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.
