The Books of My Life: Sexual Politics and Narrative Film by Robin Wood

 

This is another little fragment from the Movie project jigsaw puzzle. It would have been integrated with the material on Robin Wood I wrote in another blog, the blog on Wood's books on Hitchcock and Hawks.

In his Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, Film and Culture series, 1998) Robin Wood has stitched together and revised some of his previously published articles of film criticism to provide us with what Wood refers to in Sexual Politics itself as a book of film criticism. Drawing on Norman Brown, a classicist who, like Erich Fromm, Erik Erickson, Wilhelm Reich and historicised, ethnologised, sociologised, and Marxised Freud, Wood the film theorist, explores the battle between life (creativity, freedom, spontaneous impulse, joy, love unconstrained of rules or limits) and death (repression, denial, punishment, prohibition, mechanisation, possessiveness, greed, money values) in cinema. He explores and engages the battle between the cinema of life or liberation and the cinema of death, the cinema of capitalist and fascist oppression. The cinema of death, Wood argues, is the cinema of the heterosexual couple, the subordination of women in the family, puritanical sexuality, and the oppression and persecution of gays. The cinema of life, according to Wood, is the cinema of liberation and release from all of these forms of oppression.

In the Sexual Politics and Narrative Film Wood explores Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, a film which, according to Wood, embodies the fascist cinema of death. He explores F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, a film which, according to Wood, is a film which offers us, at the end, the false dawn of liberation. And he explores the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, Leo McCarey, Max Ophuls, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Rivette,  Richard Linklater, and Greg Araki, and movies like Loyalties, the two Gaslights, Mandingo and Life Classes, all of which, Wood claims, embody or point toward, at least in part of in full, liberation from the culture and cinema of oppression and death.

Another thing Wood does in Sexual Politics, something that is particularly interesting to me, is to distinguish between four approaches to film (I would, borrowing these from Max Weber, call them ideal type approaches to cinema), the approach of the theorist (he or she who develops theories), the approach of the scholar (he or she who analyses information), the approach of the critic (he or she who engages with a work passionately and arrives at value judgements about that work), and the approach of the reviewer (he or she who engages in what I will call the lowest common denominator approach, an approach represented by Leonard Maltin's movie guides with their star ratings system, an approach that masquerades as criticism but in truth does not do justice to the complexities of culture or aesthetics). Wood, as I said, numbers himself among the critics, someone who approaches film not only descriptively or empirically but also normatively, in terms of value. I would suggest, however, contrary to Wood, that Wood is not only a critic, he is also a theorist, a scholar, and an academic (Like Wood I consider myself what my tutor in Canadian history said I was, a cultural critic; I am a cultural critic who makes use of theories and scholarship but I do not consider myself an academic even though I have taught in the academy). And I would also suggest that all of these aspects of Wood are on full display in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film.

Wood as academic theorist is on full display in several places in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film. Sexual Politics. Next to Wood's second expansion of Hitchcock's Films Revisited;(2002), Sexual Politics and Narrative Film offers, in my opinion, Wood's most systematic approach to film theory in his post-Screen period, a period in which Wood adapted his humanistic auteurism to new approaches to film represented most clearly in English language film criticism in the British film journal Screen. In this book and in his revised books on Hitchcock and Hawks, Wood matches his auteurist and mise-en-scene criticism with several specific aspects of the structuralist, semiological, and psychoanalytic, a psychoanalytic approach which is thankfully not grounded in a universalism, to approaches of the Screen and post-Screen eras of film, television, and literary criticism or analysis. 

Though Wood decries some forms of academic film criticism in Sexual Politics he was an academic, if an outsider-academic, at least part of the time. He taught at Queen's University, the University of Warwick, and York University over the years, after all. Wood as academic and scholar is on full display in his exploration of primary source material. For example, Wood uses documentary material, the original script to be specific, to argue that Letter from an Unknown Woman from 1948 was a collaboration between director Max Ophuls, star actor Joan Fontaine, the screenwriter, the camera man, and the producer of the film and he explores how all of these impinged on Ophuls's vision of the film. In spite of the fact that the film was a collaboration Wood argues that the film remains very much an Ophuls film, a conclusion aided by looking at Letter in relation to other Ophuls films made in the US and Europe, where, critical and scholarly consensus has it, Ophuls was freer to make his own film. It is on display in his historical contextualisations in many of the films he discusses and in their broader political, cultural and economic contexts, particularly the patriarchal capitalist ideological system in which the films were made. It is on display in Wood's exploration of the influence of the Gothic novel and the Gothic film on Mandingo. It is on display in the structuralist and semiological approaches in which Wood delineates the antinomies at the heart, for instance, of Mandingo and Celine et Julie vont en bateau, antinomies which give meaning, he argues, to the films he explores. It is on display in Wood's analysis of how audience identification "works" in, for example, Mandingo and Before Sunrise.

Wood as evaluator critic is also on display in Sexual Politics and Narrative Film. Wood the evaluative critic values films that disrupt the dominant or hegemonic discourse. For example, see Wood's discussion, and importantly so, toward the end of the book of Mandingo, Celine et Julie vont en bateau, and Before Sunrise, all of which he admires because they all push at the boundaries if not cross over the racial and sexual boundaries of patriarchal capitalism claims Wood. Wood's mix of the descriptive and the normative is perhaps most apparent in his essay on the two Gaslights, the British Gaslight from 1940 and the Hollywood one from 1944. Wood prefers the latter because it, he argues, pushes at the boundaries of a woman's inferior position in patriarchal Western society. Criticism, as Wood admits, as non-dogmatic political and ideological correctness.

Wood's Sexual Politics and Narrative Film is, as is always the case with the works of Robin Wood, well written. It is, as again is always the case with Wood's work, characterised by thoughtful analysis and careful readings of the films under Wood's critical microscope. Sexual Politics and Narrative Film is, as is always the case with Wood's work, interesting theoretically, methodologically, and critically. It is, in my opinion, a book every film scholar and every cultural studies scholar should read.

This does not mean I agree with everything Wood says. I, for example, tend to be more of a descriptive sort of bloke than a  normative one while Wood is, as a scholar and a critic, both. This difference does not mean that I don't like some films more than others. Nor does it mean that I like some of the films I do like more than others. I love Celine et Julie vont en bateau, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Jules et Jim, most of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, and most of the films of Frank Capra (I do, by the way, agree with Wood about Buffy the Vampire Slayer but not The Sopranos). Generally speaking, however, I try to put my likings on hold when I analyse something historically, sociologically, and anthropologically whether Mormons or Werewolves on Wheels. Finally, I would like to add one addendum to Wood. I would like to add a new sub species of film and TV "reviewer" to Wood's four ideal type typology of theorist, scholar, critic, and reviewer. I would like to add that of the social media reactor, a species that, I would argue, must be placed at the very bottom of the critical barrel. Cue "Money for Nothing".

By the way, I am not arguing that critics should not like, dislike, or somewhere in between the movies they watch. In the final analysis we all like, dislike, or fall somewhere in between the movies and TV shows we watch or the books we read. All of us regardless of "race", creed, or political and ideological colour are politically and ideologically correct in some way, shape, or form (my perception of the world I live in, for instance, has been shaped by Doctor Strangelove, We, and the Master and Margarita). What I am saying is that most critics and reviewers are not as theoretically, methodologically, and analytically gifted as Wood. Nor do most people who watch and express an opinion on a film realise, as does Wood, that beauty and value is in the eye of the beholder and what one considers beautiful at one point in time and space may change at another point in time and space. Finally, let me note that this blog cannot do justice to the breadth of Wood's thought, a breadth that even includes a discussion of emic and etic approaches to cinema. An essential book.

The Books of My Life: Hollywood Cinema (Maltby)

 

In Hitchcock’s Films, Robin Wood's seminal study of several of the American films of director Alfred Hitchcock, Wood opens the book by asking what at the time, was a very important question, why should we, he asks, take Hitchcock seriously? Richard Maltby opens his book on  Hollywood cinema, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, second edition, 2003) by asking a similar question. Why should we take Hollywood seriously? While Wood argued for taking Hitchcock seriously to sceptics for whom Hitchcock could not be taken seriously because he worked in a commercial medium, 

Maltby, giving us a preview of coming historical, commercial, cultural, and theoretical attractions in the book, answers his own question about why we should take Hollywood seriously in his introduction to Hollywood Cinema. We should take it seriously because Hollywood is an industry, a corporation, an industry and corporation that sells dreams to willing consumers who wish to “purchase" its product.  In the rest of the book, which is divided into four parts,  "The Commercial Aesthetic", “Histories", “Conventions", and “Approaches", Maltby tells us what Hollywood is, a  dream factory which sells its commodity. It uses, Maltby argues, technological and cultural strategies to sell willing consumers pleasure. 

