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Last summer Robin Wood delivered three lectures at the National Film Theatre in London, in conjunction with the publication of his collection of essays, Personal Visions. FILM COMMENT published the first lecture in the NovemberDecember issue. The third lecture, "as I wanted to give it," appears below.
"The truth lies not in one dream but in many."
Each theory of film so far has insisted on its own particular polarization. Montage theory enthrones editing as the essential creative act at the expense of other aspects of film; Bazin's Realist theory, seeking to right the balance, merely substitutes its own imbalance, downgrading montage and artifice; the revolutionary theory centered in Britain on Screen (but today very widespread) rejects-or at any rate seeks to "deconstruct"-Realist art in favor of the so-called "open text." Auteur theory, in its heyday, concentrated attention exclusively on the fingerprints, thematic or stylistic, of the individual artist; recent attempts to discuss the complete "filmic text" have tended to throw out ideas of personal authorship altogether. Each theory has, given its underlying position, its own validity-the validity being dependent upon, and restricted by, the position. Each can offer insights into different areas of cinema and different aspects of a single film.
I have suggested, in these talks, the desirability for the critic-whose aim should always be to see the work as wholly as possible, as it is-to be able to draw on the discoveries and particular perceptions of each theory, each position, without committing himself exclusively to any one. The ideal will not be easy to attain, and even the attempt raises all kinds of problems, the chief of which is the validity of evaluative criteria that are not supported by a particular system. From what, then, do they receive support? No critic, obviously, can be free from a structure of values, nor can he afford to withdraw from the struggles and tensions of living to some position of "aesthetic" contemplation. Every critic who is worth reading has been, on the contrary, very much caught up in the effort to define values beyond purely aesthetic ones (if indeed such things exist). Yet to "live historically" need not entail commitment to a system or a cause; it can involve, rather, being alive to the opposing...