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I can't remember when I first met Robin. It was probably back in the early 1 960s, after I had joined the Education Department of the British Film Institute. Robin was beginning to write a series of monographs on a variety of filmmakers and, through the facilities of the BFI, I was in a position to lay on screenings for him - not that he really needed them.
From the outset, Robin was exceptional in the amount of information he could receive from a single screening of a film - far more than I could do from six. At the same time, he didn't seem to notice - or didn't care - if the film was in black-&-white or colour, or in standard aspect ratio or cinemascope! What he was doing when watching a film was extracting a moral fillet. That was his great strength, it seemed to me: he went for the moral centre of the films he engaged with.
Robin and I had had much the same training. We were both products of the Cambridge School of English and of the incisively moral mind of F.R. Leavis. Leavis celebrated those authors who demonstrated a "firm grasp of the particular" and extolled a humanist attention to psychological realism. Indeed, Robin's work has always involved an intimate examination of the details of any film he was exploring, while requiring, however, a dimension of realism with which he could engage. Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1 920), for instance, or the films of Jerry Lewis would be left to more outré expositors!
So back in the 1960s, there were screenings and lunches and endlessly insightful talk about cinema. Robin truly amazed me by the details he could retain and with the moral orderings that he could find in films which, at that time, I might have felt scarcely worthy of such attention. Ingmar Bergman, yes; but Alfred Hitchcock and - Heaven help us! - Howard Hawks? I had a lot to learn.
But culturally, those were heady times. Everything about film was in the process of expanding. Spurred on by new technologies,...