Hollywood, as Maltby notes in part one of the book, “The Commercial Aesthetic", was and largely still is, much like any other corporation that arose in the corporate era of American capitalism. It was and is a vertically integrated (capitalist pop linguists call this synergy today) managed corporation which is structured hierarchically and whose goal it is to turn a profit and make monies for its stockholders. It does this like any other modern corporation, it sells a commodity, pleasure, dreams, utopian fantasies. Genres, Maltby argues, such as the Western, with their conventions, stereotypes, and repetitive visual motifs, is one of the things Hollywood uses to sell pleasure and to essentially pre-sell films to waiting audiences who were familiar with genre repetitions and enjoy them and also enjoy the novelties Hollywood seeds into these genre repetitions.

In the “Histories” section of the book Maltby  takes readers on a journey from the Hollywood of the Classic era of 1910 to 1948 with its vertically integrated studios that produced, at least in its big studios, A pictures, B pictures, shorts, newsreels, cartoons, and distributed and exhibited their product, to the Paramount decision by the US Supreme Court, a decision that marks the end of the classic Hollywood era since it forced Hollywood to divest of its theatres and made it easier for other companies to distribute product. Next Maltby takes us to the era of the New Hollywood from 1948 to the 1980, a period characterised by roadshow films and spectaculars like Ben Hur and Jaws, and an increasing reliance on expensive advertising. Finally Maltby takes us to the era of the conglomerate Hollywood since 1980, with its, studios as distributors of largely high stake big budget spectacles, its big and spectacular advertising budgets, and its horizontal integration or “synergies”, an era that also brings us full circle back to the age of vertical integration. 

In the technology chapter of the “Histories” section Maltby takes aim at a prominent theoretical approach to film and Hollywood cinema since the 1950s, Bazinian realism. While Bazin argued that technological changes were the product of Hollywood’s seeking after increasing realism, Maltby instead argues that Hollywood realism, such as it was (movies cannot, as Maltby notes, be fully realistic given their manipulations of time, space, narrative, and performance) and is, was the product of technological developments that were not teleological but piecemeal and which ebbed and flowed. These technological innovations, Maltby argues, had to do one thing, they had to fit into the dominant industrial, hierarchical, and aesthetic practises of Hollywood. Technological changes such as sound, colour, widescreen, and digital forms, the four case studies Maltby offers, had, in other words, to intersect with preexisting and standardised, routinised, rationalised, and bureaucratised (all these, as Max Weber notes, were was central to mass business and American mass corporate capitalism) Hollywood genres, styles, and editing strategies. The moral of this story seems to be that the more Hollywood changed the more it had to stay the same. 

Next in the Politics chapters in the "Histories" section Maltby argues that Hollywood has generally preached the gospel of political neutrality. He also notes, however, that at certain times the social problem film, for example, has been significant in Hollywood. It was significant, as Maltby notes, during the New Deal and the post-World War II era, despite the McCarthy witch hunt. It was also important, as Maltby tells us, during World War II when Hollywood, just like the US, went to war with its allies including the USSR against the evil Axis nations. Finally, Maltby rightly notes that though Hollywood has typically sought the widest possible audiences for its films in order to maximise profits Hollywood is also embedded within a culture in which ideology, the fetishisation and universalisation of capitalist economic notions and notions of American exceptionalism, are present and universalised. 

Something else Maltby takes aim at in the “Histories” section of the book is auteur theory, the notion that there are film authors, mostly directors, who have worked within the Hollywood industrial and profit making machine. Emphasisng that Hollywood is a dream factory, Maltby raises questions about the auteurist theory that has dominated film theory into the 1970s and which has continued to prove a useful way of organising the study of Hollywood ever since. 

In the “Conventions’ section of Hollywood Cinema Maltby explores how Hollywood uses space, time, performance, and narrative to produce the product it wishes to sell to consumers. Maltby argues that Hollywood strategies like camera placement, the centring of shots, “invisible” editing, star personas, the emphasis on action, self-censorship, and reading movies between the lines, to note a few examples, are means that Hollywood uses to manipulate audiences into purchasing and watching their product often a second time. Along the way Maltby argues against the crystal ball textualist approach to film, one that assumes everything you need to know about a text is in the text (an odd kind of contextualism) noting that film is not a text; it moves.

In the final section of the book Maltby explores the history of criticism and scholarly analysis of Hollywood product. He divides this section of the book, Approaches, into two parts: Criticism and Theory. 

I was quite impressed with Malby’s book on Hollywood cinema. That said, and in the critical spirit of F.R. Leavis and Robin Wood I had several buts. I would like to have seen more discussion by Maltby of tone (melodrama, drama, tragedy, comedy, satire, parody) in Hollywood movies, aspects of the movies that are just as important as genre. In fact, I think many of what are thought of as genre forms are actually tonal forms. 

I did not find Maltby’s argument against auteurism, an old argument, by the way, one which parallels the main criticisms of auteurism during the 1950s and 1960s, namely, that Hollywood was too commercial to have an author, compelling. Hollywood, as Robin Wood notes, can be both a commercially oriented medium engaged in commerce and still have a few authors, like Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra, working within it. 

Maltby could have done a better job of exploring how Hollywood’s economies of scale have helped it become successful in overseas markets and how its restoration of control over exhibition in the United States has squeezed not only foreign movies out of the domestic market but domestic “independent” films out of the marketplace. Remaking foreign movies, of course, was and is also a strategy Hollywood has used to squeeze foreign movies out of the market (something Hollywood TV has sometimes done). 

I liked Maltby’s contention that different groups of spectators read Hollywood films differently, some read them more literally and fundamentalist like while others read them, as Hollywood also intended, between between the lines. Reading between the lines, however, requires a degree of cultural capital and different caches of cultural capital exist leading to different readings of these between the lines. Some spectators pay attention to mise-en-scene (cultural capital acquired via schooling) others pay almost exclusive attention to special effects (the effect of socialisation to the popcorn spectacle movie). Maltby could and should have paid more attention to the issue of cultural capital and the different degrees of cultural capital readers have.

Maltby could have done more exploration of qualitative and quantitative studies of how audiences actually read film texts. Speaking of how audiences “read” texts, while I liked Maltby’s discussion of the literal and “sophisticated” readings of the film Casablanca his reading of the readings of the film is too simplistic. Many readers of Casablanca today on YouTube, self proclaimed reactors, don’t know enough about World War II to grasp the propaganda, Rick as a metaphor for the US, in the film, while others literally hate Ilsa through much of the film because they do not pay attention to her gestures and her mention that she thought her husband Laszlo was dead. I should also note that many “readers” of Bringing Up Baby read the film literally and not between the lines and criticise it for being ‘unrealistic”. Many readers of the film, in other words, are embedded within ideologies of realism, something prominent in amateur film “criticism” these days, and aren’t “entertained” by Bringing up Baby's comic and intentional unrealism. Additionally, given the historical amnesia of many “readers” they don’t really comprehend how Hollywood movies were made for maximum consumption and could and were sometimes read against the Code since they aren’t really aware of the Code.

All that said Hollywood Cinema is one of, it not, the best English language introduction to Hollywood I have ever read. I agree wholeheartedly with Maltby that academic criticism has generally become not only too focused on aesthetics and dominated far too often by notions of political and ideological correctness. I wholeheartedly applaud Maltby for doing something too many of these academic critics don’t do; focusing on the industry, the dream factory, that produces films in order to make profits and the means (genre, narrative strategies, use of space, manipulation of time, performance strategies) it uses to produce films that appeal to audiences, mostly 14 to 25 year olds in the post-Jaws and Star Wars era. I agree with Maltby that Hollywood has tried to insulate itself from governmental interference in its affairs not only through lobbying efforts and through self-regulation but by making its films ambiguous enough to be appreciated and read in multiple ways by those who go to see see Hollywood films. And, as I said earlier, I liked, really liked, how Maltby argued that spectators were central to Hollywood’s strategies and that movies were made to be “read” literarily, akin to how religious fundamentalists read the Bible (if selectively) and more complexly by readers with more expansive degrees of cultural capital. I appreciate Maltby’s contention that Hollywood has sold the American dream and the notion of American exceptionalism to audiences at home and abroad. In general, I think Maltby deserves praise for his descriptive approach, his sociological, ethnological, historical, physiological, anatomical, and cognitive science approach to Hollywood cinema, something often lacking from both film criticism and film scholarship these days and, therefore, something which is much needed. Kudos. Very, very, highly recommended despite its sometimes too reductionist economic approach. It must always be remembered that the infrastructure that undergirds economic ideologies is cultural.

If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Musings on Movies, Evaluating Movies, and Cultural Capital

 

Last night I watched two movies on the over the air Movie channel: Prime Cut (1972) and End of the Game (1976). I had seen both films before, the former just a few weeks ago also on the Movie channel (with blurring of nudity and cleansing of language, both of which one can easily figure out), the latter fifty years ago with my dear friend Duane Stigen at a cinema in Middletown itself, Muncie, Indiana. Both Duane and I were students at Ball State University at the time.

My initial reaction to Prime Cut, a film directed by Michael Ritchie, was that I liked it. I am a dark comedy or black comedy kind of guy after all and Prime Cut is definitely a dark comedy. Prime Cut is a film which reflects American films increasing adventurousness in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. In fact, I am still amazed and stunned that a film this dark could have been made in the United States even outside of Hollywood, as this film was. 

