Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Auteur Theory and Authorship
Robin Wood is one of the most influential film critics to
write in the English language. Brilliantly insightful and
infuriatingly opinionated, Wood has spoken for a
minority of critics in his attempt to bridge the gap
between politically engaged criticism and questions of
human value. Educated at Cambridge University in the
early 1950s, Wood has taught film studies at universities
in England and Canada, ultimately making his home in
Toronto, where he has worked with an editorial collective
to publish the journal CineAction since 1985.
Wood began publishing film criticism while a
graduate student, contributing an article to Cahiers du
Cinéma on Psycho (1960) in 1960 and a short piece on
Advise and Consent (1960) to the second issue of the
British film journal Movie in 1962. But it was with a series
of books on individual directors (Alfred Hitchcock,
Claude Chabrol, Howard Hawks, Arthur Penn, and
Ingmar Bergman) in the latter part of the decade that
Wood established himself as a major voice in film
criticism. In Hitchcock’s Films (1965), he offered a series of
impressively detailed textual analyses of seven Hitchcock
films to argue that Hitchcock is a moralist who forces
spectators to confront their own darker impulses through
‘‘therapeutic’’ viewing experiences. Wood’s auteurist
readings of Hitchcock and Hawks have become canonical,
influencing virtually all subsequent scholarly discussions of
these two directors.
When Wood shifted his attention to genre films in
the late 1970s, he set the terms for the intense critical
debates on horror films that would arise in the following
decade. In 1979, along with his longtime partner Richard
Lippe, Wood mounted a major horror retrospective for
the Toronto International Film Festival that included the
Cameron argued that it was the director who was responsible
for what appears on the screen, but he also argued
that a dominant personality other than the director could
be the ‘‘author’’ of a film, that, for example, the ‘‘effective
author’’ of the film versions of Paddy Chayefsky’s (1923–
1981) works was primarily Chayefsky rather than the
credited directors, and the person responsible might on
occasions be the photographer or composer or producer
ROBIN WOOD
b. London, England, 23 February 1931
publication of a small anthology of essays on horror titled
The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film (1979).
In Wood’s celebrated introduction, he argued that the
horror film was driven by the Freudian concept of
repression and offered a psychoanalytic and Marxist
reading of the genre that remains influential.
Wood came out as gay in the mid-1970s, and since
that time his criticism has become increasingly political.
Sexual politics has been of particular importance to Wood
in his later work, whether he is discussing light-hearted
entertainments like American Pie and its sequels or the
confrontational art films of Gaspar Noé and Michael
Haneke. Many of his essays are gathered in the volumes
Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (1986) and Sexual
Politics and Narrative Film (1998). In subsequent editions,
Wood has also reconsidered his early auteurist work from
his more recent critical perspective, often examining the
directors’ ideological limitations rather than celebrating
their stamp of personality. Over three editions of the book
on Hitchcock, for example, Wood offered new gay and
feminist readings of the director’s films.
FURTHER READING
Wood, Robin. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989.
———. Hollywood. from Vietnam to Reagan—and
Beyond. Revised ed. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2003.
——— . Ingmar Bergman. London: Studio Vista, 1969.
———. Personal Views: Explorations in Film. New ed.
Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006.
———. Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and
Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
Barry Keith Grant
or star. Cameron cites The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961),
which ‘‘although directed by the excellent Gordon
Douglas, was above all an Angie Dickinson movie, being
entirely shaped by her personality and deriving all its
power, which was considerable, from her performance’’
(Cameron, 1972, pp. 13–14). In practice, though, little
of the work done by Movie or Sarris implied an authorial
dominant presence other than the director.
148 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM