Robin Woods essays

Robin Wood's essays Robin Woods article Ideology, Genre, Auteur suggests that instead of looking at movies in only one perspective, one should combine different approaches to assess the movie as a whole. By collectively looking at the ideologies, the methods, and the director, one will get a more accurate sense of the movie. He states that his concern is to suggest something of the complex interaction of ideology, genre, and personal authorship that determines the richness, the density of meaning, of the great Hollywood masterpieces (Wood, 289). Wood is concerned with the ways in which ideologies are communicated in films. Ideologies are a set of beliefs that serve to normalize or naturalize a particular part of life, be it social, political or economical. Concentrating on American films, he lists twelve ideological certainties that permeate the classical Hollywood film. These include: capitalism in respect to ownership and enterprise; the work ethic and the idea of honest labour; marriage as legalized heterosexual monogamy; the allure of success and wealth; and America as the epitome of prosperity and happiness. Wood sees these ideological concepts riddled with hopeless contradictions and unresolvable tensions (291). He suggests that on their own, analyzing ideologies are unreliable as a form of evaluative criterion because of the inconsistencies and conflicts within the ideologies themselves. It is these ideologies that develop the genre theory. Genre theory is used to categorize film dependent on the story, the director, the expectations of the audience, et cetera. Wood indicates that genres stem from the contradictions in ideologies and should be studied in terms of ideological oppositions (291) such as film noir in a world of a small-town domestic comedy. He states that the problems of genre theory has been the tendency to treat genres as discrete (292), that is, ...