Christ Petit, who did the entry for the Prime Cut in the Time Out Film Guide, describes the film, and rightly so, as a mash up of pulp gangster fiction and fairy tale with Lee Marvin as Nick Devlin, playing the white knight to Gene Hackman’s Mary Ann, the dark knight. It is a noirish fairy tale which reveals the darkness at the heart of America including middle America. The film is set in Kansas City and rural Kansas where Mary Ann's meat packing plant is. Mary Ann is not only selling cattle and pig meat at his meat factory. He is also selling female flesh to the rich. (Hello Jeffrey Epstein). There is no difference between selling cattle and pigs and female flesh, female commodities raised from youth in nearby orphanages, Mary Ann tells Devlin when hit man Devlin raises moral questions about what Mary Ann is doing.

Devlin and his fully armed crew, have been sent by his bosses—gangster capitalists—from Chicago to collect the dues ($500 grand) Mary Ann owes the Company. One of his first acts (Devlin as White Knight) after arriving at Mary Ann’s meat plant—he arrives as the sale of female flesh is in progress—is to save Poppy (Sissy Spacek), who asks for his help, from the clutches of Mary Ann, his hired gun hands, and the rich sellers checking out the female flesh for sale in the pens (Mary Ann as Black Knight). By the way, all the female flesh for sale in the pens, it appears, are named after flowers (a reference to their soon to be deflowering after purchase?).

Chris Petit also notes in his entry in the Time Out Film Guide that a couple of set pieces in Prime Cut mirror the work of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly his North by Northwest (1959), something that is certainly intentional. The first finds Devlin and his crew running for their lives through a busy all-American fair complete with the Lawrence, Kansas marching band and a mannequin cow filled with milk which can be put into cups by pressing on the simulated teat of the cow. The second finds Devlin and Poppy running for their lives as a terrifying and horrifying combine bears down on them. Both set pieces point up the fact that the White All-American types who are at the county fair are blissfully ignorant about not only what is happening at the fair but are largely blissfully ignorant about the darkness—the violence, the misogyny, the imperialism, the collateral damage, the forced prostitution, the heroin—at the heart of the US and, thanks to the US, around the world, including in Southeast Asia.

The second film, End of the Game (Der Richter und sein Henten), which was directed by Maximilian Schell and written by Frederich Durrenmatt and Schell, I did not like when I first saw it. In fact, I hated the film. I thought it was the worst film I had ever seen at the time. Looking back on it, one has to take my “evaluation” of the film with a very large grain of salt. There were a lot of things in the film which went right by my head. I was, after all, only a sophomore in college and most of the movies I had seen up to that point were mainstream Hollywood films. I had yet to see films made in Europe or Japan, though that would soon would thanks to my move to Indiana University, and I had yet to take film classes which introduced me to the workings of narrative in film, mise-en-scene in film, the use of music in film, editing in film, and the various styles of acting in film. That too would soon change thanks to film course offerings at IU.

Between 1976, when I first saw End of the Game, and 2026, when I saw it for the second time, I had changed a lot. I was, thanks to the cultural capital that comes with age, education, and experience, better able to get the references, some satirical, in the film, a detective movie that explores the darkness at the heart of German Switzerland. I was also able grasp and to better appreciate the several styles of acting in the film, the way the film was cut, the films limited Brechtianism, and the films' dark humour in the film. For all these reasons and more I quite liked End of the Game on second viewing.

I guess the moral of the story is that we humans can, though we often don't, change. Some of this change comes from growing up and opening ourselves up to learning. Thank the lord Beezus for universities, teachers, and books. Amen.

The Books of My Life: Robin Wood’s Hitchcock's Films, Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo and Film Studies

 

I grew interested, shortly after I finished my doctoral work in history with a dissertation on the History of Mormon Studies, a dissertation grounded in the sociology of knowledge, in doing something I had long wanted to do since I was a student at the late and not much lamented, at least in some quarters, Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I wanted to do a history of the seminal English language film journal Movie. The question was how to do it. I first contacted James Naremore, retired from IU, who I had taken classes with, sending him my outline for the project. He urged me to contact the Australian film critic and film historian Adrian Martin, which I did. Martin provided me an an excellent introduction to the impact of Movie on Australia. Both gave me excellent advice on how to do that history, a history that stretched from England to Scotland to Canada to the United States and to Australia.

What I, a poor ex-college student needed to do this project was, of course, time and money. To provide the superstructure and infrastructure for me to do this project, I applied to do postgraduate work at the University of Warwick near Coventry in England. I chose Warwick because Victor Perkins, who had been connected to Movie since 1962, the year of its founding by film critic and scholar Ian Cameron, was teaching there. So was Edward Gallafant, one of the many scholars who was carrying on the Movie legacy, though one impacted by the changes in film theory thanks to post-auteurist Cahiers du Cinema and Screen. 

There was a major problem with the Warwick plan, however. I wanted to do American Studies at Warwick. Unfortunately it had only a master’s programme in the subject, a course I thought would be more up my alley than history given my sociological, cultural anthropological, theoretical, and historical bent. It is, of course, rare if not impossible to get monies for master’s work at universities that offer master’s and Ph. D programmes. For this reason, I suppose, Warwick preferred that I do a doctorate in history instead. I complied with the request and was accepted into history as a doctoral student of J.E. Smyth, who was at Warwick, and who had done extensive work on the history of Hollywood cinema, and who I wanted to work with.

There was a problem with this plan as well that would not go away, however. I did not want to do another history degree (nor did I want to do Film Studies as I found it and find it too parochial). I felt more intellectually comfortable in American Studies given my theoretical and thematic interests. Smyth suggested I apply to the University of Manchester to study with Ian Scott a film historian there, which did have an excellent doctoral programme in American Studies. I thought about it and like so much in my older age years my interest in doing this course declined as it encountered the reality of having to uproot my life, a life in which I acquired mass quantities of consumer goods such as books and classical CDs, two things that kept me like film scholar Robin Wood poorish, that I would have to do something with in order to do it. Along with the fact that I would have to do something with my mass of material goods money, well the lack thereof—Warwick offered no support nor any hope of teaching—increasing infirmities, and tiredness all played roles in my not applying to the University of Manchester. 

As a consequence of all this the Movie project sputtered and ran out of gas. Nevertheless the Movie project did not fully disappear into the ether. I did what would have been a piece it in my blog entitled Early Adventures in Auteurland which you can read on this site if you want to. I also regard the following essay on Robin Wood’s books Hitchcock’s Films, Hitchcock’s Films Revised, Howard Hawks, and Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo as another pieces of the once projected Movie Project puzzle. I hope you enjoy what follows if you choose to read it.

Introduction. Robin Wood, Hitchcock, Hawks, and Film Studies

From the vantage point of the 21st century there is no doubt that one of the most important and influential books in English language film criticism and film studies was Robin Wood's book on film director Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock's Films (London: Tantivy, 1965). At the time Wood published his book on Hitchcock auteurism had been spreading in France thanks to Les Cahiers du Cinema and Positif and spreading in the United States thanks to Peter Bogdonovich, Andrew Sarris, and Richard Schickel (see my Early Adventures in Auteurland posted on this blog page). 

Auteurism was not only spreading in the United States. It was also spreading in the United Kingdom.  A number of English magazines and journals were also impacted by auteurism including Oxford Opinion, Sequence cofounded by future film director Lindsay Anderson, who wrote extensively on American director John Ford, and another Oxonian Peter Ericson, and Sight and Sound once Penelope Houston, took over as editor of that journal. Perhaps the most “famous” promotor of auteurism, one that did not, by the way start or stop with film directors (see the Movie monograph on film actors as auteurs in Heavies and Dames( in the UK, however, was Movie. Movie was a film journal that was a home and sometime home to film auteurists like Ian Cameron, and V.F. Perkins, and, perhaps most famously, Robin Wood.

1. Leavis, Cambridge, and Wood 

For Wood, and others of an auteurist ilk, the goal of a film critic should be to isolate the authorial themes and concerns of a given director. It was an approach, Wood (1931-2009), who was born to a middle class family in Richmond in Surrey, inherited from his mentor F.R. Leavis, who was a fellow at Downing College, when he was a student at Jesus College. Wood also studied with A.P. Rossiter, who was a fellow at Jesus and who wrote an influential book on Shakespeare. This inheritance from Leavis was, as Wood notes in his new introductions to his books on Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, paradoxical since Leavis was not much interested in popular culture or movies.

Leavis’s approach to particularly the literary art was one one which marked itself off from positivist science. For Leavis, valid interpretations whether of great art or of life must be grounded in sensitive and cultivated receptiveness. One, of course, argued Leavis, had to learn this sensitive and cultivated responsiveness (we might call this cultural capital today) in order to apply it to works of art and to life, since for Leavis art and life were inseparable, and one could and should evaluate both as one moved through life.  

