Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at Princeton. He has written books on Yeats, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson, among other things.
‘This is the Nile and I’m a liar.’ These are the opening words of an amazing play by Anne Carson, first performed in 2019. The statement is in one sense correct. The speaker is nowhere near Egypt and about three thousand years too late for the Trojan War. J.L. Austin listed being ‘said by an actor on the stage’ as one of the ways in which an utterance might be...
One of the most fascinating aspects of Wei Shujun’s film Only the River Flows is the continuing contrast between its look and its story, between the faithful realism of the first and the elusive options of the second. An early instance of the former is the picture of a police station in a provincial Chinese town in the 1990s taking over a closed cinema as additional office space....
Towards the end of Levan Akin’s shape-shifting movie Crossing, a character says that she has begun to think of Istanbul as ‘a place where people come to disappear’. She has strong personal reasons for the thought, having travelled from Batumi in Georgia to look for her sister’s transgender child, who left home long ago, chased out by an angry father. The...
The bad year in Bertrand Bonello’s dizzying film The Beast is 2025. That’s when everything went wrong. By 2044, the latest date in the movie, the world is steady again and much improved. The bots are in charge and humans have only humble clerical jobs where their mistakes will not matter much. The bots are human in their fashion, a long way from being mere machines. They have...
The opening scenes of Viggo Mortensen’s new film, The Dead Don’t Hurt, are like an essay in montage or a puzzle for students of Sergei Eisenstein and André Bazin. A knight in armour rides a horse through a forest. A woman lies in bed. There is a shoot-out in a small Western town. How are we to put these pictures together? Mortensen is not going to help us. He gives us...
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 compiling such...
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.
On 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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