A Decade of Archives 4: 2009

This is the fourth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

2009 began with an unremarkable post pointing to a couple of free items on the internets and ended with a post on introductory film textbooks (December 2009 began the shift toward more frequent film posts that I discussed in the 2010 commemoration). Looking back on it, 2009 seems like a year with some good specific posts, but overall I don't think of it as a banner year for the blog in any way. I've been struggling with coming up with much to say about it, in fact, so instead of trying to tie everything together artificially, I'm just going to offer a few thoughts on some of my favorite posts from the year.

First, not really a post here (though I mentioned it): an interview with me that Charles Tan did in February 2009. This gives a sense of some of what I was thinking about at the beginning of the year. (Note that, contrary to the bio note at the beginning of that interview, I wasn't actually teaching in New Jersey at that point. I moved back to New Hampshire in the summer of 2008.)

In February, I wrote about Joanna Russ's magnificent vampire story "My Dear Emily". The version I had read at that time did not have Russ's preferred ending. Later, I read her preferred ending, but I'm not sure I prefer it. Sometimes I do. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays. Today is Monday, so I prefer the preferred ending. But tomorrow I will prefer the first-published ending. In any case, and with either ending, it's a story I continue to revere.

In March, my essay "Coetzee in the Promised Land" appeared at The Quarterly Conversation (and was, of course, mentioned around these here parts). I'm inordinately proud of this essay, so even though it didn't actually appear here in Mumpsimusland, I'm still linking to it now. Because I can.

Mandingo

When it first came out, many critics loathed Mandingo.  They said it was a pulp potboiler, a racist exploitation film, softcore porn, immoral.  Roger Ebert gave it zero stars and called it "a piece of manure" and "racist trash".  It did just fine at the box office in 1975, the year it was released, but its reputation as laughably and/or offensively awful stayed with it, keeping it out of circulation for a long time.  It's only been generally available on DVD for a couple of years now.

In 1976, Andrew Britton wrong a long and careful vindication of the film, but his essay was not widely read.  Britton noted how many of the reviewers didn't seem to have paid much attention to the film itself, given how many simple errors about the plot and character relationships filled their reviews.  More famously (if academic press books by film scholars can qualify as "famous"), Britton's teacher and colleague Robin Wood devoted a chapter of Sexual Politics and Narrative Film to Mandingo, which is where I first heard about the movie.

After watching Mandingo, I wanted to see if anybody had written about it more recently, especially within the film blogosphere, and that's when I discovered some real gems.  I can't say I loved the film in the way some people have, but I certainly think the original critics who hated it missed the mark completely.  It's a remarkable corrective to and comment on such things as Gone with the Wind, and some moments reminded me strongly of Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!, particularly in the way both movies complicate the viewer's sympathies for the white protagonist.

But my purpose here is simply to point you toward some excellent online writings about the film:

Robin Wood on Michael Haneke

At the end of the his life, Robin Wood was, according to various biographical notes accompanying his later essays, working on a book about Michael Haneke's films.  I don't know how far along that book was at the time of Wood's death last month, but knowing that he had written some essays about Haneke's work through the years, I fired up the ol' Google to see what of Wood's writings on Haneke were available online.  Quite a few, it turns out, and they're very much worth reading:

• "'Do I disgust you?' or, tirez pas sur La Pianiste" (CineAction, Spring 2002)
  
• "In Search of the Code Iconnu" (CineAction, Summer 2003)
• "Hidden in Plain Sight: Robin Wood on Michael Haneke's Cache" (CineAction, Jan 2006)
• "Michael Haneke: Beyond Compromise" (primarily on The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, and Funny Games) (CineAction, Summer 2007)

Those all come from issues of CineAction that are available via Findarticles.com, and you'll discover plenty of other essays by Wood therein (sometimes bylined with his full name, Robert Paul Wood, by Findarticles) as well as other CineAction essays on Haneke, especially from the Summer 2006 issue.

[Update 18 August 2011: Alas, it seems CineAction is no longer available via Findarticles, so the links above will no longer work.]

For more on both men, Film Studies for Free is the best single place to check, with posts on Wood and Haneke.

I've seen all but one of the Haneke films available on DVD in the U.S., and thus all of his major feature films except his latest, The White Ribbon.  The one I have not seen is the American version of Funny Games, mostly because the original is my least favorite Haneke, and Wood gets close to my feelings about it, calling it a "minor work", lamenting how it has tainted people's perceptions of Haneke, and pointing out the nonsense in the statements Haneke has (repeatedly) made about punishing his audience for sitting through the film.

As for Wood, you can ignore his bizarre statements about Kafka at the beginning of the excellent "Beyond Compromise" essay -- when not writing about film, Wood was sometimes embarrassingly obtuse, but his sensitivity to film was astounding.  His essays and books are particularly valuable when he writes about what he sees as successful and meaningful in particular films, and that is especially so of Haneke, a director who can be very difficult to appreciate -- read Wood on The Seventh Continent or Code Unknown (my own favorite among Haneke's films).  Let's hope that someone is putting together a collection of Wood's uncollected essays and/or that, before his death, Wood was able to finish the manuscript of his book on Haneke.  Either would be a treasure; both would be bliss.

Robin Wood: 1931-2009

The news of film critic Robin Wood's death came as a real shock to me because, in preparation for teaching an intro to film class next term, I've been spending a lot of time with his writings recently.  One of my projects, only vaguely justified by the class, has been to view or re-view all of Alfred Hitchcock's films, and Wood was one of the most important writers on Hitchcock.  Indeed, his Hitchcock's Films Revisited has been the book I've spent the most time with during my journey with Sir Alfred because it is richly provocative and unpredictable, and helped me reassess some films, such as Marnie, that I would otherwise have felt were minor.

Hitchcock's Films Revisited is fascinating, too, because it is multiple books in one, and various parts think about, contradict, and, indeed, criticize other parts of the book.  After the original Hitchcock's Films was published, Wood's life changed considerably -- he had been a married man living in England, politically uncommitted, with little knowledge of or respect for certain trends in film theory.  In the 1970s, he divorced, came out as gay, re-evaluated some of his stances on film theory, developed strong leftist political convictions, and moved to Canada.  These seismic shifts in his life inevitably affected his view of Hitchcock's films, and he chronicles those changes in the autobiographical sections of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, which includes the entire text of the original book and adds hundreds of pages of later material.  Even if I were not as interested in Hitchcock's work as I am, I would find Hitchcock's Films Revisited valuable as a model for the intersections of autobiography and criticism.  It forces readers to assess their own ways of evaluating and interpreting films by showing the ways Wood himself had done so over the years and, as importantly, the experiences that led him to choose particular techniques of evaluation and interpretation when he did.

There have been numerous eulogies for Wood written in the past few days.  The Auteur's Notebook has a roundup.  David Bordwell's blog post is typically thoughtful and well-written.  Film Studies for Free links to eulogies as well as works by or about Wood.  All worth reading.