Works by
Robin Wood
(Critic, Writer)
[Feburary 23, 1931 - ]

Howard Hawks  (1968, 2006)
Prolific director Howard Hawks made films in nearly every genre, from gangster movies like Scarface to comedies like Bringing Up Baby and Monkey Business and westerns like Rio Bravo. In this new edition of a classic text, author Robin Wood explores the ways in which Hawks pushed the boundaries of each genre and transformed the traditional forms in new, interesting, and creative ways. This reprint also contains an exciting new introduction by Wood, which shows how his thinking about Hawks has deepened over time without fundamentally changing. Since its original publication in 1972, Wood’s Howard Hawks has set the terms for virtually all subsequent discussions of the director. The provocative chapters demonstrate the ways in which Hawks’s films were affected by the director’s personality and way of looking at and feeling things, and by his celebration of instinct, self-respect, group responsibility, and male camaraderie. Wood’s connections between the professionalism of Hawks’s action films and comedies, with their "lure of irresponsibility," has become a standard way of conceptualizing Hawks’s films and the model to which all later critical work has had to respond. This book remains as contemporary as when it was first released, although it is grounded in the auteur period of its publication. Robin Wood has stubbornly resisted the trends of academic film studies and in so doing has remained one of its most influential voices. Certain to be of interest to film scholars and students, this book will also be particularly useful as a text for university courses on Hawks, popular cinema, and authorship in film.

Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond   (1986, 2003)
This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era. For the new edition, Wood has included a considerable new preface, a chapter celebrating My Best Friend´s Wedding, a section on 90s American teen comedies such as American Pie and Can´t Hardly Wait, a chapter on Hollywood today that looks at David Fincher and Jim Jarmusch (among others), and a helpful essay on Day of the Dead. All chapters from the original 1986 edition remain intact and include critical analyses of the films of Martin Scorcese and Michael Cimino, a political assault on the films of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and an in-depth meditation on Brian De Palma.

Hitchcock's Films Revisited (1965, 1969, 2002)
When Hitchcock´s Films was first published in 1965, it quickly became known as a new kind of book on film -one that came to be considered a necessary text in the Hitchcock bibliography. When Robin Wood returned to his writings on Hitchcock's films and published Hitchcock´s Films Revisited in 1989, the multi-dimensional essays took on a new shape -one that was tempered by Wood's own development as a critic. This new revised edition of Hitchcock´s Films Revisited includes a substantial new preface in which Wood reveals his personal history as a film scholar -including his coming out as a gay man, his views on his previous critical work, and how his writings, his love of film, and his personal life have remained deeply intertwined through the years. This revised edition includes all original eighteen essays and a new chapter on Marnie titled "Does Mark Cure Marnie? Or, 'You Freud, Me Hitchcock.'"

Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond  (1998)

Hitchcock's Films (1969, 1978)

Personal Views: Explorations in Film (1976)
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.

Claude Chabrol (1970) with Michael Walker (1970)

Ingmar Bergman (1969)

Antonioni (1968)s with Ian Cameron