The importance of evaluation in Leavis meant that one could and should delineate great artists, but also one in which it was understood that the great artists delinieated were the product of their times. What a sensitive, intelligent, and curious reader with a degree of cultural capital can learn from these great artists (great based on the evaluative component of Leavis’s approach) was how a great writer writes or how, in Wood’s case, a great filmmaker makes film, and how a great writer, and a great filmmaker, engages and explores aspects of life. Lev Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, for instance, explored and engaged topics such as happy families, unhappy families, romance, ideologies associated with romanticism, love, how someone feels trapped and feels there is no way out of his or her dilemma, and Russianness, while Alfred Hitchcock in Rear Window explored the human ugliness hiding in plain site, romance, love, ideologies associated with romanticism, voyeurism, and voyeurism and the cinema. From both we can learn, Leavis and Wood claimed, valuable lessons about life.

Leavis saw education in “seriousness”, “intelligence”, and “significance” as the heart and soul of a critical education. One should get this education, Leavis argued, in colleges and universities, colleges and universities that placed the liberal arts at their heart. Leavis’s approach to education, as a consequence, differed from that of many if his colleagues who stressed that one should be educated into traditions that never changed. For Leavis, on the other hand, tradition, like art and life was dynamic. 

Leavis’s idea of the university as a centre for the cultivation of knowledge was not, of course, the university of careerism that was becoming or had become dominant in the era of the dominance of consumer capitalism even at Leavis’s Cambridge. Leavis decried this network of interlocking clubs of academics, publishers, and reviewers, just as he decried industrialisation, seeing it as a culture that promoted not an education into a critical methodology but an education dominated by not rocking the boat conformism and liberal platitudes. Leavis’s university, or perhaps better his idea of the university as a centre for the cultivation of knowledge, on the other hand, was a university that emphasised that one should not blindly accept accepted knowledge. Instead, Leavis argued, any tradition worth preserving was, like art and life, dynamic. It was a tradition that embodied a critique of the present and pointed to possible futures. 

2. Wood Post-Cambridge

After leaving Jesus Wood, who taught English in a high school near London, published an article on Hitchcock’s Psycho. The article was deeply influenced by Leavis and by the auteurist policy of Cahiers du Cinema. Wood was able to get it published in Cahiers du Cinema in 1960 thanks to Eric Rohmer, a major figure at Cahiers at the time, and, thanks to Penelope Houston, who turned it down after Wood sent it to Sight and Sound. 

Wood’s essay on Psycho made his name in some quarters of early 1960s film criticism. In 1965, at the invitation of Peter Cowie, publisher and editor of the auteurist oriented "International Film Guide" series and author of a book on Bergman and a book on Swedish Cinema, Wood published the first edition of his now famous book, Hitchcock's Films. Hitchcock's Films contained a scholarly analysis of several Hitchcock films including Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964). An essay on Torn Curtain (1966) was added to the enlarged edition published in 1969 by Tantivy (Barnes in the United States). It also contained a critique of earlier work on Hitchcock by Houston, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, and Jean Douchet.

Wood begins Hitchcock's Films by asking what was an important question at the time, why we should take Hitchcock seriously. Wood asked, in other words, why anyone should take a director working in the commercially oriented Hollywood cinema, seriously. This was an important question at the time since for many Hollywood and art were two things that did not, at least for many, seem to go together. 

Wood argues in Hitchcock's Films that we should take Hitchcock seriously for several reasons. We should take him seriously because although he works in a popular medium where the plots of his films and the tone of his films (comedic, dramatic, tragic often at the same time) don't originate with him, something we could also say about, as Wood notes, Shakespeare for similar reasons, there is a unity to his work. We should take him seriously. We should take Hitchcock seriously, Wood argues, because themes, profound themes of universal significance such as the exchange of guilt, the good and evil in us all, voyeurism, appearances versus reality, a preoccupation with marriage and male sexual anxiety, and the therapeutic nature of relationships between men and women involving the protagonists experiencing the deviant, the underground, and relationships where despair and anxiety are counterpointed to optimism, are present in Hitchcock's work. We should take Hitchcock seriously because his heroes often need to be cured of some weakness or obsession, some deviant desire, that they indulge in. We should take Hitchcock seriously because Hitchcock is a master of drawing spectators into his films making audiences experience, via the manipulation of their emotions and consequent character identification with his characters, and particularly what his female characters. We should take Hitchcock's films seriously because, Wood argues, Hitchcocks’s films are great art. They are great art because they are coherent and the more coherent and organic (a kind of functionalist theory applied to film) a work of art is the better it is, argues Wood. As a consequence of this evaluative criteria, Wood distinguishes between more coherent and less coherent Hitchcock films arguing that the former are better than the latter, that Rear Window, for example, is better than Torn Curtain. We should take Hitchcock seriously, Wood argues, because his films show him to be a master of plotting, the use of actors, mise-en-scene, and editing.

3. Wood and Howard Hawks

Hitchcock’s Films was not the only seminal book Wood published on a Hollywood director in the 1960s. In 1968 he published the first edition of his book on Howard Hawks in the auteurist centred Cinema One series published by Secker and Warburg. As with his book on Hitchcock Wood melded film criticism with what we would today call film studies (exegesis, interpretation, and evaluation). 

Howard Hawks, like Wood's book on Hitchcock, reflects, expands, and deepens the auteurist perspective that developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Wood largely focuses in the book, just as he did in his book on Hitchcock, on the themes in Hawks’s work, Though Wood focuses on the themes in Hawks’s work he does not ignore the broader economic, political, and cultural aspects of film making and film meaning. Wood, for example, puts Red Line 7000 in the context of the political and cultural changes of the 1960s, he briefly touches on possible homosexual subtexts in Hawks’s films, he explores the representation of men and women in Hawks’s films, and he compares and contrasts the Westerns of John Ford and those of Hawks and the ideologies that undergird them. Unlike in his book on Hitchcock Wood is more cognisant, in his book on Hawks, of the fact that Hollywood film making is collaborative when he discusses the collaboration between Hawks and his actors on character development. Still, he argues that a Howard Hawks film, and Hawks produced several of his films as well as directed them, is a Howard Hawks film

For Wood Hawks’s films can be divided into two general types, forms, or structures, the adventure films like Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and Red River (1948), and the comedies such as Scarface (1932), a non-comedy that Wood argues thematically belongs with the comedies, Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Monkey Business (1952). The former, argues Wood, centre around a group made up of male professionals for whom self-respect and responsibility are central and in which the group forms a somewhat self contained society. The comedies, on the other hand, with their lure of irresponsibility, emphasise the primitive, the wild, and instinct, are less self-contained, and contain, in them, an implied if not explicit critique of American society. Wood argues that Rio Bravo (1959) and Red Line 7000 (1965) bring together both of these thematic worlds making them more organic because each character, each sequence, and each image illuminates every other, and, for this reason, he argues that they are Hawk’s artistic masterpieces. That said, Wood also argues that the latter is, artistically speaking, seriously wounded by poor acting from several of its principles.

4. Wood Meets the New Film Theories of the 1970s

In 1969, thanks to Peter Harcourt, the founder of the film studies programme at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario and author of an auteurist oriented book on film directors, Wood took up a position teaching film studies at Queen’s, a position he held until 1972. Between 1968 and 1971 the prolific Wood wrote several auteurist oriented books all published in a series with the Movie imprint (some were published by Praeger in the United States). Wood’s works for the Movie series included  studies of the directors Arthur Penn (1968), Ingmar Bergman (1969), Claude Chabrol (with Micheal Walker, 1970), and Michelangelo Antonioni (1971), and a monograph on the Apu Trilogy of Satyajit Ray (1971).  (Wayne State University press recently published expanded editions of Wood's Arthur Penn and Ingmar Bergman books and reprinted his work on the Apu Trilogy).

After resigning at Queen’s in 1972 Wood returned to England where he eventually took up a position teaching film at the new University of Warwick near Coventry, a job he held from 1973 to 1977. On his return to England Wood found that film theory had radically changed in his absence and that auteurism was now the bete noir of many fashionable film theorists, many, if not most of whom were connected to or associated with the film journal Screen, a journal that was influenced by the Marxist turn of Cahiers du Cinema in the late 1960s. 

Many of the critics connected to Screen categorised and classified classic auteurists like Wood, as unrepentant romantics, as dinosaurs in the brave new world of structural and semiological film studies. Wood now discovered that auteurists like himself were regarded as passe in a film studies world in which the author, as semiologist Roland Barthes proclaimed in a 1967 essay, was dead. For Barthes an author did not write, he or she was instead written by society and culture. 

For academic film theorists influenced by Barthes and the French cultural historian Michel Foucault who had also proclaimed the death of the author, critics and scholars like Peter Wollen (in the Conclusion to the third or 1972 edition of his influential Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, first edition London: Secker and Warburg, Cinema One series, 1969) and Raymond Bellour, Hitchcock and Hawks, the physical being, were different from “Hitchcock” and “Hawks”, the name applied to a body of work produced in a commercial medium. For post-auteurist Cahiers du Cinema the author, in other words, was an enunciator of the stuff of society and culture not the isolated figure of romantic ideology as, they charged, auteurists portrayed them as.

