Personal Views: Explorations in Film

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

by Robin Wood

A reissue of a significant and hard-to-find text in film studies with a new introduction and three additional essays included.

Robin Wood, the renowned scholarly critic and writer on film, has prepared a new introduction and added three essays to his classic text Personal Views. This important book contains essays on a wide range of films and filmmakers and considers questions of the nature of film criticism and the critic. Wood, the proud "unreconstructed humanist," offers in this collection persuasive arguments for the importance of art, creativity, and personal response and also demonstrates these values in his analyses. Personal Views is the only book on cinema by Wood never to have been published in the United States. It contains essays on popular Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and Leo McCarey; as well as pieces on recognized auteurs like Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg; and essays on art-film icons Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Kenji Mizoguchi. The writings that make up Personal Views appeared duing a pivotal time in both film studies-during its academic institutionalization-and in the author s life. Throughout this period of change, Wood remained a stalwart anchor of the critical discipline, using theory without being used by it and always staying attentive to textual detail. Wood s overall critical project is to combine aesthetics and ideology in understanding films for the ultimate goal of enriching our lives individually and together. This is a major work to be read and reread not just by film scholars and students of film but by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century culture.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Criticism

440 pages, Paperback

First published July 24, 2006

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

[Nick Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had a massive impact on me when I first read it when I was 20. I had been a bit of a fanatical film watcher in my teens, watching old Hollywood films on TV, foreign language films wherever I could find them and, as they started to appear on TV or when I was old enough to see them at the cinema, the New Hollywood films of the 1970s. I suppose my response was largely intuitive: I was easily influenced by established views: if a film was a ‘classic’ I presumed it must be good; I presumed films on Big Subjects were somehow more Serious than thrillers and such like entertainments; but there had been a number of films that had stunned me because of the way they were done: I had a certain awareness of style – and these films included Letter From an Unknown Woman and Touch of Evil, both of which have chapters devoted to them in this book. I’m not quite sure what started me thinking about films in a different and more coherent way: Truffaut’s interview book with Alfred Hitchcock and Hitchcock’s emphasis about putting everything in visual terms had a big impact: I no longer thought of style as an ornamentation that made a film look good or created a sense of realism, but as the heart of the film, the way it expressed its world. Then I read Robin Wood’s Personal Views (in the original 1976 edition – and that’s the one I’ve just re-read). The book is a series of interlinking essays. Those on specific films – as well as the essays on Letter From an Unknown Woman and Touch of Evil, there are studies of a number of films I had not seen: The Scarlet Empress, Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho Dayu – introduced me to new and more detailed ways of talking and thinking about films (I still hold to Wood’s dictum that the life of a film is in its detail): the emphasis was upon themes, not the seriousness of the subject matter, and the way the themes were built through the form and detail of a film. But the first two or three chapters are perhaps the most important, introducing Wood’s general critical attitudes and methods, the emphasis being on ‘traditional’ terms such as art, complexity, coherence and creativity. The second chapter (‘In Defence of Art’) is a questioning of the most dynamic movement within 1970s film study: the structuralist/semiologist/Althussarian Marxist ‘movement’. When I originally read this book all these ideas were new to me, now they seem long passed over: by the 1990s the structuralists had become born again empiricists, the Althussarian Marxists had made a pragmatic peace with the market. Maybe this also makes Wood’s writings outdated – there is no need to argue against something that no longer exists – but Wood’s emphasis upon ‘humanist’ values remains at odds with the empiricism of much of today’s film scholarship. If in the 1970s film scholarship was dominated by Theorists, today it is dominated by Historians...and Wood was always a critic concerned with values. And Wood differs from both the Theorists and the Empiricists in that he did not pretend to a phoney objectivity: he insisted that we always start from our personal responses: to pretend they weren’t there is dishonest...and from there, on the evidence before us, we try to generalise. This means there is a strong sense of Robin Wood within all his writings: to read him feels like listening to a conversation – and our reactions to his writing will always partly be formed by our response to this personality: I have always found him deeply engaging. Of course, returning to the book, it no longer has the same impact upon me as it did when I was 20, but this is partly because I have now been aware of the ideas for 35 years. I no longer feel that the essays on specific films are revelations, but they can still provoke thought. And behind the general attitudes there are questions that Wood does not attempt to answer. Although I think I share many of Wood’s critical attitudes they can never finally be ‘proved’, but that is because such attitudes are not provable. I also think, for instance, that out of two works the more complex will tend to have the greater worth, but there are a whole series of questions about what is meant by complexity or worth underlying such an assertion which demand a greater systematic study that Wood provides...but then, everything has its limits. It is possible that I am blinded by a certain sentimental attachment to this book, but I still find it one of the essential works written about cinema.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haha - that photo of Robin with this site has to be at least 30 years old. Robin was my friend (see: Hitchcock's Films Revisited). These are his most personal AND meticulous analyses of films. As always, if you haven't seen the films, watch them first. BUT the introduction is by far the most personal opus to film criticism I've ever seen.