Robin Wood, 1931 - 2009
tomcervo
Robin Wood, Film Critic Who Wrote on Hitchcock, Dies at 78
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Robin Wood, a film critic who published the first serious work in
English on Alfred Hitchcock and who applied formal rigor and moral
seriousness in his book-length appraisals of Howard Hawks, Arthur
Penn, Ingmar Bergman and other directors, died on Friday at his home
in Toronto. He was 78.
The cause was complications of leukemia, said Richard Lippe, his
longtime partner.
Mr. Wood, who was British by birth and education but spent much of his
career teaching in Canada, made a remarkable debut as a critic. While
teaching English at a secondary school, he placed an article on
Hitchcock’s “Psycho” in Cahiers du Cinéma, the celebrated journal
associated with the French New Wave and auteur theory. With this
validation, he began writing for a variety of British publications and
followed up with a series of influential studies of important
directors.
Influenced by the Cambridge critics F. R. Leavis and A. P. Rossiter,
whose morally committed approach to literary criticism galvanized a
generation of British university students, Mr. Wood never lost sight
of the ethical and political aspects of film. This tendency became
more acute after he came out as a gay man in the 1970s and took a
sharp turn to the political left.
He had come to believe, he told the reference work Contemporary
Authors in 2005, that there was only one defensible motive for writing
about film: “To contribute, in however modest a way, to the
possibility of social revolution, along lines suggested by radical
feminism, Marxism and gay liberation.”
Robert Paul Wood was born in Richmond, Surrey, on Feb. 23, 1931. A
fractious child, he was often taken by a maid to the movies to get him
out of his parents’ hair and soon developed an infatuation with the
Hollywood comedies of Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert Cary Grant.
After earning a degree in English from Jesus College, Cambridge, in
1953 and a diploma in education a year later, he taught English at
secondary schools in Britain and France. At one, he started a film
society and encouraged students to write critical appraisals of the
films they watched.
Following his own advice, he wrote an essay on “Psycho” and submitted
it to the British journal Sight & Sound, whose editor returned it with
the comment that Mr. Wood had failed to see that the film was intended
as a joke.
Infuriated, Mr. Wood sent it to Cahiers du Cinéma, which, despite its
contempt for British film criticism, accepted the article, a careful
teasing out of the themes of sex, death, money and compulsion in the
film. The Cahiers cachet afforded him instant entree to the British
journal Movie, to which he began to contribute in 1962.
“I began to realize that all of these films that I had loved in the
past could be taken seriously, that some real artistic claims could be
made for them,” he told Your Flesh magazine in 2006. “That was a
revelation, and really all I needed to understand. So it was purely
from that article in Cahiers that I became a film critic. I think if
they had turned it down, I probably wouldn’t have written about film
anymore, and I would probably still be an English teacher today.”
Mr. Wood, a penetrating critic with a graceful prose style, soon
emerged as one of Britain’s most influential film writers, a
reputation enhanced by the groundbreaking “Hitchcock’s Films” (1965).
“A lot of people thought it was ridiculous, this idea of taking
Hitchcock seriously,” he told Your Flesh. “He was seen as simply an
entertainer; one was merely amused by his films, had a few shocks, a
few laughs, and that was it.”
A series of important monographs followed: “Howard Hawks” (1968),
“Arthur Penn” (1968), “Ingmar Bergman” (1969) and “The Apu
Trilogy” (1971), which dealt with Satyajit Ray’s work. With the critic
Ian Cameron he wrote “Antonioni” (1968), and with Michael Walker he
wrote “Claude Chabrol” (1970). Many of his essays were collected in
“Personal Views: Explorations in Film” (1976).
In 1973 Mr. Wood was invited to create a film studies program at the
University of Warwick, in Coventry, where he lectured until accepting
a post as professor of film studies at York University in Toronto in
1977. He retired in 1990.
In addition to Mr. Lippe, he is survived by his children Simon, of
Toronto; Carin, of Bath, England; and Fiona, of Bordeaux; and five
grandchildren.
In his later film criticism, Mr. Wood concentrated on politics,
specifically sexual politics. A 1977 speech to the British Film
Institute, “Responsibility of a Gay Film Critic,” gave notice of his
new critical program, which he pursued in “Hollywood From Vietnam to
Reagan” (1986) and “Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and
Beyond” (1998). With colleagues at York, he started a radical film
studies journal, CineAction, in 1985.
His enthusiasm for Hitchcock never flagged. In 1989 he returned to the
subject in “Hitchcock Revisited,” appraising the director from new
angles but maintaining his admiration. “I think the best of Hitchcock
films continue to fascinate me because he’s obviously right inside
them, he understands so well the male drive to dominate, harass,
control and at the same time he identifies strongly with the woman’s
position,” he told the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org) in 2000.
Hitchcock’s films, he continued, “are a kind of battleground between
these two positions.”