In the context of this supposedly new and improved film criticism Wood's approach to Hitchcock's films and to films in general took a historical and theoretical turn. In his 1977 "Retrospective" to Hitchcock's Films, Wood, who by then had taken a position, again thanks to Peter Harcourt, at York University in Greater Toronto, where Wood would teach from 1977 to 199 when he retired, Wood came to grips with the critiques of auteurism offered by structuralists like Peter Wollen in his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. In that monograph Wollen used the work of Howard Hawks to argue for a structuralist theory of auteurism, one interestingly and perhaps paradoxically indebted to Wood's book on Hawks. Wollen, drawing on Wood and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argued that one needed to look for antinomies or oppositions (for example, garden vs. wilderness, civilisation vs. savage, Europe vs. Indians, settled vs. monadic, plough vs. sabre) along with similarities and repetitions within the film texts of director auteurs like Hawks. He also explored how the films of Hawks differed from and were to the work of another auteur, John Ford. 

In his response to Wollen Wood admitted that the classic auteur theory was too often too averse to exploring the wider social contexts surrounding film making in Hollywood and that Hitchcock's films, for example, were impacted, historically speaking, by economic factors (Hollywood was an entertainment machine that made films to make monies) by censorship (the Code placed limits on what could be done in Hollywood films), and by compromises for popularities sake (films were often previewed and the comments of viewers sometimes led to changes in the films previewed by audiences). He also admitted that there were historical cultural factors that influenced Hitchcock and his films, specifically German expressionism and Soviet montage theory.

Despite these changes in how he approached films, however, Wood remained an auteurist. Wood argued that while all of us, including film makers, were and are impacted by historical social and cultural factors there remained an individual, an individual artist, who was the person, the physical person, who made and directed films. Wood also remained an evaluator of films and film quality. Instead of evaluating films on the basis of coherence, how a film did or did not cohere organically, however, he now began to evaluate films in terms of political and ideological correctness, as did and do academic film critics today who evaluate films in terms of good and bad representations, particularly good and bad representations of women, gays, lesbians, the working class, adding, in the process, a conflict element or component to his functionalist approach to film. Wood, by the way, not only continued to characterise himself an an auteurist. He also continued to characterise himself as an unreconstructed and unrepentant humanist throughout the course of his life. 

5. Wood Revisits Hitchcock and Hawks

Thanks to the influence of these “new” approaches to cinema Wood came to see culture and ideology as central to film criticism (who in their right mind couldn’t?) thanks at least in part, due to, as he points out in the autobiographical "Preface to the Revised Edition" of Hitchcock's Films Revisited (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, expanded edition 2002), his coming out as a gay man and a gay film critic, and his ongoing political education. Both taught him, he writes, that there was a dominant ideology that was constructed and then fetishised and that films were made in economic, political, and cultural contexts, particularly the context of consumer capitalism. He simply melded this new emphasis on the broader contexts of film with his film auteurism and his philosphical humanism.

Wood’s reevaluation of his approach to film criticism can be readily seen in his expanded editions of his books on Hawks and Hitchcock and in his monograph on Hawks’s Rio Bravo for the British Film Institute. In the 1981 republication of his book on Howard Hawks by the BFI Wood wrote a new “Introduction” along with a “Retrospect” to the book leaving the text unchanged, something he also did in the new editions of his book on Hitchcock. Wood prefers, as he notes, in the “Retrospect”to Howard Hawks, to let the reader see how the author has changed over time. What was newly evident in the additions Wood wrote to the original text of both books was the impact of semiology on Wood, something that resulted in Wood’s increased attention to the broader ideologies or myths that impact Hollywood film such as capitalism, the cult of domesticity, the emphasis on the monogamous biological family, and the representation of men, women, and gays in films. 

Something else that Wood paid greater attention to in the expanded edition of his book on Hawks, something that has become central to film theory since the late 1960s, is Wood’s attentiveness to contradictions in film texts, something Wood finds in Hawks’s films in his new “Introduction” and “Retrospective” to the book (induction or deduction?). As Wood notes the family and children are largely absent from Hawks’s films. Instead one finds chosen families and children who are essentially little adults. In Monkey Business, as Wood notes, one finds a family that, after husband and wife go primitive in the course of the film, who are rent through with tensions which become apparent thanks an elixir (B-4), an elixir that releases that which was repressed in their marriage. Additionally, Wood finds women who can hold their own against the males and he finds more gay subtexts than he did in the first edition of the book. He concludes the new edition of his book on Hawks by arguing that Hawks is a communal artist and that, as a consequence, classic auteurism must be tempered by the reality that Hollywood filmmaking is a collaborative enterprise.

In the 2006 “Introduction" to the Wayne State University Press reissue of Howard Hawks Wood finds something similar if with subtle differences. In the 2006 “Introduction" Wood places greater emphasis on Hawks as a communal artist who, like Mozart and Shakespeare, works in the Hollywood world of ready made materials such as logical and orderly narrative forms, invisible technique, symmetry, and genre. As a consequence, Wood argues, Hawks was, an artist who, unlike avant-garde artists, makes art and entertainment for the masses. Additionally, Wood once again emphasises, filmmaking in Hollywood is a collaborative enterprise, one that brings together craftspeople, writers (different writers, he notes, largely worked with Hawks exclusively on his adventure films and on his comedies) while also asserting that the work of Howard Hawks, who worked within a commercially oriented industry, is art, art is characterised by specific themes and concerns, including existentialism. 

Wood argues something similar in his additions to his book on Alfred Hitchcock. In his 1988 “Introduction" to Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Wood, while specifying that authors were products of their society and culture, argues that “authors" were still authors. He argues that the death of the author had been greatly exaggerated and that one could find authorial signatures in authorial intentions, an author’s personal psychology (which was impacted by broader social and cultural factors), and, in the fact that the films of one American director were different even for those of another of the same birth cohort, foregrounding, in the process, the fact that despite authors being influenced by the same economic, political, cultural, and geographic factors the films of these artists were different. He notes that different directors working in the Hollywood system could use narrative and generic conventions in different ways. He argues, in sum, that authors can be both influenced by broader social and cultural factors and be individual author-artists at the same time. 

All the while Wood continued to closely analyse texts in depth but, in contrast to Andrew Kleven in his superb Movie influenced monograph Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London, Wallflower, 2005), in a much more contextualised way. He continued to explore the themes of these auteurs, such as the tendency for Hitchcock’s male heroes to be obsessed with power and domination (over women and gays) and the fear that they might lose it and lose their masculinity (impotence).

6. Wood Does Rio Bravo

In his 2003 contribution to the BFI Film Classics Series on Rio Bravo Wood goes into greater detail than in his revisions to his books on Hawks and Hitchcock, on how he had changed since his high auteurist days. While Wood's auteurism remained intact it was now draped in the theoretical components of the early part of the Screen revolution, particularly structuralism, semiology, and marxism.

Wood had actually been a kind of structuralist, as I noted earlier, even before the Screen revolution (or was it a Foucauldian binary rebellion?). He had, for instance, detailed the structural thematic components of Hawk’s work, themes that were, to some extent, undergirded by antinomies. Wood argued, as I noted, for instance, in his 1968 book on Hawks, that Hawk’s films could be divided into two types: the adventure films with their male groupings, their chosen community or chosen family, and their sense of responsibility and professionalism, and the comedies, with their lure of irresponsibility, their primitivism, their emphasis on the wild or savage, and their undermining of the rules of what might be called bourgeois society. This structural division Wood notes, a division between the adventure films and the comedies, underpinned the meaning or signification structures in Hawk’s work. Wood, in other words, was already engaged, to some extent, in a semiological approach to film in 1968. He was limitedly engaged in semiological work because different meanings (signs, symbols, icons, etc.) were attached to these different if sometimes intersecting groupings in Rio Bravo and Red Line 7000.

In his monograph on Rio Bravo Wood responds to criticisms of auteurism as too romantic, as too focused on individual auteurs without placing them into broader social and cultural contexts. Wood accepts that auteurism has too often been too focused on individuals and not focused enough on economic, political, and cultural contexts. He accepts the argument that making films in the Hollywood studio system was and is a collaborative enterprise. He accepts, in other words, the argument that directors, screen writers, editors, directors of photography, actors, and a host of craftspeople were involved in the making of Hollywood films (sins that are somewhat caricatures and stereotypes of an auteurism that was, in reality, more diverse than its critics admitted). What Wood does not accept, however, is the death of the author.

