Wood - Personal Views: Explorations in Film

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION SERIES

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at http://wsupress.wayne.edu.

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Peter Lehman

Arizona State University

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Robert J. Burgoyne

Wayne State University

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Anna McCarthy

New York University

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Explorations in Film

PERSONAL VIEWS

Revised Edition

ROBIN WOOD

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
DETROIT

Revised edition published 2006 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. Originally published 1976 by the Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd., London and Bedford. Original edition 1976 by Robin Wood. Advisory editor Michael Wallington. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

10 09 08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wood, Robin, 1931

Personal views : explorations in film / Robin Wood.Rev. ed.

p. cm.

Originally published: London : G. Fraser, 1976.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8143-3278-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Motion picturesAesthetics. 2. Film criticism. I. Title.

PN1995.W645 2006

791.4301dc22

2006007540

The publishers acknowledge the Kobal Collection for the stills from The Scarlet Empress, Remember the Night, and I Walked with a Zombie; and the British Film Institute for the stills from Sansho Dayu, Les Carabinieres, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Touch of Evil, Germany, Year Zero, and Rio Bravo.

The following essays have been previously published: Notes for a Reading of I Walked with a Zombie first appeared in print in the Winter 1986 issue of CineAction! magazine, Creativity and Evaluation: Two Film Noirs of the Fifties first appeared in print in the Summer/Fall 1990 issue of CineAction! magazine, and Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic first appeared in print in the January/February 1978 issue of Film Comment magazine.

ISBN 978-0-8143-4006-6 (ebook)

FOR JOHN

with my love

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

This is the second in a series of Robin Woods early books, so important in the history of film studies, to be reprinted as part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television series. It is particularly satisfying that Personal Views has followed the influential work on Howard Hawks, because this is the only book on cinema by Wood never to have been published in the United States. Published originally in 1976 by a small art gallery in London, England, the book received only limited distribution. The original collection of eleven essays is here augmented by three additional pieces in the spirit of the work.

The benefit for Wood is a boon for readers, who in these pages are treated to a fascinating series of essays by one of the sharpest critical minds ever to write film criticism. It is true that the essays that comprise Personal Views consider a wide range of films and filmmakers, from popular Hollywood directors such as (of course) Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and Leo McCarey to recognized auteurs like Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg to art film icons Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Kenji Mizoguchi. Wood does indeed write in Personal Views about whatever movies or makers he happens to find of interest. Yet beyond the discussion of specific cinematic tales and tellers, films and film makers, there is one over-arching theme to this collection: the nature of (film) criticism and of the critic.

Bucking the winds of scholarly change (what he would prefer to call fashion), Wood remained throughout this period an anchor of critical discipline, using theory without being used by it and always attentive to textual detail. His appropriation of Roland Barthess narrative codes as outlined in S/Z for his semiological analysis (at once serious and satirical) of Jacques Tourneurs horror film I Walked with a Zombie is a perfect example of Woods ability to take what he needs from theory in offering a critical reading of a film.

Wood was not the lone voice of protest in the storm surge of theory. There were others. (Indeed, I like to believe that I was one of them.) But always Wood has stood apart for the power of his arguments and the sheer grace of his prose. And, despite the many theoretical discussions of the hypothetical spectator and his/her construction or positioning within the text, for his open acceptance of the experience of watching the films he discusses. This characteristic of Woods writing should come as no surprise, given that he writes about films that, as he says, he has lived with.

Woods overall critical project is to combine aesthetics and ideology in understanding films, for the ultimate goal of enriching our lives individually and together. In these pages he argues eloquently for this function of art generally and cinema specifically. Wood was heavily influenced by, and readily acknowledges his debt to, his teacher F. R. Leavis, who calls these critical concerns questions of value. But if as a critic Wood is a Leavis for the cinema, he is also its John Dewey. With his emphasis on the nature of the film experience, he opens himself up to the films he discusses, applying his critical acumen to them rather than cramming them into critical containers.

In the end Wood, the proud, self-contained unreconstructed humanist, not only offers persuasive arguments for the importance of art, creativity and personal response, but demonstrates it in his analyses of the films he discusses. He never offers his own readings as definitivehis understanding of criticism as well as of cinema precludes that possibility. But after reading them it is difficult to think of the films he discusses another way. This is his greatest achievement and why the writing in Personal Views is true film criticism.

BARRY KEITH GRANT

2005

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essays on Tourneur and Mizoguchi appeared in their original form in Film Comment and are reprinted here, revised and (in the case of the latter) considerably extended, with the permission of its editors. Other sections, written for the book, have been serialized in Film Comment, and the essay on Welles has appeared in translation in Positif.

Levin and the Jam developed out of lectures given for the Open University at York during the summers of 1973 and 1974. I would like to pay tribute to the stimulating and intensely creative atmosphere of Open University summer schools.

Many of the essays have developed out of lectures given during the past five years at Queens University, Canada, at Berkshire College of Education and at the University of Warwick. Their final form, therefore, has been influenced by discussions with colleagues and students in ways too intricate and often too indirect for detailed acknowledgment of debts to be possible. Peter Harcourt, Victor Perkins, Douglas Pye, Gary McCallum, Dave Elliott, Joyce Nelson, and Tom Ryan have all been important to me during this period, by virtue of encouragements or argument; but Im sure this list is far from exhaustive. I have tried in this book to be completely myself, as a result of which I have become much more aware of the multiplicity of influences, tangible and intangible, by which the self is determined at any given time.