For Robin Wood, 1931-2009

Figure 1.

Yasujiro Ozu's "Tokyo Story ([1953] like Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow [1937] before it) has been viewed too narrowly as a film about a dear old couple with ungrateful children. Its scope is enormous, encompassing a searching social analysis"¹ (New Yorker Films, 1972).

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 F. 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 accommodate the critic's constant reevaluation, recognizing that criticism involves an ongoing dialogue with both a work and one's view of the world.

While he did not dismiss reviewing outright, he was infuriated by its encouragement of superficiality, imprecision, cute wordsmithing, smug self-involvement, and forms of indulgence that run counter to the serious engagement he demanded. He was more than skeptical of Film Studies' heavy preoccupation with theory, which to his thinking treated works of the cinema chiefly as specimens with which one could prove or disprove this or that grand concept, not works with integrity in their own right created by other human beings. He was appalled that, for much of the existence of the discipline, the tortured ideas of theorists were treated with utmost respect while individual films became important in Film Studies classrooms primarily as examples of technique, and technological or philosophical developments. Wood observed that authorship was viewed with contempt, less because auteurism was "simplistic" than because personality was a "social construct," a revelation that film scholars had asserted with high seriousness, as if the impact of society on a given individual could be anything other than a truism.

He emphasized the close reading of films, less for its own sake than as a means of approaching questions of value, a term that appeared often in Robin Wood's critical vocabulary. Ascertaining a film's importance was central to his critical project, but again he refrained from providing any schematic formula for describing value, other than the Leavisian category of "intelligence about life"² (Figure 2). Wood demonstrated that both a poignant film manifestly affirmative of life (Tokyo Story [Yasujiro Ozu, 1953]) and a caustic work uncompromising about the collapse of all human institutions under capitalism (Dawn of the Dead [George Romero, 1978]) could be informed by seriousness and intelligence.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as he asserted his humanism in key monographs on Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Howard Hawks, Arthur Penn, Satyajit Ray, Claude Chabrol, and Michelangelo Antonioni, 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. When Wood came out as gay, leaving behind...