Wood argues that Hawks, the flesh and blood Hawks rather than the “Hawks” of contemporary critics and film scholars, is the author of his films despite the fact that he worked with a number of screenwriters, for example, often collaboratively. In his Introduction to the 2006 edition of Howard Hawks Wood had paid greater attention to the writers that Hawks worked with. He notes that Hawks generally used writers Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer for his comedy films and William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett for his adventure films. Regardless of who wrote the scripts for his films they are all, Wood maintains, characterised by the existentialist themes that intrigued Hawks for years. For Wood—this is something Wood talks about in his 1981 Retrospect and 2006 Introduction to Howard Hawks and in his monograph on Rio Bravo—is, like Mozart and Shakespeare, a communal artist, an artist who works in the “clays" of already existing forms, in Hawks’s case Hollywood genres, Hollywood narrative strategies, Hollywood filming strategies, and so on. Wood asserts that Mozart and Shakespeare were less reliant on an economic institution like Hawks, the Hollywood studios. Despite this, however, one can, Wood argues, compellingly argue that without musical training, musical notes, musical forms, musicians, patrons, and conductors, Mozart could not have become the musical star he was anymore than Hawks could have become the artist he was without pre-existing Hollywood cinematic forms and structures. 

In the third chapter of his BFI monograph on Rio Bravo Wood shifts to a close analysis of the film, which he asserts is part of a trilogy that includes Only Angels Have Wings, To Have and Have Not, and Rio Bravo. He discusses in more detail Hawks’s existentialism. He gives readers a close analysis of the film, one that explores the themes of the film and Howard Hawks’s adventure films in general with their male group, made up of males with nicknames like Chance, Dude, Stumpy, and Colorado, a male group that is a kind of chosen family in which professionalism and self-respect are central. He explores character development in the film including the character development of Dude (played by Dean Martin), a character arc in which Dude moves from a broken alcoholic to a redeemed law man. He explores the development of the relationship between Chance, played by John Wayne, and Feathers (yet another Hawksian nickname) played by Angie Dickinson. He explores tonal variety in Rio Bravo with its drama, near tragedy, and comedy. He notes that Stumpy, played by Walter Brennan, and Carlos, played by Pedro Gonzales-Gonzales, are both largely the figures in the film that provide comic relief. He notes that Carlos, as comic relief, plays the stereotyped role Mexicans generally play in Hollywood films though with a difference; he stands up to Chance at one point in the film, hires Feathers to help at the bar in his hotel, and helps Chance, who wants no help, in the films final battle. He explores how Feathers is integrated into the male group. He notes the doubles or doppelgangers in the film (Stumpy/Carlos, Feathers/Stumpy, and Dude/Colorado). He analyses key scenes such as the one between Feathers and the flowerpot, and the communal song scene, in great detail. He speculates about the gay subtext in the film and in Hawks other work noting the significant glances between Dude and Colorado. And though he realises that stating that one film is the best film ever made is ultimately an idiots game given that there are so many different kinds of films and no one has seen every film ever made, he ends the monograph by praising the Rio Bravo saying that it is his favourite film, and praising the communal art of Howard Hawks.

7. Wood’s General Approach to Cinema

Another thing Wood did in his revisions to his books on Hitchcock and Hawks and more specifically in the 1989 and 2002 additions to Columbia University Press Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (the last nine chapters of the book), was to lay out in greater analytic and systematic detail his approach to cinema and particularly to Hollywood cinema for the first time. Wood's approach integrates the economic (the capitalist context, production contexts), the political (the Code; broader contexts; surface level manicheanism and deep level complexification of this manicheanism; power, domination, and impotence), the cultural (genre—Hollywood’s way of resolving or seeming to resolve contextual contradictions and tensions—representation of class and gender, ideology; star personas), the geographic (Hollywood), and the demographic (auteurs, stars, Hitchcock used stars Stewart for films which had to do with power, domination, and impotence and Grant for films in which the male tries to manipulate women but not dominate them). Wood’s approach, in other words, integrates, the historical, the sociological, and the aesthetic. Additionally, in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited Wood also pays greater attention to style and technique (camera placement, camera shots, camera movement, editing, the use of music and their relationship to the meaning of the films) than he had in earlier versions of his Hitchcock and Hawks books. This attention to context and style and technique makes Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, in particular, an important contribution to film theory, film methodology, film scholarship, and film criticism.

Wood’s greater attention to context can particularly be seen in his additional chapters to Hichcock’s Films, chapters eleven through nineteen. In chapter seventeen, the chapter in which Wood, analyses both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, the 1934 English version, and the 1956 American version, chapter, Wood posits that one of the major differences between the two films is that the former was made in an era when the cult of domesticity was stronger and more hegemonic while the latter was made in an era, the era after WWII and Rosie the Riveter, when the cult of domesticity wasn’t as strong as it previously was. What is also clear in this chapter is that Wood is not a reductionist in his approach to film. He argues that there are other factors that differentiate the two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. There is, for instance, the genre issue. The English version of the movie is a suspense thriller while the latter version is a suspense thriller and a melodrama. There is also the star system issue. The American version starred Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day, stars who bring with them personas, in Stewart’s case the masculine domination/impotence binary persona that typified his work with Hitchcock, and domesticity and singer, for Doris Day.

According to Wood the underlying dominant ideology of Hollywood classic films is one which makes capitalism, the Protestant work ethic, heterosexual relations, the cult of domesticity family of settled husband, ideal wife, and children, and progress through technology, ideals. Hollywood films, argues Wood, generally extol success and wealth, the happy poor, the American dream (of all the above), the virile adventurous male, the dull but dependable husband, and the happy female housewife, making them normative while simultaneously making the wandering male and the dangerous wandering female (an adventuress, a gambler, a saloon worker, etc) dangerous. 

This ideological cultural signification or meaning system, however, was and is, according to Wood, riddled with tensions and contradictions, tensions and contradictions in which ideological oppositions in the form of genres, form a complex interlocking pattern of antinomies, such as, for example, the oppositions between the small town comedy and the sophisticated city comedy, and the opposition between city comedies and film noir. These oppositions, claims Wood, are different strategies for dealing with the ideological tensions inherent in the dominant normative culture and ideology. 

For Wood—and this is where he integrates the auteurist, the social and cultural, and aesthetic approaches—it is through the medium of the author that the ideological tensions inherent in the dominant ideology take particular form. Using Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt, Wood shows, in chapter fourteen of Hitchcocks Films Revisited, that the differences between both of these films, films in which noir, with all its dangers, is inserted into the small town comedy, can be traced to their auteurs. While Capra’s film reaffirms small town values and the value of families and is cathartic, Hitchcock’s film is hollow if not nihilistic. Thematic differences between authors, in other words, matter.

In chapter twelve Wood notes that the classical narrative structure of films is one of symmetry, especially at the beginning and end of films, and that closure, the resolution of all of all the narrative threads and moral issues, restores order to the universe of the film and, in the process, reaffirms a set of values embodied in a system of rewards, generally marriage and death. The function of symmetry and closure, Wood argues, is to reinforce the patriarchal order and the subordination of women. There are,  however, Wood argues, exceptions to these general rules in films. Disruptions can occur. Thus while symmetry and closure operate on a formal level what symmetry there is and what symmetry marks is neither finality nor the return of an earlier order but choice. Additionally, closure can mark difference and can be ironic or dissonant, contradictory.

In chapter fifteen Wood explores how identification works in classic narrative films. According to Wood there are five different types of spectator identification: identification with the male gaze; identification with the threatened or victimised character; emotional identification or degrees of sympathy; intellectual identification or the sharing of consciousness; identification via cinematic devices; and identification with stars. Wood recognises that sympathetic and empathetic identification is, to a degree, subjective, and that spectators can read films in ways the author did not intend them to be read. That said, Wood argues, the scenario of a film and its cinematic devices go a long way toward tying spectators to characters via sympathy and empathy. In Notorious, for instance, these devices draw us, thanks to Hitchcock’s methodological strategy, to Alicia, the character played by Ingrid Bergman. Wood’s approach to identification here is more expansive than that of other semiological and psychoanalytical influenced film theorists (like Laura Mulvay, for instance) in that Wood explores how spectator identification via manipulations can change. Wood argues, for instance, that Hitchcock makes us initially identify with Adare (Michael Wilding) in Under Capricorn and then our identification is switched to Lady Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman) when she appears well into the film thanks to spectator sense of her victimisation and thanks to Bergman being a star with a known star persona, something, Wood argues, Hitchcock plays off of.

Wood goes on to explore in detail the intersection of the Bergman thematic with the Hitchcock thematic later in chapter fifteen. Wood begins his analysis of Bergman’s star persona  by exploring the star persona created for her after she arrived in Hollywood from Sweden. Wood looks at how Bergman’s thematic played out in Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s and in George Cukor’s remake of the English film, Gaslight. Bergman, when she arrived in Hollywood, was fitted, Wood argues, with a star persona that coded her as “natural", “healthy", “nice", and “ladylike" in opposition to the personas of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich which were marked as glamorous and exotic screen goddesses and, in the case of Garbo, aloof, morose and languorous yet soulful, and, in the case of Dietrich, decadent and full of artifice. It was Bergman’s smile, Wood argues, which represented all of the characteristics of Bergman’s Hollywood persona in microcosm.

