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Remembering Robin Wood at the TIFF Cinematheque
Ricky Nelson, John Wayne, and Dean Martin in Rio Bravo. Still courtesy Warner Bros./Photofest.
It’s common knowledge that if you want to catch a certain kind of film in Toronto, you head to the TIFF Cinematheque. Call them “art films,” call them “classic films,” call them “real films,” call them whatever you want. But fact is, when you want to see something new from an up-and-coming international wunderkind, or a retrospective or certain director’s work, or care what a panel of festival programmers and curators deem the best films of the decade, the Cinematheque is your best bet. While they make a fine habit of cobbling together some fine programmes dedicated to certain filmmakers or national cinemas (many featuring the best prints available in the world), it’s rare to see a programme as wide-ranging as “Personal Views: A Tribute To Robin Wood,” which kicks off this Friday.
Born in England in 1931, but transplanted to Toronto to teach film studies at York in the late-’70s, Robin Wood has become one of the most cherished critics and scholars to write about the cinema. His writing looked at everything from the films of Claude Chabrol to the politics of Reagan-era American cinema. In 1985 he founded CineAction, a York-based film journal that still publishes quarterly. Sadly, Robin Wood passed away in December of 2009. But he leaves behind a rich legacy of film criticism essential for anyone interested in discourses of cinema of the past fifty years. (And indeed, much of it is quite literally required reading for any film school student.)
“As soon as Robin passed away, there was really no question,” TIFF Director Piers Handling says of the decision to mount a retrospective in Wood’s honour. “It was a great way to mark the passing of one of the English language’s greatest film critics.” Working with TIFF Canadian programmer Steve Gravestock and Wood’s long-time partner Richard Lippe, Handling began putting together a list of films which Wood had championed. Which is no small task in itself.
Wood’s interests ranged from high-art filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, to early screwball comedies and horror films—his writing is largely to thank (or blame, depending on where you sit) for George Romero’s canon of gory zombie films receiving so much critical and scholarly attention. “Robin’s writing ranged across so much of cinema that we thought it would make a great programme,” says Handling. “In fact, it’s a very limited programme: you could quadruple the size of this and still make it amazingly fascinating.”
The resulting programme crosses decades, genres, continents, and smashes the high-art/low-culture divide. Bringing together genre filmmakers such as Howard Hawks (1959’s Rio Bravo opens the series Friday night), Arthur Penn, and George Romero with international art-house staples such as Satyajit Ray and Michael Haneke, “Personal Views” fittingly reflects Wood’s own wildly diverse interests. “It’s nice to have an eclectic programme,” says Handling. “We’ve never really singled out a critic. And I think it has to do with our personal connection to the critic, especially living here in Toronto.”
Of course, eclecticism doesn’t always breed uniform quality. Despite Wood’s enthusiasm for the film, screening Romero’s dull slog Day of the Dead seems an odd choice, especially considering the incontestable quality of its forerunners, Night of the Living Dead (1968), and especially Dawn of the Dead (1978). Even Rio Bravo, which Hawks and John Wayne cooked up as a response to the anti-McCarthyist undertones of Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, may be fascinating for its ideological agenda and ability to articulate the death knell of classical studio Westerns, but it’s also pretty goofy at times (see: the scene where Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson lie around a jail singing to each other).
Still, the selections here are by-and-large top notch, including Penn’s The Chase, Haneke’s Code Inconu, and Anne Wheeler’s Loyalties, a 1986 Canadian/British co-production that’s as thrilling an allegorical colonial conquest in the Canadian bush as you’re likely to see (even if it is a little on the nose). And of course there’s always Wood’s writing, and the handy Cinematheque programming notes, to put some of the more curious selections in context.
Some of the screenings will be introduced by guests such as Handling, Richard Lippe, York professor and current CineAction editorial board member Scott Forsyth, and others. George Romero will even provide a video introduction for Day of the Dead, which is a bit odd considering he now lives in town, but hey, he’s probably off somewhere retrofitting a zombie story into his next broad allegory. All in all, “Personal Views” is shaping up to be not just the most diverse programme you’ll see at the Cinematheque this summer, but one that would engross and entertain one of its long-time advocates and frequent attendees: Robin Wood.
“Personal Views: A Tribute to Robin Wood” opens this Friday with Rio Bravo at 7 p.m. TIFF and the Department of Film at York University will toast the memory of Robin Wood prior to the screening from 5–6:45 p.m. in the Ontario College of Art & Design’s Lambert Lounge at 100 McCaul Street. Note also that due to the increased security measures during the G20 summit the AGO will close on Friday, June 25 at 4 p.m. and re-open on Monday, June 28. As a result, all TIFF Cinematheque screenings scheduled for that weekend have been canceled and most of them have been rescheduled. Check the Cinematheque’s website for the updated schedule.