Michael Wood is an emeritus professor at Princeton. He has written books on Yeats, Nabokov, Stendhal, Hitchcock and Empson, among other things.
It’s easy, and usually rash, to use the word ‘unforgettable’, or even ‘memorable’, since we can forget anything. But then what we hang on to becomes all the more remarkable, and Barthes, like Cole Porter, was the author of phrases and rhythms that for some of us will not go away until we do.
‘I inhabit the cinema,’ Agnès Varda says at the end of her autobiographical film, The Beaches of Agnès. ‘It’s my house. It seems I have always lived here.’ Of course we understand her metaphorically, even if we wouldn’t put it past the bag-lady character she plays at various moments in this work to set up house inside some forgotten foyer. At...
In a villanelle mood, Colm Tóibín started the following poem. The immediate context was a remark by a colleague that our students (and indeed most of our colleagues) don't seem to get excited about theory the way they used to. The title and first stanza are Colm's, and therefore so are the rhymes. You can tell from the word ‘skid' that I'm running out of options. A Structuralist Lament They don't thrill at the sign as we once did. They see Saussure as one more dead white male Trapped between the ego and the id. The Elementary Structures all are hid, No Lévi-Strauss is heard to tell the tale: They don't thrill at the sign as we once did.
The spacecraft hangs above Johannesburg, like a relic from Star Wars that couldn’t find the parking dock. It manages to look both otherworldly and scruffy, battered, rusting. Unplugged cables dangle down like weeds. It isn’t going anywhere, it can’t go anywhere. No one in the movie is very interested in the spacecraft, it just hovers like persistent bad weather. It...
I don’t know what it’s like at your end of the global village but I keep coming across extraordinary instances of evolutionary good cheer. The optimism doesn’t involve the theory of human origins or the longed for decline of the theology of intelligent design but the simpler assumption that adaptation is an ongoing success story. Human beings, it seems, are all right. We may...
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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