Personal views

This edition brings back a film studies work that has long been hard to find. Robin Wood, a leading scholar of cinema, provides a new introduction and adds three essays to the original collection Personal Views.

The essays cover a broad range of films and filmmakers and ask what film criticism is and what a critic's role should be. Wood openly calls himself a humanist and makes the case for art, creativity, and the individual viewer's personal response, showing these values at work in his close readings. The popular Hollywood directors discussed include Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and Leo McCarey. Auteurs such as Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg also appear, along with art-film figures Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Kenji Mizoguchi.

Of all Wood's books on cinema, this is the only one never published in the United States. The pieces were written during a turning point for film studies, as the discipline was becoming established within universities, and during a period of change in Wood's own life. Throughout, he remained a steady presence in film criticism, drawing on theory without letting theory dictate his readings and staying attentive to the details of each text. His broader aim is to join aesthetics and ideology in understanding films, so that cinema can enrich people's lives both individually and together.

The book is intended for film scholars and students, as well as for any reader interested in twentieth-century culture, who will likely want to return to it again and again.