Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at Princeton. He has written books on Yeats, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson, among other things.
Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869) is rightly celebrated as a masterwork of literary realism, but it also, quite consistently, makes us wonder whether we know what realism is, or what else might be caught up in it. One of the novel’s characters, a painter, thinks the very concept is ridiculous: ‘Down with Realism! A painter needs to paint the...
In a recent interview Sean Baker said he likes to resist purely ‘grey and drab’ moments in life or movies. ‘Even when I’m going through hard times, I still see colour.’ This is literally true of the palette of his films and especially of the scenes at Brighton Beach and Coney Island in his new movie, Anora, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year. It...
Reflecting on Megalopolis, a film he first envisaged in the 1970s and filmed (mostly in Georgia) in 2022, Francis Ford Coppola recalled thinking about a famous definition offered by Jean-Luc Godard: a film is composed of a beginning, middle and end, although not necessarily in that order. With a little tweaking the phrase helps us to contemplate this sprawling new movie. It has a beginning...
‘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....
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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