characters dealing in one way or
another with filmmaking.  Of course the list might expand yet more if evident
displacements/ metaphors for filmmaking were included:  Alexander Kluge's 1968
_Artistes in the Big Top_ -- about an alternative circus, but "really"/also
about alternative cinema; & Helke Sander's _The All-Round Reduced Personality_,
in which the female protagonist(s) are photographers. Polly in Patricia Rozema'
s _I've Heard the Mermaids Singing_ (which Jeremy Butler's citation of Eliot
recalled) also is a photographer.  (Anyone know of a film directed by a woman
that depicts a female character overtly as a filmmaker, not a photographer?)
But the question remains:  to what end the parameters?  What does such a
grouping yield, other than evidence of self-reflexivity &/or narcissism &/or
limited imagination of screen-writers/filmmakers -- & a network game as a quite
pleasant diversion from paper-grading, as another respondent remarked.
 
Henry Breitrose, might you let us know your thoughts in specifying the parame-
ters you did, and also your ideas about your inquiry's yield to date?
 
Ramona Curry
University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign   [log in to unmask]