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The death of Robin Wood represents a terrible loss to our discipline and to humanity. He was one of the founders of Film Studies, in myjudgment its key founder. His contribution to the field is precisely why I make the rather grand claim that humanity will suffer from his passing. Wood began the 2003 edition of Hollywood from Vietnam, to Reagan with the four-word sentence "I am a critic." For Wood, scholarship and theory had to be subordinated to criticism, which he saw as among the noblest endeavors in which a person could be involved, because it entails the examination of one's commitments and sensibility, showing us the importance of a given work to an understanding of living (Figure 1). He studied and wrote about film not only because of his profound love of lhe medium, but because it assisted his meditation on humanity and on his own qualities as a human being. Wood's humanism, informed by his key influence, the distinguished Cambridge critic and teacher E R. Leavis, emphasized seriousness and significance, terms to which Wood regulady alluded. For Wood, seriousness about art was necessarily synonymous with seriousness about life, since the practice of criticism makes us evaluate a work's significance - or lack thereof - to our experience of life, our understanding of the past, and the potentials of the future. Wood, like Leavis, deliberately avoided providing rigid definitions of these notions, since, in their view, one needs to remain flexible to accommodate the critic's constant révaluation, recognizing dial criticism involves an ongoing dialogue with both a work and one's view of the world.
While he did not dismiss reviewing outright, he was infuriated by its encouragement of superficiality imprecision, cute wordsmithing, smug self-involvement, and forms of indulgence that run counter to the serious engagement he demanded. He was more man skeptical of Film Stuthes' heavy preoccupation with theory, which to his thinking treated works of the cinema chiefly as specimens with which one could prove or disprove this or that grand concept, not works with integrity in their own right created by other human beings. He was appalled that, for much of the existence of the discipline, the tortured ideas of theorists were treated with utmost respect while individual films became important...