Hitchcock's Films Revisited

by Robin Wood

Analyzes the plots, characters, dramatic techniques, and themes employed in Hitchcock movies

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Media Tie In, Art, Textbooks, Pop Culture

387 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Robert Paul Wood, known as Robin Wood, was an English film critic and educator who lived in Canada for much of his life. He wrote books on the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Arthur Penn. Wood was a longtime member - and co-founder, along with other colleagues at Toronto's York University - of the editorial collective which publishes CineACTION!, a film theory magazine. Wood was also York professor emeritus of film.[2]

Robin Wood was a founding editor of CineAction! and author of numerous influential works, including new editions published by Wayne State University Press of Personal Views: Explorations in Film (2006), Howard Hawks (2006), Ingmar Bergman (2013), Arthur Penn (2014) and The Apu Trilogy (2016). He was professor emeritus at York University, Toronto, and the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robin was one of my dearest friends. I want to leave it at that. He's a visionary/pioneer in terms of film analysis, and loved red wine as much as myself. I miss him. If you respect Hitchcock AND gender, READ THIS.

[Teddy Farias · Rating 3 out of 5]

the first part of it was great...but then author 'revisits' what he wrote years before as if to make a new or fresh point about his critique on Hitchcock's films. why? too technical in the end.

[Jack Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant look at Hitchcock's films. Wood in this version looks back on his original text and reworks them whilst adding new content. I found the new introduction and discussion about F.R. Leavis particularly enlightening. Even though this may be a little dated in some ways ( Wood comments on this himself) it is still a thought provoking text.

[Tobias Broucke]

Robin Wood is one of the pivotal figures in the legitimizing/institutionalizing of film studies as a serious academic discipline, and some of his essays have been reproduced/anthologized enough to be firmly canonical (such as his indispensable 'Ideology/Genre/Auteur', included in this collection), but it is nevertheless sometimes difficult to know what to do with his work, how to situate it. He is (by his own account) a deeply omnivorous, non-doctrinaire thinker, which has the effect of making him incredibly unpredictable and thus interesting to read, but also makes it hard to generalize his practice into any sort of school, any sort of -ism. In contrast to some of his contemporaries (many of whom he, sometimes rightly, criticizes for being too singleminded in their approach), it is hard to know what calling somebody a 'Wood-ian' critic would mean—it would maybe be clearer were one talking about the early, squarely auteurist Wood, but (as he is quick to point out) his early writing is by far the weakest and least rigorous of his career. He is strongest when he is at his most ecumenical, so I suppose one just has to read the essays themselves and resist the urge to generalize, to rely on abstractions and heuristics.

This non-rigidity makes him an extremely astute critic of criticism. For instance, he injects much-needed ambiguity to questions of cinematic identification especially as regards gender, which were so often excessively systematized in the 1970s (and still today), which had the potential downside of naturalizing what one meant to critique (a common rejoinder to Laura Mulvey which, while somewhat oversimplifying her argument, isn't without truth). Other thinkers like Carol J. Clover, Judith Butler, and Joan Copjec would carry that ball further down the field (so to speak) in the 1990s (and they were perhaps able to cover more ground in part because they didn't, like Robin Wood does, reject Lacan out of hand), but Wood surely helped lay the groundwork for a more dynamic understanding of cross-gender identification, and is adept at drawing out the potentially revolutionary gender politics embedded within Freud's seeming phallocentrism and heteronormativity. He is also able to weave his own experience (especially, but not exclusively, his experience as a gay man) into his criticism in ways which are at once poignant and critically relevant to his argument—not an easy thing to do.

And so: often I am totally enraptured by his preliminary statements, his meta-critical scaffolding, and then somewhat let down by his analysis of the films themselves. His omnivorousness can have the effect of making his conclusions seem arbitrary—if he's choosing one methodology and rejecting a second one here, why is he choosing the second one and rejecting the first one there? And though it has its uses, I can never get fully on board with the kind of shot-by-shot, quasi-mathematical analysis he subjects films to fairly regularly, an approach which seems to take all the texture and sensuousness out of the object of analysis. Maybe that is the point of analysis (don't hold me to this), but it is nevertheless a tough read, and seems to run counter to many of Wood's self-professed principles. ~130 years into the existence of the art form, I still don't think we have devised a wholly satisfactory way of writing about cinema. It may be impossible, but (for all my quibbles) Wood gets closer than most.

[Jack Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robin Wood's readings of Hitchcock are justifiably renowned-- the man is a piercing critic and an excellent stylist-- but I think the thing that really turned me on to "Hitchcock's Films Revisited" is Wood's readings of... Robin Wood. Basically, when Wood released the first edition of this book he was a completely different person and thinker than he was during subsequent releases. Uncloseted and unashamedly Marxist, the "new Wood" who writes the latter half of this edition looks not for auteurist coherence in Hitch's work, but sociological contradiction. How does Hitchcock's corpus make sense of its wider world? Or how does it fail to? These questions and their corollaries drive some people insane (people who see the word "gender" and think "eww politics"; ie the kind of people who American empire has relentlessly propagandized), and Wood himself points out several examples of a sort of hacky leftist critique that is incapable of shedding any new light on its chosen subject.

Wood is assuredly not a hacky leftist, though. These are nuanced, thoughtful essays that make no bones about their ideological commitments but that also refuse to give up on the idea of, well, careful study. For Wood that carefulness also means taking full account of his place in the world, which somehow makes the fifty page Introduction here maybe one of the most moving things I've ever read.

Anyway you know the drill: fuck Donald Trump and free Palestine.

