Offscreen Notes
Robin Wood: 23 February 1931 - 18 December 2009
It’s has been a terrible last few weeks for cinema, especially horror cinema, with the recent deaths of Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy (November 30, 2009), American horror and science-fiction writer, director and special effects artist Dan O’Bannon (December 19, 2009) and the great British-born Canadian resident film educator, critic, theorist Robin Wood. Wood stands tall as one of the most important and influential film writers of his generation. I had the good fortune of taking a class with him during my Masters Degree at York University in the late 1980s. It was a course at Atkinson College on Images of Women in Cinema. I remember one class where he was discussing the doppelganger and mentioned how rare it was to come across a female doppelganger and that he was hard pressed to think of one. I put up my hand and mentioned the two Maria’s from Metropolis, to which he quickly replied with a retroactive “Ah yes, of course!” The class consisted of a mix of film students and students from Women Studies, which created somewhat of a divide within the class which reared its head in one particular class, on Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing. After his lecture, Wood warned the class that the film contained some harsh, misogynist imagery, at which point a sizable group of students stood up and left the class. Wood was hit so hard by their departure, saddened that they were not willing to see a film which he had programmed for the course. He was hurt by their lack of confidence in his ability to properly contextualize and analyze the film from a ‘feminist’ perspective. I remember the day so well because of the mixture of sorrow and pain on Wood’s face. And this was at the core of Wood’s strength: his ability to understand both a film’s social and cinematic significance. In this respect he remained forever influenced by his tutelage under the great humanist literary critic F. R. Leavis. Wood had an amazing range of tastes and critical skills, delving into great auteurs (Hitchcock, Antonioni, Bergman, Penn, Satyajit Ray), critical theory (specializing in Freudian, Psychoanalytical and Marxist theory), and genre (especially the Horror genre, but also the Western and, more recently, the teen film). Wood’s critical focus and commitment changed dramatically in the late 1970s, after the public acknowledgment of his homosexuality (he divorced his wife, with whom he had three children, in 1974 and then lived for the better part of his life with his partner Richard Lippe.) This shift was first stated in his essay “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic”, which was originally a speech at the National Film Theater and later printed in Film Comment in 1978. Perhaps his most groundbreaking work was on the horror film, which grew out of a catalogue of essays written to accompany a program of horror films at the Toronto Festival of Festival. The pamphlet, entitled The American Nightmare, was edited by Wood and Richard Lippe and published in 1979 by the Toronto Festival of Festivals. Although the essays were written and evaluated from the perspective of a (gay) Freudian-Marxist-Psychoanalytical bias, which not everyone would have agreed with, what was important (beyond the fact that this normally disparaged genre was being treated with such intellectual rigor) was the distinction made that horror films could have socially and politically progressive messages, themes, and subtexts. Out of this grew Wood’s ‘good’ (progressive) and ‘bad’ (reactionary) list of horror films. People argued with Wood’s position, but the gauntlet was thrown. Horror films would no longer be thought of as being only sensationalist, violent, juvenile, or misogynist. Wood’s essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” was to horror scholarship what Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” was to feminism. What I’ll always retain from Wood was his commitment to formal and stylistic analysis; no matter how passionate and social his criticism, he never forgot about cinema. I recommend the wonderful “A Tribute to Robin Wood” that appears in the film journal he co-founded, Cineaction, Issue 71, 2007, p. 22-30 (reminiscences rom Kass Banning, Scott Forsyth, Peter Harcourt, Bart Testa, Bruce LaBruce, and Janine Marchessault).
