Claude Chabrol

by Robin Wood

American print.

Genres: Film

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1970

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 3 out of 5]

A study of New Wave film director Claude Chabrol’s work by Robin Wood and Michael Walker. Wood and Walker were identified with the film journal Movie, probably the most influential British film journal of the 1960s: deeply influenced by the 1950s Cahiers du cinema, Movie argued that films were primarily to be seen as expressions of their directors, the auteurs, and the prime means of that expression was through the mise en scene: form and content cannot be separated. Wood, Walker and Movie were soon to move beyond this critical position, but this short study is a clear example of the strengths and limits of the method. Each chapter is a study of a particular film, each chapter being written by one of the two writers (now and again they disagree with each other, which I find engaging): they look for reoccurring themes (therefore indentified as Chabrol themes) and Chabrol’s methods in presenting his themes. This is responding to films as texts, using many of the methods of literary criticism. (Wood was famously influenced by F.R. Leavis.) The responses to the films are intelligent and, if you have seen the films, should provoke thought: this is criticism that aims to enrich your response to the films. But film criticism was soon to enter murkier waters, bringing politics, ideology and economics into the mix, impersonal powers beyond the control of the individual artist. A continual theme in Wood’s later work was the status of the artist or auteur within these systems of control and meaning, but this study is untroubled by such difficulties and, for all its intelligence, seems a little naive.