Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at Princeton. He has written books on Yeats, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson, among other things.
Hindsight is a fine thing, and hindsight about a bit of foresight is even better when it comes to storytelling. There was a time when nobody knew anything about what was happening, whatever it was – except for the few people who did. The difficulty with such a story is that the ones who know are likely to appear so wise as to be inhuman, and the ones who don’t know seem more...
‘What is a hesitation, if one removes it altogether from the psychological dimension?’
Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem
There is a moment in William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity when he decides to linger in Macbeth’s mind. The future killer is trying to convince himself that murder might be not so bad a crime (for the criminal) if he could just get it over...
Jean-Luc Godard ’s Le Mépris has many admirers, and a restored print of it gets star billing in the BFI’s current season devoted to the director. Certainly it offers some fine quirky moments and angles, but it seems too distracted and awkward to count among Godard’s best films. He is too far away from his movie home. But then he was the one who chose to wander. He...
Perhaps because it’s based on a lively trilogy of novels for supposed teenagers, more probably because its writers and directors knew how to have a good time with stereotypes, The Hunger Games movie series is attractive because it is so eclectic, because it raids whatever cultural bank or shopping mall is handy. The heroine’s name combines a plant with a character from Thomas...
There are some fine shots of the title thoroughfare in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a new release from the Criterion Collection. It’s all bushes and darkness and bends in the road, various cars’ tail-lights appearing and disappearing. Anything could happen there, especially since there are some very posh residences among the shrubs. But the view from Mulholland...
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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