Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at Princeton. He has written books on Yeats, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson, among other things.
In a 2002 speech marking the centenary of Zola’s death, Jacques Chirac said that ‘to speak of Émile Zola is quite simply to speak of France … of this France which … is a language, an idea, an ideal of justice and freedom.’ If it hadn’t been for him, ‘this France’ would still be working on the 1789 Revolution. I don’t think...
How can you be a serial killer if you have only one person to kill? How can two films be so different when they sound as if they ought to be exactly the same? These are questions prompted by Claude Chabrol’s films. There are plenty of other questions too, and this is a good time to ask them: The Unfaithful Wife (1969) is back in cinemas in the UK and there’s currently a Chabrol...
We may have mixed feelings about the title of Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Disclosure Day. Doesn’t it sound a bit legal? How close is ‘disclosure’ to its apparent synonyms ‘revelation’ and ‘exposure’? Spielberg invites us to dismiss these worries and enjoy our liberal selves. When, about halfway through the film, a character talks about...
At the end of François Ozon’s film The Stranger, the narrator and hero makes a remarkable speech. He does the same, verbatim, in Luchino Visconti’s 1967 movie, and in Albert Camus’s novel L’Étranger, on which both films are based. But it means something different in each case and so becomes a sort of test or touchstone for the viewer or reader. A man...
Julian Barnes’s latest book is full of broken rules. In the second chapter we’re invited to look back at his early novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which contained, along with much else, ‘a list … of subjects which should be banned from fiction on a temporary or permanent basis’. The narrator’s list, with which Barnes himself ‘largely...
Michael Wood talks to Malin Hay about the recent list from Sight and Sound of the ‘greatest films of all time’ (in which he voted), and what considerations could, or should, go into...
Michael Wood talks to Adam Shatz about critical theory, its origins, developments and various diversions, and where it stands today.
Michael Wood looks at how Fritz Lang uses sound in his first two sound films, M (1931) and The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933).
Michael Wood reads his take on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra.
O n the face of it a Dictionary of Untranslatables looks like a contradiction in terms, either self-imploding from the word go, or, if pursued, headed fast down a cul-de-sac in which it is...
It took a very special kind of invention to get an awareness of the ‘erratic truth of death’s timing’ into a medium of mass entertainment.
I don’t believe in astrology, but I also know that not believing in astrology is a typically Taurean trait. When I first caught a bright young friend browsing in the astrology section of a...
Above the entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from my schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of...
Musing over Don Juan, Byron asked his banker and agent Douglas Kinnaird a rhetorical question: ‘Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a...
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