Anyone who has formally studied film certainly knows Robin Wood, who was a pioneer of the academic study of film as we know it. One of his most famous essays, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” is one of the most important and influential essays in modern film theory. In it, Wood provides a bridge between auteur theory (director is author of film and drives its content) and genre theory (genre characteristics drive film’s content) in a way that doesn’t try to disprove the other (which many theorists tried to do). Wood lays out a good approach to both theories:
“One of the greatest obstacles to any fruitful genre is to treat the genres as discrete. An ideological approach might suggest why they can’t be, however hard they may appear to try: at best, they represent different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions.”
He provided a deep understanding for each school of thought and put them together in a way that continues to help students of the discipline over thirty years later. A good overview of his life and work can be read in this recent New York Times post.
Wood’s views over the years have varied, but those who have read his work know that even if we disagree with him we dare not ignore him. Wood has a sort of realism about himself, and his views. As he aged, he came out as a homosexual and his politics turned sharply to the radical left. However, he remained realistic in acknowledging that any kind of socialist world revolution was out of the question even though his colleagues refused to see it that way. Even if we disagree with his politics, we can respect that he admitted his complete shift in his life’s focus to be “single-mindedly concerned with sexual politics.” On some levels, he allowed his early work on film to be appreciated as it is.
Not much is taken away from his earlier work, even if he recanted some if it, we cannot ignore it. He wrote important books about Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock. While he eventually became sympathetic to their cause, Wood remained strong against feminist criticisms of Hitchcock. Feminist critics tried to lump him in with the stereotypical oppressive male category, even though he was part of a minority group himself. Wood comments on Hitchcock:
“I think what’s been crucial to any work on Hitchcock has been the work of radical feminists in the late in his films, and then to amend that…although women are constantly tormented, terrorized and murdered in his films, the women emerge as the most sympathetic characters and the ones with whom Hitchcock seems to most deeply identify. The whole thing is turned on its head, and the films become about male oppression, rather than about the terrorization of women. 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. The struggle against that, his films are a kind of battleground between these two positions.”
Wood put together a great defense of Hitchcock that was troublesome for feminist critics like Laura Mulvey, whose “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” essay sought to destroy Hitchcock (and film in general). Wood never dove into such nihilistic views of film; his criticism was always constructive instead of destructive like many who shared his convictions. Even if we disagree with his worldview, Wood’s work is helpful in not only understanding film but also in understanding the political left.
Wood set the foundations for the academic study of film, which came to be during a time of fascination and obsession with psychoanalytic and Marxist perspectives (although he did not jump on that bandwagon immediately). Like any useful thinker, he played with ideas and theories for a long time before personally adopting them. His books and essays are still important and useful and can be applied to a study of today’s filmmakers. Personal politics set aside, anyone who studies or writes about film would be drastically undermining themselves to overlook the work of Robin Wood (1931-2009).
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