[Marnie Cannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wood's work clearly works for others but was not my personal favorite analysis of Hitchcock film theory to read. Wood focused heavily on auteur studies and mise-en-scene. Both are important parts of film studies, but I need more than that to create a stable argument. I found the discussion of Marnie intriguing but had to disagree with the claims Wood made about Rebecca. Wood's statements about Rebecca fell too much into "personal opinion" and not enough into analysis - much like this review. lol

[Tristan Dearden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really monumental, and can be read as a history of approaches to film studies as much as a work of film studies. The stuff on identification is particularly interesting and subtle. Also, it's odd to see someone so confidently trotting out psychoanalytic theory (although with that confidence comes clarity... maybe the obscurity of a lot of modern psychoanalytic theory is due to that retreat from the mainstream).

[GwenViolet · Rating 5 out of 5]

The model for basically any serious film study. Being a "revised" form enables to contrast the old (60s) essays with the newer (70s-80s) essays and see the intellectual development of a critic from "yoked between Leavis and Cahiers Du Cinema" and the introduction of Freud, Marx and Feminism basically unstabling the "unity" of the first set of essays, instead seeing Hitchcock's films in terms of dialectical contradiction, while not (entirely) giving up on the "new criticism" methods that work.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required reading back in university, and wasn't I a lucky youngling to discover this updated volume, battered but still holding together, in an Oxfam for dirt cheap? Seriously though - my god, the expense of your textbooks in those days. Ruinous, it was. But some brilliant work was found on those reading lists, and I would recommend Robin Wood's volume as one of the best available on either Hitchcock's movies, or film criticism generally. Excellent comprehensives analyses of 'Vertigo', 'Psycho', 'Rear Window', 'Strangers on a Train' and others are the book's bread and butter. Parts of it have dated, originally penned as they were in 1969, but the 'revisited' subtitle is the important element - Wood himself acknowledges his limitations in the extensive new chapters, essays and footnotes, right down to owning his self-directed homophobia, how it informed his older perspectives on the movies, and how his coming-out changed those perspectives for the better. Kinda, sorta a masterpiece.

[Ben Archambeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have cherry picked large swaths of this book to read piecemeal as I worked through Hitchcock's filmography, but this is the first time I've read it as a whole. No one has changed my lens of interpretation like Robin Wood, who gives permission to understand every artistic creation as an act of full throated intention.

[Suzanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really helped me with my Hitchcock class--on the films he analyzes!!
Not all films were covered, but the ones that were, great insight!!

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un livre réellement intéressant.

[Ehsan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A collection of some of Wood's best writings. This is probably the best book ever written about the master of suspense and his achievements.
Enjoy!

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the must have books for any serious student of Hitchcock. It will make you see his films in new ways. The author had his own interesting journey from the time of his original book in the '60s to this revision from 1989, and that's reflected as well. Personalities aside, reading Wood's agonizing reappraisal of "Marnie" is worth it for the aficionados. Wood had championed the film as a neglected masterpiece, defending what many feel are the films flaws as integral to appreciating it. In the interim Donald Spoto's biography of Hitchcock came out, telling the story of what really went on off-camera, and Wood's original comments could not stand. This is that rare volume of academic criticism that's actually worth reading.

[Jake Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

A simply masterful work of criticism, and I say that as someone who finds more than a few of Wood's conclusions a stretch. I still don't know if I can look at Hitchcock's work as such a progressive oeuvre, but Wood made me wrack my brain over the shots and scenarios he mentioned to see if I could refute them (I never could). It's also a highly readable distillation of some of the various critical theories to come out of the post-Derrida explosion, and after just spending a semester struggling with those theoreticians, I loved seeing their work put to practical, understandable use. One of the best film books I've ever read.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though not as enjoyable to read as A Hitchcock Reader, the other textbook I used for this class, I greatly enjoyed reading this book, as well!! I think I prefer anthologies in general, as there are different voices to be heard, rather than only one. This book also addressed many topics within films that I was interested in, though this is unique in that it analyzes films in general for the first part of the book, rather than ideas or topics pertaining to Hitchcock and the films themselves. The author does that in the second half of the book. This is a great book for the Hitchcock enthusiast, though the other one was far more intriguing and entertaining in the way it was written.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps still the foremost critic on Hitchcock's films, this is an update of Wood's landmark 1965 book that changed the director's reputation in the English-speaking world. No one else I've read has captured so well what is greatest in Hitchcock's films while pointing out their occasional weaknesses. The book is also a portrait of Wood's own evolution from callow wanna-be and closeted gay man to fierce and uncompromising Marxist/Feminist critic. It makes for a fascinating stew of opinion and insight into cinema, which was developed over a period of almost 30 years in Wood's career.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robin Wood digs pretty deeply into the themes and subtexts of a selection of Hitchcock films - saying a lot about gender, sexuality (especially homosexuality), ambiguity, morality, psycho-analysis. An excellent read and a vital reference for anyone interested in film.
I love that he loves Marnie (one of Hitch's most misunderstood masterpieces) even though he is maybe a little too forgiving of some of the more unforgivable flaws.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing for being an interesting interpretation of Hitchcock's films, but also for being damned ballsy in its interpretation too. Sample: The author sees Cary Grant's Roger O Thornhill as a symbol for Christ. Because of his last name. Thorn. Hill. Crown of Thorns. Died on a hill. Crazy!

[CJ Fusco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bored with the David Mitchell novel I've been reading, I plucked this analysis of Hitchcock's films off my shelf, where it had been languishing for a couple of years... and read it essentially cover-to-cover in one sitting. Who knew that film scholarship could be so compelling?!

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best and most irrefutable analysis of Hitchcock's cinema around. Wood is one of my favorite critics and this is probably his best work. The guy is right about most everything.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

this though....this is GREAT. love robin wood.

[Sergio · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must for any any Hitchcock fan, or film buff.