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Cinema Journal (2010) - For Robin Wood, 1931-2009

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Abstract

In the 1960s and 1970s, as he asserted his humanism in key monographs on Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Howard Hawks, Arthur Pertn, Satyajit Ray, Claude Chabrol, and Michelangelo Anionioni, in numerous articles in Movie and Film Comment, and in his exemplary early collection Personal Views (1976), Wood took to task semiotics and structuralism, and the scientific approach to film that the discipline gravitated to in search of legitimacy during its formative phase. In the North American model, the competition for grades (he felt diat the use of the term "quiz" indicated how low we had sunk), the molding of the university to fit "private sector" interests, and the general demotion of the humanities all indicated that the university had ceased to be a place where the individuai might flower; it had become instead an institution enforcing the goals of dominant ideology Indeed, each passing academic semester brings still more ludicrous degradations, the university adopting a steady stream of fads with associated jargon, such as the "wired" (now wireless) university (as if technology alone would lead us to utopia), or "outcomes assessment," another model to guarantee education "consumers" and their parents that they are getting their money's worth (are CEOs or heads of state subject to "assessment"?).

Article

The death of Robin Wood represents a terrible loss to our discipline and to humanity. He was one of the founders of Film Studies, in my judgment its key founder. His contribution to the field is precisely why I make the rather grand claim that humanity will suffer from his passing. Wood began the 2003 edition of Hollywood from Vietnam, to Reagan with the four‑word sentence "I am a critic." For Wood, scholarship and theory had to be subordinated to criticism, which he saw as among the noblest endeavors in which a person could be involved, because it entails the examination of one's commitments and sensibility, showing us the importance of a given work to an understanding of living (Figure 1). He studied and wrote about film not only because of his profound love of the medium, but because it assisted his meditation on humanity and on his own qualities as a human being. Wood's humanism, informed by his key influence, the distinguished Cambridge critic and teacher E R. Leavis, emphasized seriousness and significance, terms to which Wood regularly alluded. For Wood, seriousness about art was necessarily synonymous with seriousness about life, since the practice of criticism makes us evaluate a work's significance ‑ or lack thereof ‑ to our experience of life, our understanding of the past, and the potentials of the future. Wood, like Leavis, deliberately avoided providing rigid definitions of these notions, since, in their view, one needs to remain flexible to accommodat...

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Christopher Sharrett is Professor of Communication and Film Studies at Seton Hall University. He is author of The Rifleman (Wayne State University Press, 2005) and editor of Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media (Wayne State University Press, 1999). Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Film (Maisonneuve Press, 1992). and Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror film (coedited with Barry Keith Grant Simecrow Press, 2004).

Notes

  1. ↑ Robin Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 130.
  2. ↑ F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952).
  3. ↑ Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 296.
  4. ↑ Wood, Rio Bravo (London: British Film Institute, 2008), 44.

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