The publication of Hitchcock’s Films by Robin Wood in 1965 (shortly after the release of Marnie, a Wood favorite) was the moment when English-language film criticism truly came of age. Wood went on to write other book-length studies of film auteurs such as Howard Hawks, Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, and Arthur Penn, as well as the seminal essay collections, Personal Views, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan, and Sexual Politics and Narrative Film.
Wood, who, according to the New York Times, “was British by birth and education but spent much of his career teaching in Canada,” combined a genuine love of cinema with scholarship, insight, and a prose style of astonishing clarity and intelligence. He taught us how to *read* a film, how to 
see the implications of what was contained within a specific visual image, and to consider the point of view of a particular film artist within the larger contexts of ideology, culture, and the production systems in which the filmmaker operated. Wood’s life – as we experienced it vicariously through his writings – was a constant process of growth and reevaluation, leading to revisions of his earlier work such as Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (2002). As I have said before, no writer on the subject of film has influenced me more profoundly.
see the implications of what was contained within a specific visual image, and to consider the point of view of a particular film artist within the larger contexts of ideology, culture, and the production systems in which the filmmaker operated. Wood’s life – as we experienced it vicariously through his writings – was a constant process of growth and reevaluation, leading to revisions of his earlier work such as Hitchcock’s Films Revisited (2002). As I have said before, no writer on the subject of film has influenced me more profoundly.
David Hudson is collecting obituaries and tributes here.
