I was in high school when I picked up a hardback copy of the first edition of Robin Wood's "Hitchcock's Films" (1965) from a remainder table at a depressingly small, sterile, fluorescent-lit Crown Books in an old-fashioned, long-gone outdoor mall (called Aurora Village) in North Seattle. That was in the mid-1970s and now I'm writing this and Robin Wood died last week at the age of 78.
I'll never forget standing in that store, reading the famous, much-quoted opening words:
Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?
It is a pity the question has to be raised: if the cinema were truly regarded as an autonomous art, not as a mere adjunct of the novel or the drama -- if we were able yet to see films instead of mentally reducing them to literature -- it would be unnecessary.
(David Hudson, in his round-up of tributes to Wood, reproduces part of the first page at The Auteurs Daily.)
The forces that necessitate the question Wood asks -- not just about Hitchcock but about all movies -- are still in place today, though not as monolithically as they were when Wood wrote those words. My friends and film professors fought that attitude all the time when I was in college, it was so prevalent among students, faculty and the general public.
And it still is today. Try to talk about movies as movies -- that is, as Wood said, as a unique art form and not an outgrowth of literature or theater -- and somebody will think you're getting too "technical" (as happened at a recent year-end critics' panel I participated on at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle). Kathleen Murphy responded: Would it be too technical to discuss the texture and color of paint on a canvas? Well, of course not. But may people still view movies as little more than stories told with actors, rather than, say, considering shots as sentences -- with shapes, contours, rhythms, colors, nouns, verbs, adjectives...
I'd read movie reviews since I was a kid (John Hartl in the Seattle Times, Paul Zimmerman in Newsweek, eventually Pauline Kael in The New Yorker...) but Wood's Hitchcock book was the first thing of its kind I'd ever encountered -- though I also came to treasure his book on Howard Hawks and his collections of essays ("Personal Views" and "Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan," especially). He loved Mizoguchi's "Sansho Dayu" and Ophuls' "Letter From and Unknown Woman" as much as I did, and wrote deeply and poetically about them. Later, I thought he misunderstood Cronenberg (he detected a revulsion for all things fleshly), but he was still more engaged with the actual work than just about anybody else at the time. (Like many great critics, he could be incredibly perceptive, even when you thought his eventual judgements were off-base.)
Charles Barr wrote in The Guardian:
Before he published "Hitchcock's Films" in 1965, there were -- in English, as opposed to French -- virtually no books on film directors, and few books of any kind that brought either rigour or sympathy to the analysis of popular cinema. The teaching of so-called "film appreciation" in Britain was confined mainly to a few pockets within adult education and teacher training. This was already starting to change, but Wood's work was a key influence in validating and shaping a new discipline.
And, of course, Hitchcock -- whose attention to composition and cutting are so precise -- offers the perfect introductory opportunity for a master class in how movies work. Wood put it all together.
David Bordwell offers the most moving and insightful of the Wood appreciations I've read:
I can't convey the excitement that was ignited by "Hitchcock's Films" (1965), "Howard Hawks" (1968), and "Ingmar Bergman" (1969), quickly followed by the monographs on Penn (1970) and Ray's Apu Trilogy (1971). Nearly all books of film criticism were then simply collections of reviews. Wood's stood as through-written, pondered over, carefully carpentered books, comparable to the best literary analysis. These monographs showed, in incisive detail, what most auteur criticism simply proclaimed: great directors expressed their personal vision of life in and through cinema. Wood showed, scene by scene and sometimes shot by shot, that movies harbored layers of feeling and implication in their finest grain of detail. Without fanfare he introduced "close reading" to film criticism.
DB quotes a paragraph from Wood's "Rio Bravo" essay (Jonathan Rosenbaum reports that Wood recalled Hawks' great western on his deathbed as his favorite film, along with "Sansho Dayu," "Tokyo Story," "Letter From an Unknown Woman," "Le Crime de Monsieur Lange" and some surprises), which he describes as "a sort of draft for what would become one of his most important statements":
Wood: Hawks, like Shakespeare, is an artist earning his living in a popular, commercialized medium, producing work for the most diverse audiences in a wide variety of genres. Those who complain that he "compromises" by including "comic relief" and songs in "Rio Bravo" call to mind the eighteenth century critics who saw Shakespeare's clowns as mere vulgar irrelevancies stuck in to please the "ignorant" masses. Had they been contemporaries of the first Elizabeth, they would doubtless have preferred Sir Philip Sydney (analogous evaluations are made quarterly in Sight and Sound). Hawks, like Shakespeare, uses his clowns and his songs for fundamentally serious purposes, integrating them in the thematic structure. His acceptance of the underlying conventions gives "Rio Bravo," like Shakespeare's plays, the timeless, universal quality of myth or fable.
Bordwell: Nearly every Wood virtue is already here. He takes it for granted that conventions are crucial to understanding and judging cinema. He refuses an evaluative split between high culture and popular culture. He insists that worthy films have serious thematic implications--in "Rio Bravo," a link between self-respect and peer respect. He shows the film's complexity through shrewd comparison (in the book on Hawks, "High Noon" will provide the telling contrast). And he gives the whole thing a polemical edge with the sideswipe at Sight and Sound, a target for many years to come....
I'm grateful to Wood for so much. As he must have been comforted and strengthened by recalling "Rio Bravo" in his final hours, I'm consoled and inspired by this, from Barr's obit:
The opening of Wood's last book, a study of the Howard Hawks western "Rio Bravo," published by the BFI in 2003, is typical of his insistently personal style, and of the intensity with which he lived movies, as he did so much else. It describes how, being rushed to hospital in an earlier medical crisis, he found real serenity of mind in thinking about the stoicism with which Hawks's characters habitually encounter death.
So long, Robin Wood. You were one of the best...
* * * *
Extensive Wood resources: Crossing the Wild River: R.I.P. Robin Wood (1931-2009), Catherine Grant's Film Studies For Free
A Life in Film Criticism: Robin Wood at 75, Your Flesh Magazine.
A Robin Wood Bibliography compiled by D.K. Holm.
UPDATE: Just discovered that Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has a characteristically fine piece on Wood, "Rio Bravo" and "High Noon" that helps to combat the ignorance of a showbiz gossip blogger who shall go unnamed. And Dennis uses the same image-grab I kiped for the top of his piece!
11 Comments
I wasn't a fan of Robin Wood's book on Hitchcock, but apparently Hitch was. He had copies of it specially bound in a hard vinyl cover with his trademark profile embossed on the front, and gave them out to certain fanatical fans who went to the trouble of making him a short, 16mm film in celebration of his birthday back in '72. Signed them, too. That one is never going on eBay.
I really must hand it to Wood for being the first non-French critic to ever take Hitchcock seriously; we regard the Master of Suspense's films as art largely because of Wood's writings. I also commend him for being able to come out and declare his sexuality thanks to Hitchcock's films. That was brave.
Wood should also be remembered for defending some of the most cruelly misjudged filmmakers of our time, including Michael Cimino. Was there ever another critic who *loved* "Heaven's Gate"? I'd be surprised.
But I have a problem with the Marxism that sometimes plagued Wood's style of criticism. Have you ever read his review of "E.T."? Wood writes:
"The film is extremely sexist. Spielberg seems unable to conceive of women as anything but wives and, in particular, mothers. Apart from almost dying, the worst thing that happens to E.T. is being dressed in female clothes, an event which is shown to deprive him of his dignity. At the end of the film, as all-purpose friend, Christ figure and patriarch, he lays his finger on Elliott's head to transmit to him his power and knowledge, but tells the boy's younger sister to "be good." (I have not yet found a woman who likes the film: the fantasy about childhood that it enacts is heavily male-oriented.)
Crucially, the cultural phenomenon presented in E.T. signifies a choice made by the critical establishment, the public, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who nominated it for many Academy Awards even though they ultimately found in Gandhi an even more respectable and archetypal liberal/bourgeois recipient of honors. One must compare E.T. with the commercial/critical failure of the infinitely more interesting Blade Runner (released the same week) and its troubling and complex presentation of the Other. The most pertinent comparison remains, however, with the two It's Alive films of Larry Cohen, which provide numerous suggestive parallels. Critically despised, they lack E.T. 's aura of expensiveness, an essential component of reassurance within the context of capitalism's decline."
About the sexism charge... did Wood not realize that the screenplay for "E.T." was written by a woman? I suppose not- Melissa Mathison's name is not mentioned once in his review.
That's the only thing I wish Wood could have gotten over. He was sometimes so far-left that it became easy for him to lampoon filmmakers who probably initially appeared to be little more than 1980's box office opportunists, from Spielberg to Cronenberg.
He was a real pioneer, though. Yes, he plunged heavily into lefty politics in the '70s and '80s (so did Godard). I'd forgotten his reading of "E.T." You'd be surprised how many critics hadn't the faintest grasp of that movie at the time (they couldn't see beyond its popularity -- or the name Spielberg, forgetting that this was supposed to have been his little, personal, relatively low-budget movie that just happened to become a phenomenon -- with nothing like the pre-release hype of "Titanic" or "Avatar"). Also, just because a movie is written by a woman doesn't mean it isn't sexist. In this case, I see his point about the movie's conception of women (very party-line '70s/early '80s idea of "feminism"), but he misses the point of the movie, which is that it's through the eyes of a young boy and his alter-ego, an alien. As I said, like the best critics, Wood could be perceptive about some things even if you thought he was missing others...
One of my favourite film writers paying tribute to another of my favourite film writers - it doesn't get much better than this! Thanks, Jim.
Hitchcock's Films Revisited is a book I can go back to again and again (that piece on Vertigo!), but I also love Wood's writings on Hawks as well as his essays on the horror film and on the "responsibilities of a gay film critic".
It takes a very special kind of intelligence to write perceptively about things that most other critics consider to be "low art" or "popular entertainment, not to be taken seriously". Wood had that special intelligence and open-mindedness.
Rio Bravo is just about my favourite movie of all time and Wood's essay on it is the single best piece of in-depth film criticism I've ever read.
The passing of Robin Wood, and the oft-mentioned fact that he wrote THE American book on Hitchcock, has caused me to wonder how critics and film historians/theorists, in general, take the work of Ray Carney, who has taken a few shots here and there at Hitchcock, implying that his (Hichcock's) work was little more than Hollywood gloss, and not to be considered high art. There's no doubt that Carney's work on Cassavetes is valuable, but his take on Hitchcock seems at least short-sighted, if not terribly ignorant.
I don't mean to derail this appreciation of Robin Wood, but since Hitchcock seemed to be a central figure in the development of Wood's critical work, it seemed like an interesting moment to compare him to Carney.
Thanks for another great appreciation of Wood! It's great to hear how (and when) his influence has been felt by so many other critics whom I admire.
I'm most grateful for Wood's ability to create extended essays that bridge the gap between reviews and academia. I am convinced that just about anybody could read Robin Wood's writing and come away with a better understanding of how to read a film because his prose is so easy to digest, unlike so many other long-form film critics.
One of my favorite excerpts from Wood's Hitchcock book is his writing about Ingrid Bergman as star and how her qualities made her the only correct casting choice for Notorious. So many others have simply written about pieces of Bergman (and I mean that in the most fetishistic sense, like regarding her smile--not that there's anything wrong with that). Wood's writing is easily the most perceptive thing I've ever read about the actress.
Indeed, Robin Wood will be missed.
Thanks for posting this; anyone who finds Robin Wood's writing for the first time is in for a treat.
The stupid blog entry criticizing Rio Bravo was fitting in a way. The terrible analysis reminded me of why reading Wood's writing was so wonderful in the first place.
Quentin Tarantino likes Rio Bravo as much as Robin Wood did.
Here he is talking about the movie and he even mentions Wood.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjX010pdIro
I love Robin Wood. Some of his writings on horror films and genre pieces, were truly extraordinary. A really wonderful film critic. RIP
I will be brief as in a Hawks film.
We brought nothing into this world and it's certain we can carry nothing out.
But at least I could read one of the greatest and perceptive of film writers - especially on the on the “H” auteurs Hawks and Hitchcock.
I'd say he's so good, he doesn't feel he has to prove it.
Leave a comment