The late Robin Wood was a courageous and open-minded writer who brought a new discipline to film criticism. Jai Arjun Singh reviews the critic
Why should we take Hitchcock seriously?” was the rhetorical question with which the Canadian academic Robin Wood opened his book Hitchcock’s Films in 1965. “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 of drama — if we were able yet to see films instead of mentally reducing them to literature — it would be unnecessary… To appreciate these films it is necessary that we grasp the nature of the medium.”
Wood, who died last month, played a seminal part in helping people — other critics as well as regular viewers — understand the “nature of the medium”. Over a lengthy academic career he authored a series of books and monographs — on the films of Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Howard Hawks and Satyajit Ray among others — that had a huge impact on how movies were seen and written about. He took popular cinema seriously and believed that it deserved to be critiqued with the same attention to detail that was given to high art, music or literature. His meticulous essays demonstrated what a complex organism a great film is, and how form and content are inseparable in the work of the true movie artists.
He first came to public attention with Hitchcock’s Films, which was an intense examination of the themes and ideas that lie beneath the surface of the seemingly straightforward narratives in many Hitchcock thrillers. Wood has sometimes been accused of over-analysis, of reading things into the films that aren’t “obviously” there, but his book illustrated a very important point: that a work of art must be looked at on its own terms, with no special importance attached to what the artist himself intended (or claimed he intended) it to be. Wood repeatedly invoked the D H Lawrence line “Never trust the teller, trust the tale” to remind us that 1) artists are sometimes not very honest about their work, and 2) even when they intend to be honest, there are layers in the creative process that they themselves are not consciously aware of. The Lawrence dictum was especially relevant in Hitchcock’s case, because he was famous for saying facetious things about his own movies, thereby confounding the efforts of his defenders. Wood recognised this, looked at the movies with his own eyes, and wrote intelligently and passionately about them.
A notable thing about Wood was that he had a strong background in literature, which enabled him to draw parallels between a literary work and a cinematic work — even when the book was a respected classic and the film was a popular entertainer. He once likened a Ricky Nelson song sequence in Howard Hawks’ western Rio Bravo to the role of Autolycus the mischievous vagabond in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. This was a comparison most critics wouldn’t have had the nerve to make, but Wood not only made it, he even suggested that there was greater thematic justification for the Rio Bravo song than for Autolycus’s crowd-pleasing part. In the process, he reminded readers that Shakespeare was in his own time considered a relatively low-brow writer who catered to the mass audience:
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“Hawks, like Shakespeare, is an artist earning his living in a popular, commercialised 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.”
But despite Wood’s many literary allusions, he always analysed a film as a film, recognising that it was an independent form with its own rules. His books have many interesting studies of short scenes from this or that film, to illustrate the discipline of a director’s cutting between characters, the way camera movement complements the spoken word, and how meaning and emotional impact is heightened by a combination of techniques that might be invisible to most viewers.
He was, above all, a very brave writer. This might seem an odd choice of adjective for a film critic, but Wood was scrupulously candid about his personal life and how it influenced his movie-watching — writing, for instance, about the effect of his homosexuality on his feelings about a film with marginalised characters. He was also famous for frequently revising his opinion of a film after watching it years later, and publicly acknowledging something many critics feel uncomfortable facing up to: that your feelings about a movie don’t remain constant with time.
To write with genuine insight about a work that is deemed “lowbrow” or “low culture” (such as the 1977 cannibal-horror film The Hills Have Eyes, which Wood regarded a major film) requires a rare combination of qualities. You need a talent for analysis and articulation, but also an unconditional open-mindedness about what you’re willing to watch, think about and write about — even at the risk of being scoffed at. Many academics and critics have the former quality in abundance, but Robin Wood was among the very few who had the latter.
[Other recommended reading: Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, The Apu Trilogy, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, and the essay “To Have (Written) and Have Not (Directed)”, which discusses the adaptation of the Hawks film To Have and Have Not from the Ernest Hemingway novel]