The Legacy of Robin Wood
Wood stated ‘The release of sexuality in the horror film is always presented as perverted, monstrous and excessive; both the perversion and the excess being the logical outcome of repression.’
These ideas were fleshed out in the three part essay ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’ (Part I: Repression, The Other, The Monster; Part II: Return of the Repressed; Part III; The Reactionary Wing). This essay was published in The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, which was edited by Wood and his partner (academically and romantically) Richard Lippe. Wood was one of the first critics to note the overtly conservative nature lurking within the subtext of slasher movies. As a student of film studies, Wood’s enthusiastic writings really captured my imagination, bolstered my love for the critical analysis of horror cinema and fed my passion for film - particularly with the essay mentioned above. For me, An Introduction to the American Horror Film opened up a whole new way in which to view horror films.
After graduating from Cambridge in the early Sixties, Wood became a teacher and began writing articles on film. When he contributed an essay on Hitchcock's Psycho to the highly reputable Cahiers du cinema, Wood began to contribute to film journal Movie. In 1965, after a spell of teaching in England, France and Sweden, Wood published his first book, Hitchcock's Films. This was actually the first book to be published about the filmmaker in English. In the early Seventies he lectured in film in Canada. In 1973, he returned to England and lectured at Warwick University as part of a ground-breaking project set up with the British Film Institute to introduce the concept of film studies to the UK university curriculum. During this time Wood and his wife, teacher Aline Macdonald, divorced. Returning to Canada in 1977 he met and fell in love with Richard Lippe, and became professor of film studies at York University, Toronto where he taught until his retirement in the early 1990s. During his time here, Wood helped form a critical collective involving students and colleagues and published their work in CineACTION!. Wood would often draw on the critical theories of Freud and Marx and he was particularly interested in exploring the psychology behind the motivation of various film characters – especially those in Hitchcock’s films. As an openly gay man in the 70s, Wood’s writings were also frequently political, and he explained his reasons for this in his essay The Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic. In 2005, Wood said one of his main motives for writing about film was: “To contribute, in however modest a way, to the possibility of social revolution, along lines suggested by radical feminism, Marxism and gay liberation.” His other works focused on filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, Michael Antonioni and Arthur Penn. Various other titles include Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond and Rio Bravo (BFI Publishing).
Wood died of leukaemia at the age of 78 and leaves behind his partner Richard Lippe, ex-wife Aline MacDonald, children Carin, Fiona and Simon, and five grandchildren. He had a profound influence on the study of cinema.
'Why should we take Hitchcock seriously? It is a pity the question has to be raised. If the cinema were truly regarded as an autonomous art, not as a mere adjunct of the novel or the drama – if we were able yet to see films instead of mentally reducing them to literature – it would be unnecessary.' Robin Wood. 23 February 1931 – 18 December 2009
