Looking for Robin: Notes on a Completed PhD Project a Decade Later

During the second part of the 1990s I researched and wrote a PhD thesis at Lund University, Sweden. My topic was the film criticism of Robin Wood. As my investigation got underway I was able to place a number of articles and excerpts in Swedish academic journals. I also gave one or two conference papers on my subject. Besides that, I translated pieces by Robin into Swedish. The work came to an end of sorts as the thesis was published in Swedish as not quite a 300 page book in October 2001 (it went to the printers on 9/11). Its title was Robin Wood--brittisk filmkritiker (Robin Wood--British Film Critic) and it had a still from Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959) on the cover. On the recommendation of Robin's acquaintance, sometime colleague and occasional promoter Peter Harcourt, I wrote one further piece. It was my first in English and a somewhat feeble attempt to say something about Robin's knotty relationship with Canada, Canadian film and the concept of national cinema, an area not really covered in the thesis. The article was printed in Canadian Journal of Film Studies. (1) After the book was published it was, or parts of it were, used on film studies reading lists at several Swedish universities for quite some time (it is long out of print, but I continued to receive requests for permission to make photocopies until last year). Otherwise, I cannot say that it was met with much interest. Frankly, my colleagues at the department of literary studies--where film studies was housed at the time--thought Robin's commitment to Andre Bazin's notion that Hollywood should be studied because of its 'vitality, and, in a certain sense, the excellence of a tradition' plain ridiculous. Friends within my own field, on the other hand, tended to see his work as a bit outmoded, non-theoretical and perhaps not quite scholarly. Mainly, he seemed to be thought of as an important person during an early phase in the ever developing evolution of our field. From a practical point of view, the most encouraging thing the book did for me was that it ultimately gained me entry into professional academe and thus a regular income. For various reasons, my research has been focused on quite different topics ever since. This, however, does not mean that my fascination with Robin's work ended. I did follow him through the late books, the Wayne State University Press re-issues and up until his last essays for Artforum and Film Comment as well as the reports from the Toronto film festival in CineAction. These days, I regularly re-read him. I laugh and marvel at some of his more personal and provocative passages. I have also retained great admiration for his stylistic elegance, for certain of his conceptual thoughts and for his many suggestive critical insights. Another pleasure has been to detect work that clearly is inspired by Robin's example or would have been impossible without it. For instance, take the introduction to David Bordwell's Planet Hong Kong (2000), a book that has just been revised for a second edition as this is written. Bordwell--always an admirer of Robin and the author of a heartfelt obituary--here maps out what he terms 'the general idea of an aesthetic of popular cinema' and a 'vigorous tradition of mass entertainment' while also speaking plenty about 'craft' and 'refining the tradition'. (2) Instantly, Robin's two pioneering introductions to the Hitchcock and Hawks' book, composed more than three decades earlier when very little of the kind really had been attempted, resonate vibrantly. Some kind of friend Doing research on Robin's writings and career also meant that, in various ways, I came to follow in the footsteps of his life path. Early on, I became familiar with the odd coincidence that he had lived in Sweden during two periods of his life, and that the second of these had actually been spent in Lund, the very place where I lived. He even met his wife there and married her in Lund's town hall, a fact I have later pointed out to several astounded film scholars, principally familiar with Robin as a gay man and critic. …

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