A Robin Wood Bibliography

obin wood: A Brief Biography.

obin Wood was born (as Robert Paul Wood) on 23 February, 1931, in London England, to Robert Wood, an artist, and Florence Wood, né Earthy. He attended Jesus College, Cambridge, where he was influenced by F. R. Leavis and A. P. Rossiter, and graduated in 1953 with a diploma in education. From 1954 to 1958, Wood taught in schools in both England and Sweden (it is no coincidence that one of Wood's first books was on Ingmar Bergman, or that the first critical study of Wood is in Swedish). After a year in Lille, France, teaching English, Wood returned to teaching English at schools in England, and again in Sweden. On May 17th, 1960, Wood married Aline Macdonald. They bore three children, Carin, Fiona, and Simon. Though he went to Cambridge, and the editorial staff of Movie were Oxford, Wood began to contribute to the magazine in 1962, mostly on the strength of an essay he did on for Cahiers du cinema. In 1965, he published his first book, Hitchcock's Films, at the invitation of A. Zwemmer publishers in London. From 1969 to 1972, under the aegis of Peter Harcourt, Wood was a lecturer in film at Queen's Univrsity, Kingston, Ontario. In September, 1974, Wood and his wife divorced. Around this time, he also had a relationship with John Anderson, the dedicatee in at least one of Wood's books. Later he was to meet Richard Lippe, with whom he has been living since 1977.

Wood came out as a gay man, almost in passing, in a famous Film Comment essay in 1977. From 1973 to 1977, Wood was a lecturer on film studies at the University of Warwick, Coventry, where he met the future film scholar Andrew Britton, whose influence on Wood, by his own account, was as great as Wood's on his student. Wood became professor of film study at York University, Toronto, Ontario in 1977, until his retirement in the early-1990s.

One of the most prolific film writers since the 1960s, Wood publishes at least one book or significant essay every year. Wood has (unintentionally) inspired his own cult of worshipers, not unlike those followers of his own mentor, Leavis. Only Raymond Durgnat and Andrew Sarris have an equal status for film students of a certain generation. In 1985 Wood formed a collective with several other students and colleagues, set up to publish CineACTION!. As of this writing the magazine continues to come out about three times a year. In recent years he has been a (underused) resource on DVD retrospective making ofs. In 1989, Wood spent his sabbatical year in San Francisco, where he formed a life-affirming if temporary relationship with a man named Yuichi, which also inspired him to take an early retirement. Wood's early retirement was also designed to free him to write novels, of which, according to clues on dust jackets and elsewhere, he has written at least four thus far, none yet published.

[11 November, 2006] Recently, Robin Wood himself has provided an account of his life and career to interviewer Armen Svadjian in Your Flesh His interview also features a photograph of Wood, bearing an uncanny resemblance to F.R. Leavis, at the age of 75.

Special Note: This bibliography is unauthorized. It is unaffiliated with Robin Wood, his associates, or any of his magazine publications.

Update, Saturday, 19 December, 2009: Robin Wood died, apparently peaceably in his sleep, between 8 and 9 am, Friday morning, December 18th. The 78-year-old writer had been ill, and reports indicate that in his last days he was blind, a bitterly cruel condition for one of the most visually acute of all film critics. Solace, though, came in the form of opera and classical music, always a key art form for him but one to which Mr. Wood became increasingly dedicated late in life.

Word of the writer's death began to circulate in the afternoon.

The most moving tributes to Robin Wood written so far have appeared in a thread at Dave Kehr's website, particularly one written by Joseph McBride. Mr. McBride wrote, in part, "I am very sad to learn here of Robin Wood's death. He and Andrew Sarris were my role models when I started writing film criticism, and they remain my two idols in the field. Robin wrote brilliantly and in great intellectual depth and with a brave candor and passion. He showed us all the way to write about films seriously and with the kind of scholarly involvement that characterized the work of the great literary critics who paved his way before film criticism became a true scholarly field. Robin was one of the few auteurists who weathered the structuralist storm by accommodating its insights while not succumbing to its jargon or conformism. His work was actually strengthened by that challenge. I agree that his unusual willingness to evolve and rethink his ideas (as in his various editions of his Hitchcock book, especially his great chapter on Marnie) is part of what makes him great."

As the present writer wrote on Dave Kehr's site, "I can echo Joseph McBride in saying that Wood and Sarris were my long-distance mentors, along with, in my case, Raymond Durgnat and William S. Pechter. In fact, I recall with pleasure Joe's loving parody of film critic writing styles in an old issue of American Film, with its in reality enlightening precis of Wood's aesthetic, that criticism of film is criticism of life. Recently, I had just been re-reading the first version of Hitchcock's Films as inspiration for a project of my own, and was reminded again of Wood's beautiful critical prose style. I, too, am in the curious position of reading that book as my first director-survey book (my favorite literary genre), which is to start off one's critical explorations with a bar raised unknowingly high. Late in life his style tended to be highly "parenthetical," and I would read his news essays twice, first skipping all the parenthetical asides, and then again straight through with the asides as they came. There are so many wonderful Wood essays, from Sansho the Bailiff in Favorite Movies to his work on 70s horror films, his defense of Year of the Dragon, his championing of Canadian director William D. MacGillivray, and his later essays on teen sex comedies and to Richard Linklater and his work, but one essay that always pops into my mind is his analysis of Klute in Film Comment, an essay that underscores why we loved "seventies films" at their best then and now. … Some day his career will be recognized for what it is, the very model of the 20th century critical-intellectual journey towards self-discovery and values through art." Robin Wood mirrored his times in his personal trajectory from academic to human rights clarion, while giving voice to the intelligent person's qualms and curiosities about trends in intellectual fashions.

agazines (and websites) with contributions by Robin Wood.

ewspapers with contributions by Robin Wood.

etters by Robin Wood to publications.

ooks by Robin Wood.

ooks and anthologies with contributions by Robin Wood.

n Wood: book reviews, essays, references.

ontents of Wood-Influenced Magazines (Movie, CineACTION!).

hantom Citations: works attributed to Robin Wood currently of uncertain veracity.

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