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This issue celebrates Robin Wood's remarkable contribution to film criticism. Robin established himself as an important critic in the sixties and wrote steadily until a year before he died in 2009. His career is marked significantly by the tumultuous social and political changes that affected his professional and personal life. Robin's criticism is often described in terms of a simplistic bifurcation: first there was the humanist critic and then the politicized one. Arguably, the work was grounded, from his earliest writings, in an engagement with the social world and already evidenced a moral and political consciousness. Robin's writing was influenced by the Utopian possibilities of the social liberation movements of the sixties and the reactionary politics that followed, ending the hope of revolutionary change. The latter led to his interest in the films of such diverse directors as Gregg Araki, Patrice Chéreau and Michael Haneke, each of whom directly speaks of social oppression and its results and consequences.
Robin remained consistent in his adherence to the significance of the author/director as a prime creative presence responsible for the work and the importance of style as the cinema's means of communicating ideas and meaning. He was well aware of the collaborative nature of mainstream film production (as shown in his affection for the work of Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey and Jean Renoir, directors who were known to encourage collaboration and improvisation) but saw the director's contribution as giving the film a defined vision. Robin was attracted to films that evidenced a strong directorial signature long past the time...