In chapter eleven Wood details the types of films Hitchcock made. Wood argues that Hitchcock’s films fall into five ideal type categories: the story about the falsely accused man, the story about the guilty woman, the story about a psychopath, the story about espionage/political intrigue, and the story about a marriage. In chapter eighteen Wood reevaluates Rear Window from a more feminist perspective and Vertigo from a more psychoanalytic perspective and feminist perspective seeing the former as a cultural critique and the latter as as an exploration of the criminal as ego, the cop as superego, and Stewart’s character as suspended between the two and as a critique of male fantasies about women and love. In chapter sixteen Wood explores gays and Hitchcock and the representation of gays (actual or not) in Hitchcock's films.

Envoi: Robin Wood and Me

I have been into movies since the mid-1960s thanks to the Beatles and thanks to my dad. it was my dad  who let me and my sister go to see the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night at the cinema. And it was my dad who introduced me and my sister to the magical and fun world of Alfred Hitchcock. He let us watch Hitchcock’s The Birds when it appeared on the telly. I soon began to watch any film I could on television. It wasn’t long—sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s—that I also started reading books on the cinema. The first book on cinema I read was Robin Wood’s monograph on Hitchcock Hitchcock’s Films. 

If memory serves I picked up the 1970 Paperback Library enlarged edition of the book at a used bookstore and started reading it on the aeroplane as I was flying home to Dallas. I have read many books on photoplays since but for me Wood’s book remains the best book on film I have ever read though I also very much like Richard Roud’s Cinema: A Critical Dictionary quite a lot and find and David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film infuriatingly interesting and capitvating.

Wood’s book made me an auteurist. I accepted that what a film critic and film scholar should do was to look for authorial signatures in the themes and style of the films I watched. I did recognise that not every director was an author and that only some directors, directors like Hitchcock, Hawks, John Ford, and a host of European art directors like Ingmar Bergman, Francois Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard, were auteurs. And then I went to university.

At university I, like Wood, learned, thanks to structuralism and semiology and their focus on meanings, including contextual meanings, in texts, to ask questions about the political, economic, and cultural ideologies present in literary, film, and televisual texts. I learned how to explore how films represented men, represented women, and represented gays, something that sometimes requires a bit of archaeological detective work. 

Recently, it dawned on me that Robin Wood’s theoretical trajectory in film criticism, film studies, and film theory (Wood’s declarations that he is not a very good theorist is belied by his 1988 Introduction to Hitchcock’s Films Revisited), was also, for the most part, mine. Like Wood I was also enamoured of structuralism and semiology and I also became a social and cultural constructionist deeply interested in the workings of culture, the workings of ideology, and the fetishisations of culture and ideology of that’s just the way it is mantras from most of the population. My journey to social and cultural constructionism, however, occurred thanks not only to Barthes and Screen but to cultural anthropology and cultural sociology and scholars such as Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, Keith Thomas, and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. And like Wood I came to the conclusion there was a problem with the death of the author thesis and that some golden mean between the two parts of the binary (author/no author) needed to be found.

Like any classic and seminal book Wood’s books on Hitchcock and Hawks made and make me, every time I reread them, think. They made me think about Hitchcock. They made me think about Hawks. They made me think about film theory. They made me think about film authorship. They made me think about spectator identification with characters in film. I still consider Wood one of the greatest if not the greatest film critic and film scholar in the English language world though I know he thinks that Andrew Britton is the greatest of film critics and film scholars but I haven’t read enough Britton to have an opinion on Wood’s opinion. Hopefully, I will rectify that soon.

Rereading Hitchcock's Films, Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo and reading Hitchcock Films Revisited for the first time I was reminded again and again of why these books are classics and why I liked and like Robin Wood’s work so much. He is simply one of the most sensitive and enlightening film critics and historians I have ever read and he remains very much so today. If I was allowed to vote in the Sight and Sound best film books ever written poll Wood’s monographs would be at the top of my list (with a caveat that I have not read every book on cinema in every language). Anyone with an interest in film and film directors should read Wood.

It is clear to me, after rereading and reading these books and monographs, that the textual and exegetical approach Wood took in Hitchcock’s Films is not and should not be incompatible with the interpretive or hermeneutic approach (exploration of the ideological aspects of a film) Wood takes in the 1989 sections of Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. A close reading of a film text (its plot, cuts, camera shots, editing, music, mise-en-scene) is an essential prologue to interpretive analysis, putting films (or any works of art and entertainment) in their economic contexts, political contexts, cultural contexts, demographic contexts, and geographic contexts), something Wood does in part when he discusses the Hollywood system of making films and the censorship of Hollywood films during the era of the Code. Only after the exegetical and hermeneutic analysis is complete should one engage in evaluation or homiletics regardless of whether that evaluation is grounded in the notion of coherence or the notion that film texts contain inflections of the dominant ideology in which they are produced and exhibited.

I want to end this essay by adding a few yes buts to Wood’s approach to film, to Hitchcock and to Hawks. The fist but: I don’t share, at least at this moment in time, Wood’s dismissal of much of Hitchcock's work in England before he came to Hollywood nor do I share his adoration of Rio Bravo though I do have to admit that he makes a very good case for its greatness. For me Rio Bravo is a good film (I actually prefer El Dorado, a kind of remake of Rio Bravo). It is also a film that, for me, is flawed by Ricky Nelson’s performance, Angie Dickinson’s performance, and how Dickinson’s character was written. Give me Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. Additionally, I am not a huge fan, again at the moment, of Westerns in general and of Hawks’s adventure films in general. I prefer his comedies with their lure of what I would call, anarchy, Wood called them the lure of irresponsibility, and their parodic and satirical speaking truth to power. But then I am a sixties lad. 

Second but: while I have no problem with Wood’s five kinds of identification with film (and by extension televisual) texts—identification with the male gaze; identification with the threatened or victimised character; emotional identification or degrees of sympathy; intellectual identification or the sharing of consciousness; identification via cinematic devices; and identification with stars—I would add a sixth and a seventh forms of identification, scholarly identification and politically and ideologically correct identification. Scholars who approach a text, particularly a text they have studied on a number of occasions, can and do occupy a position in a text that allows them to engage and explore it from an etic perspective, from a more dispassionate perspective. This etic perspective is one that allows scholars to avoid the other forms of identification and simultaneously to look at it from a more dispassionate perspective, a dispassionate perspective that looks, unlike most readers. of films and television, at everything in the screen (something aided and abetted by the technologies of streaming, the DVD, and the blu ray). That said, we should not forget that much scholarly discourse about films and television programmes these days reflects a possible seventh form of identification, ideologically correct identification, a space from which they judge texts good or bad on the basis of whether or not they reflect their ideological biases. Speaking of more scholarly forms of film identification, many if not most historians will not agree with Wood’s contention that what Hitchcock thought he was doing in Rope is irrelevant and will instead advocate for the study of primary materials in order to figure out what Hitchcock thought he was doing. Some will criticise Wood for largely ignoring issues of ethnicity and its close cousin race.

Third but: while Wood recognises that sympathetic and empathetic identification is, to a degree, subjective, and that spectators can read films in ways the author did not intend them to be read, identification is more complex than even Wood suggests. As I think about who I identified with in Rear Window, for example, it is a more fluid and complex form of identification than Wood would have it. I initially and tentatively identified with Jeffries (James Stewart) because he is the first character we meet and he is Jimmy Stewart, a star. Very quickly, however, I identified with Stella (Thelma Ritter) because she was so witty and sarcastic and I like wit and sarcasm. When Lisa (Grace Kelly) entered the frame I identified with her after all she was gorgeous, smart, compassionate, concerned, and, of course, she was Grace Kelly. Soon I soon identified with all three as they attempted to unravel the stories taking place in Jeffries’s rear windows. However, by the time Lisa sneaks into Thorwald’s (Raymond Burr) flat Lisa was once again the person I identified with thanks to her courage, if perhaps a less than cautious courage, and sense of adventure, something that showed just how wrong Jeffries was about her. I guess Hitchcock did make a woman’s picture for me. My point here is not that identification is often fluid in Hitchcock’s films. My point is that viewer identification is not necessarily constrained by directorial intentions, particularly the play on emotions, and for this reason ethnographies of how viewers identify with characters in Hitchcock’s films is warranted.

Fourth but: while Wood’s use of psychoanalysis is cautious—Wood notes that psychoanalysis’s conclusions cannot be applied cross-culturally—he simultaneously seems to suggest that the death instinct, the id-ego-superego schema as an interpretive tool, and the sex/power/impotence dynamic, are universal. Even with this caution, however, I much prefer social and cultural psychology to psychoanalysis and prefer a psychoanalysis in the context of social and cultural psychology and culture in general.

Fifth but: while Wood is more attentive to contexts, to genre (in a way that sees them as less discrete than many other critics do), and to film techniques, he still, in Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, ignores the writers Hitchcock worked with. In the revised parts of Howard Hawks he is more attentive to writers and the types of films Hawks made. Itt would have been nice to see Wood explore, as he did in the added sections of the Hawks book, the writers who worked with Hitchcock in greater detail. Perhaps they do matter. I would  also like to have seen Wood explore the cinematographers and costumers (Edith Head) Hitchcock often worked with.

Final but: Wood doesn’t really explore how readers actually read texts. And while texts are not, exegetically speaking, open ended—the snake in What a Way to Go is, for those with the cultural capital to get this, a metaphor for the Dean Martin character at the beginning of the movie in that film—they do, when one does qualitative and quantitative studies of readers of film and televisual texts, often seem open ended. 

The Books of My Life: Singin’ in the Rain

As I look back on my film viewing and film ranking habits one of the things that stands out to me from the vantage point of today is how much what I like, what I don’t like, and all points in between has changed across time and space. It is called, growing up with a reflexive mind, I guess

When I was a teenager I watched every film I could on television, at second run theatres, and at art cinemas. I particularly sought out films that were regarded as classics and as quality films by film critics like Leonard Maltin, whose film guide was my film bible in the early years of my film viewing life. Today I am much more choosy and much more persnickety about which films I would put in my film pantheon and which directors I would put in my director pantheon. I would, for example, number Doctor Strangelove and Casablanca as two of my pantheon films and number Alfred Hitchcock and Eric Rohmer as two of my pantheon directors.

Recently I have been rewatching a number of films that critical consensus among film critics would rank as classics. I have recently rewatched, for example, Gigi, Meet Me in Saint Louis, The Pirate, The Band Wagon, An American in Paris, and Singin’ in the Rain. Though I know that most critics would not agree with me, and the younger me would probably not agree with old me, I would not list, at the moment at least, any of these films among the best films ever made though I did quite like Gigi and Meet Me in Saint Louis the second or third time around. 

I blame a lot of this change in my film viewing aesthetics on Joss Whedon’s television show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I have long been fond of parody, satire, and dark or black comedy (yes, Virginia, black does not only refer to the colour of skin) but Buffy revealed to me how much I love genre blending, tonal blending, allegory, metaphor, and existentialism (that last actually makes Buffy kin to the works of Bergman and Kieslowski). A.B., after Buffy, I find it hard to watch films and television shows that don’t blend genre, tone, and social ethics. They seem mundane and banal to me now.

Now don’t get me wrong there were still things I found interesting and quite impressive in many of the films I rewatched. The visuals of the Vincente Minelli films and the John Ford films, for example, were and are impressive, really impressive. As a whole, however, the films by these directiors simply did not move me as they once did. 

Paradoxically I was quite moved—moved intellectually—by Peter Wollen’s monograph Singin’ in the Rain (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics, 1992). I have known Wollen’s work since I read Wollen' seminal Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. If memory serves, I read the first edition of this monograph which is now in its fifth edition, sometime in the 1970s. At the time, Signs and Meaning was a mind blowing experience for me as it revealed to me a more semiological and contextual approach to the film auteurism I had become devoted to.

Wollen’s Singin’ in the Rain was just as impressive as Signs and Meaning in the Cinema had been to me some fifty or so years ago. Wollen does an excellent job of exploring the production aspects of the film including its production by MGM’s Freed Unit and the fact that the film was built around songs written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown that MGM already owned. Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote a few additional songs for the film at Gene Kelly’s insistence as Wollen notes. He does an outstanding job of exploring the roles co-directors Stanley Donen and Kelly played in the making of the film. He does an excellent job of exploring how Kelly, who was also one of the stars of the film, worked with others to choreograph the dance, camera movements, and transitions in the “Singin’ in the Rain" segment of the film. Wollen rightly, in my opinion, regards Kelly as the general, the conductor, the author who led his forces in the making of the film. He does a superb job of conceptualising Singin’ in the Rain in the history of modern dance and in exploring Kelly’s approach to modern dance. He does an outstanding job of placing Singin’ in the Rain within the subgenres of the film musical, sub-genres enunciated by Rick Altman in his book on the American film musical: the Show Musical, the Fairy Tale Musical, and the Folk Musical. Wollen rightly, in my opinion, argues that Singin’ in the Rain is all three. He makes an interesting argument that Singin’ in the Rain is, with its realism—its story arc, character arcs, and exploration of the transition from silents to sound in Hollywood—and its artifice—the ballet sequence in the film—a kind of filmic version of Derrida’s critique of logocentrism. The film musical, as Wollen and others have noted since at least since the 1970s, foregrounds their construction making them similar to what Bertolt Brecht was trying to do in the theatre.

Recommended.

The Books of My Life: Gun Crazy

 

With the advent of digital television and its many channels and sub-channels it feels a lot like 1971 again today. 1971 was an age where you had the big boy network channels of ABC, CBS, and NBC on your local television box and also, at least in major metropolitan areas like the Dallas I grew up in, independent channels that showed old American movies and television shows. I loved watching old films and television shows like The Dick van Dyke Show and The Twilight Zone so I tended to watch the independent channels more than the network channels back in the day.

Given this, I actually kind of like this back to the past aspect of contemporary digital television despite the fact that many of these future past retro channels like WYBN here in upstate New York, are often poorly run by hacks who regard commercials as the real star attraction of their we want their money stations. The problem for those of us who actually want to watch the television shows or films rather than the commercials on these stations is that these stations are run by money grubbers who care more about commerce and profits than the shows or films they run and so they run their commercials, many of which make you wonder about their professionalism (amateur is actually too kind of a word to describe their incompetence), literally over the shows and films they broadcast. This makes watching any shows or films broadcast on these stations and their sub-channels next to impossible because these commercials often run over the end of the television show or at critical points during a film making it literally impossible to make sense of them. Such, I guess, is media life in neo-liberal America where the surreal is no longer surreal. It is the neo-American way.

Amidst the uber-amateurish retro TV stations out there in digital TV land there are some good stations, stations which are actually run by professionals who know what they are doing and who actually know how to make bot technologies properly. They don’t, in other words, incorrectly use one size all automation programmes to run their stations so they can milk them for the largest profits possible disrupting the flow of television shows and films in the process. One of my favourite of these quality retro TV networks is the Movies network.

The Movies network is a retro joy to watch for those of us who became cinephiles in the 1960s and 1970s thanks, in large part, to TV stations, particularly independent television stations, independent stations which showed classic Hollywood movie after movie on their channels in the 1960s and 1970s. And watch movie after movie on these channels my sister and I did. It was only after I went up to college that I discovered another way you could watch classic Hollywood flics, namely, in second run film theatres and in film society showings, both of which  ran classic Hollywood films but who also added into the mix classic and current foreign films for ones viewing pleasure.

It was on the Movies channel that I finally saw the celebrated film Gun Crazy, a 1950 noir made by the poverty row studio Monogram, produced by Monogram’s King Brothers, directed by Joseph Lewis, written by MacKinlay Kantor and blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, and starring Peggy Cummings and John Dahl as the two leads, Laurie and Bart. The film, originally titled Deadly is the Female, which is often cited by critics and historians as a precursor to the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde given that both films, as is Fritz Lang’s 1937 film You Only Live Once, centre around a couple who, in Gun Crazy’s case, meet cute at a gun shooting exhibition at a low rent carnival, and who proceed to rob their way across the American Midwest.

I liked Gun Crazy quite a lot but then I am a sucker for the cynicism and darkness of film noirs. They suits my perspective on the world quite well. So, after watching the film I picked up Jim Kitses’s book on the film, Gun Crazy (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 1996), to read more about the film. Kitses does a nice job of putting the film in its production contexts giving readers details about its writing, the impact of censorship on the film, its making, and those who made the film. Kitses, in a swipe at auteur theory, argues that the film was a collaboration between the King’s who produced the film with a proletarian chip on their shoulders. They were aided and abetted by the aforementioned Kantor and Trumbo, the latter of whom wrote under an assumed name, who wrote it, and the craftspeople, including the actors, who helped make it and helped give it meaning, even though it is, I would argue, the director, the general or the conductor, who ultimately leads the troops or players who make it into film battle or film performance.

Kitses also does an excellent job of exploring the noir context of the film. Additionally, he makes interesting connections between the noir aspect of the film with its narrative, character, and mise-en-scene codings, and other genres and tones the film, according to Kitses, draws on, including, surprisingly, the Western and Screwball Comedy. Kitses asserts that Gun Crazy is playing off of American myths about the freedom American frontier and the ideological spaces our two protagonists are confined in and which they try to break out of, to no avail, of course, in the deterministic world of film noir. It is on this cultural level that Kitses links the cultural to the political, to an America increasingly standardised and packaged and which is not particularly, as a consequence, palatable to our protagonists.

It is also on the cultural level where Kitses’ interpretive analysis, one grounded in exegesis, an analysis of the how the text was produced, gave me pause. Kitses utilises the standard operating practises of contemporary scholarly film criticism to explore, for example, the psychological and psychoanalytic aspects of Gun Crazy, but largely does so without documenting these presumed aspects of the film in the archival record. And while these suppositions may have validity one would, or at least I would, would like to see them linked to the historical record rather than to problematic and interesting conclusions based largely on a reading of the text. Sometimes it really does seem that the criticism aimed at so much film criticism is true: it far too often over analyses and over interprets a film on the basis of less than fully documented information in such a way that it appears that the socialised eyes of the beholder/critic is guiding the interpretation rather than the empirical evidence. 

Recommended.