David Oberman
wrote:
>He had come to believe, he told the reference work Contemporary
>Authors in 2005, that there was only one defensible motive for writing
>about film: �To contribute, in however modest a way, to the
>possibility of social revolution, along lines suggested by radical
>feminism, Marxism and gay liberation.�
LOL!!
Leslie Fiedler wrote that it is the duty of the writer to bite the
hand that feeds him, that he must question & criticize the values of
the society he lives in. But this view of Wood's is reheated &
re-served Geoffrey Hartman (who wrote that criticism "can be
pedagogic, of course, but it is free _not_ to be so").
>Following his own advice, he wrote an essay on �Psycho� and submitted
>it to the British journal Sight & Sound, whose editor returned it with
>the comment that Mr. Wood had failed to see that the film was intended
>as a joke.
LOL!
>Mr. Wood, a penetrating critic with a graceful prose style ...
LOL!!!!
>In his later film criticism, Mr. Wood concentrated on politics,
>specifically sexual politics.
Anything to keep criticism from being unpedagogic -- for which read
uninterpretive, unexplanatory, unhelpful, & even insane.
nick
> On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:51:35 -0800 (PST), tomcervo <tomce...@aol.com>
Trying to find Wood's writing on David Cronenberg, a quick Google
search gave this up for anyone interested in some light Christmas
morning reading:
http://cinemacanada.athabascau.ca/index.php/cinema/article/view/1613/1676
Sir Blob
what a mess and pile of crap, couldnt get past the introduction, and i
was trying so hard just to comment here, amazingly he's gonna write
5000 words on how cronenberg is so cool cuz he's science fiction and
not horror, which the left clearly forgets because they're too busy
with their own binaries, wait a second he doesn't say its becuz of
that, he just slips it in paragraph after the next, binaries that
harkness will solve because he discovers science fiction for us, oh
harkness genette, dscovers from the canadian levi strauss which got
him his place as a reviewer in a crappy newspaper, like he didnt have
to suck the same cock robin wood had to, pandering to the press
instead of to film studies, oh please, refrain from the victim crap...
and finally really odd rocking chair writing style going from ideology
to sci fi to shivers, oh the irony he says, oh the irony i say in a
pic i recently saw, to a fascinatingly long paragraph on AIDS and gay
cancer, fascinating, he looks like an amateur me, albeit obsessed with
sucking cock
Sir Blob
bourgeois humanist criticism buahahahahahaha!!!
David Oberman
<nickmacp...@AOL.com> wrote:
>Trying to find Wood's writing on David Cronenberg, a quick Google
>search gave this up for anyone interested in some light Christmas
>morning reading:
>
>http://cinemacanada.athabascau.ca/index.php/cinema/article/view/1613/1676
John wrote: "Wood and company operate within a critical system that
acts to limit their viewpoint to issues that deal with repression of
alternative forms of sexual and moral expression ..."
A few choice morsels from Wood's liner notes to the Criterion
"Rebecca":
"Skepticism about male-female relationships under patriarchy is
central to Hitchcock's importance to us today."
"Rebecca is killed because she defies the patriarchal order, the
prohibition of infidelity: she has used him, certainly, but hasn't he
asked for it?"
_______
If you think you're a person of influence,
try ordering somebody else's dog around.
-- Beethoven
The Star Kin
> On Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:51:35 -0800 (PST), tomcervo <tomce...@aol.com>
I aint done readed much of wood, but i done remember the time i done
readed his essays on satyajit ray's apu triology and it was a
wonderful piece of workery i done think. he used to be thoughtful,
civil bourgeoisie humanist liberal critic.
but he done come out of closet in a big way in 70s. now, aint no wrong
in gay boy person saying, 'hey, i'm gay', but he done decide to take
aim at cinema and wholery of culture from 'gay angle'. of course,
that is bogus like cuz there aint no single all-consuming way of being
gay. paglia is a lesbian and she disagrees with whole bunch of gays
and other lezzies. sadly, woods done adopt group think and
ideological collectivism. he grew bitter and bitchy. he begin to see
all movies and stuff as 'political'. now, all stuff is political to
some extent but i's done think one's main passion with movies should
be personal than politickery.
anyway, wood is prolly most notorious for saying heaven's gate is the
greatest western that ever done be made and he done include it as one
of top 10 of all time. funny it may sound but i don't necessarily
disagree. sure, when heaven's gate is bad, it's mighty darn bad but it
got some great passages and i's done think it was neglected terribly
when it done come out. i would argue it is at least as interesting as
apocalypse now, another folly if yous were to asks me.
Sir Blob
thats prolly cuz he had a job at a campus, or something
all the literary theory is bullshit thou, if reviewing 40 dollar dvds
is middle class humanism, then whats downloading mooees for 3 cents
per pic, revolution?