Books by Robin Wood

Robin Wood - one of the foremost critics of cinema - has laid the groundwork for anyone writing about the horror film in the last half-century. Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews compiles over fifty years of his groundbreaking critiques.

My book is about an eight-year journey of getting a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease. I have ten to eleven years of experience working as a physical therapist assistant. I have experience in water, hospital, and nursing home while battling this condition. I have had to plead my own disability case and, after being awarded my back pay, found the treatment of choice, which is stem cell. I am the first person in West Tennessee to have this treatment. The stem cell treatment stops the progression of the disease and the symptoms. While waiting to get the stem cell treatment, I used my experience as a physical therapist assistant to help control my symptoms such as line dancing, playing cards, and swimming that stopped the tremor. My hope is that my journey and experiences will help other people who are dealing with Parkinson's disease and similar conditions and to get the awareness out to the community.

The Apu Trilogy is the fifth book written by influential film critic Robin Wood and republished for a contemporary audience. Focusing on the famed trilogy from Indian director Satyajit Ray, Wood persuasively demonstrates his ability at detailed textual analysis, providing an impressively sustained reading that elucidates the complex view of life in the trilogy. Wood was one of our most insightful and committed film critics, championing films that explore the human condition. His analysis of The Apu Trilogy reveals and illuminates the films' profoundly humanistic qualities with clarity and rigor, plumbing the psychological and emotional resonances that arise from Ray's delicate balance of performance, camerawork, and visual design. Wood was the first English-language critic to write substantively about Ray's films, which made the original publication of his monograph on The Apu Trilogy unprecedented as well as impressive. Of late there has been a renewed interest in North America in the work of Satyajit Ray, yet no other critic has come close to equaling the scope and depth of his analysis. In his introduction, originally published in 1971, Wood says reactions to Ray's work were met with indifference. In response, he offers possible reasons why this occurred, including social and cultural differences and the films' slow pacing, which contemporary critics tended to associate with classical cinema. Wood notes Ray's admiration for Western film culture, including the Hollywood cinema and European directors, particularly Jean Renoir and his realist films. Assigning a chapter to each Pather Panchali (1955), Aparajito, (1957), and The World of Apu, (1959), Wood goes on to explore each film more thoroughly. One of the aspects of this book that is particularly rewarding is Wood's analytical approach to the trilogy as a whole, as well as detailed attention given to each of the three films. The book, with a new preface by Richard Lippe and foreword by Barry Keith Grant, functions as a master class on what constitutes an in-depth reading of a work and the use of critical tools that are relevant to such a task. Robin Wood's The Apu Trilogy offers an excellent account of evaluative criticism that will appeal to film scholars and students alike.

This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century. For the new edition, Robin Wood has written a substantial new preface that explores the interesting double context within which the book can be read-that in which it was written and that in which we find ourselves today. Among the other additions to this new edition are a celebration of modern "e;screwball"e; comedies like My Best Friend's Wedding, and an analysis of '90s American and Canadian teen movies in the vein of American Pie, Can't Hardly Wait, and Rollercoaster. Also included are a chapter on Hollywood today that looks at David Fincher and Jim Jarmusch (among others) and an illuminating essay on Day of the Dead.

This volume is a study of the classic western film "Rio Bravo", which, according to the author, remains "beyond politics, as an argument as to why we should all want to go on living".

Wood explores the relationships between narrative form and style and sexual politics, probing the political and sexual ramifications of fascism and cinema, marriage and the couple, romantic love, and representations of women, race and gender in films from the United States, Europe, and Japan.