Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at Princeton. He has written books on Yeats, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson, among other things.
Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, ends in a graveyard where the narrator wonders ‘how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’. Emerald Fennell’s film of the same name opens with a public hanging, and we wonder if things will quieten down. Is this a connection? Not really, except that both works deal in...
Acharacter in Josh Safdie’s new film, Marty Supreme, says there are no second chances in this world. The remark is meant to sound tough and true, if a little worn out. In fact, although the character may be right about many places in reality, he couldn’t be more wrong about the world of this movie. Everyone has dozens of chances, and everyone screws up most of them.
Marty Supreme...
‘If only one could write! After that, perhaps one could think,’ Gaston Bachelard writes in The Flame of a Candle, published in 1961, a year before his death. He is picturing himself at his desk, waiting in vain for the ability to write to return, for the solitude of the blank page to end. There were too many times, he says, when thinking he was thinking (‘croyant...
What’s new? An old song begs our pardon for asking that. Guillermo del Toro’s new film, Frankenstein, is too busy to bother with such a query, but it’s aware of its own prehistory. It knows, for example, that if we ask AI how many films about Frankenstein there have been it will say it doesn’t know for sure, but there are more than four hundred. That’s just...
The title seems a little tame if you haven’t seen the movie. L’Histoire de Souleymane: Souleymane’s Story (or History). For once the problem or the fun has nothing to do with the double meaning of the French word histoire. It just feels as if the director of the film, Boris Lojkine, and his co-writer, Delphine Agut, could have worked a bit harder. Or worked less. There’s a reason Mrs Dalloway isn’t called ‘Mrs Dalloway’s Story’.
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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