Robin Wood: brittisk filmkritiker

Robin Wood – British Film Critic

Författare

Olof Hedling

Summary, in English

British film critic Robin Wood began to publish on film in 1960. Since then, he has written or co-written 13 books, and also published hundreds of essays and articles in books, in journals, and in different encyclopedias. At the same time, Wood has been a key figure in the development of what has become academic film studies. Wood was educated at Cambridge University, where he studied English literature in the early 1950s. Ever since, he has remained deeply influenced by a set of ideas concerning art, literature, and culture, ideas which have been typical for what has been known as the Cambridge English School. Wood’s admiration for the work and example of literary critic F. R. Leavis has been particularly profound, and has continued to this day.

The present thesis attempts to recapitulate Wood’s critical agenda in terms of a struggle. In a sense, his work can be regarded as a critical endeavour aimed at creating for film and film studies a cultural role similar to the one traditionally held by literary studies and English literature. In this endeavour, film studies is seen as the natural successor to Cambridge English.

Another area which is under scrutiny is the development of film studies within a cultural and historical context where modernism, in a general sense, has been firmly entrenched as the dominant current within the arts. With this context in mind, the aesthetic position developed by Wood and in Movie, the seminal journal to which Wood contributed most frequently during the 1960s, is used as a means of challenging the established view that the European art cinema - the modernist film movement emanating in Europe after the Second World War – was the key to film being accepted as an art form, and, thus, enter academia.

Ultimately, Wood is seen as having withdrawn from his main project. The reason for this being that he came to view contemporary Anglo-Saxon university culture as unfit for establiblishing a position with any resemblance to the one he had in mind for film and film studies.

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