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.