Robin Wood

Robin Wood, the renowned scholarly critic and writer on film, has prepared a new introduction and added three essays to his classic text ""Personal Views."" This important book contains essays on a wide range of films and filmmakers and considers questions of the nature of film criticism and the critic. Wood, the proud ""unreconstructed humanist,"" offers in this collection persuasive arguments for the importance of art, creativity, and personal response and also demonstrates these values in his analyses. ""Personal Views"" is the only book on cinema by Wood never to have been published in the United States. It contains essays on popular Hollywood directors such as Howard Hawks, Vincente Minnelli, and Leo McCarey; as well as pieces on recognized auteurs like Max Ophuls, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Josef von Sternberg; and essays on art-film icons Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Kenji Mizoguchi. The writings that make up ""Personal Views"" appeared during a pivotal time in both film studies - during its academic institutionalization - and in the author's life. Throughout this period of change, Wood remained a stalwart anchor of the critical discipline, using theory without being used by it and always staying attentive to textual detail. Wood's overall critical project is to combine aesthetics and ideology in understanding films for the ultimate goal of enriching our lives individually and together. This is a major work to be read and reread not just by film scholars and students of film but by anyone with an interest in twentieth-century culture.

Prolific director Howard Hawks made films in nearly every genre, from gangster movies like ""Scarface"" to comedies like ""Bringing Up Baby"" and ""Monkey Business"" and westerns like ""Rio Bravo."" In this new edition of a classic text, author Robin Wood explores the ways in which Hawks pushed the boundaries of each genre and transformed the traditional forms in new, interesting, and creative ways. This reprint also contains an exciting new introduction by Wood, which shows how his thinking about Hawks has deepened over time without fundamentally changing. Since its original publication in 1972, Wood's ""Howard Hawks"" has set the terms for virtually all subsequent discussions of the director. The provocative chapters demonstrate the ways in which Hawks's films were affected by the director's personality and way of looking at and feeling things, and by his celebration of instinct, selfrespect, group responsibility, and male camaraderie. Wood's connections between the professionalism of Hawks's action films and comedies, with their ""lure of irresponsibility,"" has become a standard way of conceptualizing Hawks's films and the model to which all later critical work has had to respond. This book remains as contemporary as when it was first released, although it is grounded in the auteur period of its publication.

Companion CD included with illustrations demonstrating the use of LightWave in feature films! LightWave 3D [8]: Tips amp Tricks brings together thirty-one masters in the fields of character modeling, animation, texturing, lighting, digital cinematography, special effects, and programming to provide a myriad of helpful tips for all levels of LightWave users. Whether you've just started using LightWave or you've been using it for years, this book of collective wisdom will show you how to achieve better results in less time through a combination of hidden software features, time-saving tricks, and professional techniques. The ,354 tips cover every aspect of LightWave, including configuration, modeling, texturing, staging, lighting, animating, special effects, rendering, compositing, scripting, and troubleshooting.

This volume is a study of the classic western film "Rio Bravo", which, according to the author, remains "beyond politics, as an argument as to why we should all want to go on living".

This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century. For the new edition, Robin Wood has written a substantial new preface that explores the interesting double context within which the book can be read-that in which it was written and that in which we find ourselves today. Among the other additions to this new edition are a celebration of modern "screwball" comedies like My Best Friend's Wedding, and an analysis of '90s American and Canadian teen movies in the vein of American Pie, Can't Hardly Wait, and Rollercoaster. Also included are a chapter on Hollywood today that looks at David Fincher and Jim Jarmusch (among others) and an illuminating essay on Day of the Dead.

This classic of film criticism, long considered invaluable for its eloquent study of a problematic period in film history, is now substantially updated and revised by the author to include chapters beyond the Reagan era and into the twenty-first century. For the new edition, Robin Wood has written a substantial new preface that explores the interesting double context within which the book can be read-that in which it was written and that in which we find ourselves today. Among the other additions to this new edition are a celebration of modern "screwball" comedies like My Best Friend's Wedding, and an analysis of '90s American and Canadian teen movies in the vein of American Pie, Can't Hardly Wait, and Rollercoaster. Also included are a chapter on Hollywood today that looks at David Fincher and Jim Jarmusch (among others) and an illuminating essay on Day of the Dead.

A Tarot for Pagans and Non-Pagans Alike The Robin Wood Tarot has rapidly become one of the most popular Tarot decks in the world. Its beautiful art, vibrant imagery and luminous energies, enchants everyone. The 22 Major Arcana cards are filled with life that was previously unseen in the Tarot. It is also filled with the energy of nature, taking the images outside of rooms and into the beautiful abodes of the gods. For example, The High Priestess is an ageless woman wearing a lunar headband. Behind her are trees and a darkened sky lit only by the moon. The shining strength of this deck lies in the fifty-six cards of the Minor Arcana. The characters on the cards almost seem to breathe. Often, the cards seem so dimensional you get the feeling you could jump into them. Watch the boy carve pentagrams on wooden disks in the eight of Pentacles. Gleefully help steal blades in the five of Swords. Join in the merry dance on the four of Wands. The 56-page booklet explains everything to give a Tarot reading, including the upright and reversed meaning for each card and 3 different layouts. Each of the pip cards is given a word or short phrase to help you identify the meaning of the card with virtually no effort. Pagans will love the influence of nature on this deck. Beginners will find it makes learning the Tarot fun and easy. Experienced Tarot readers will love the radiantly colorful, symbolic, and infinitely captivating deck.

When "Hitchcock's Films" was first published, it quickly became known as a new kind of book on film - one that came to be considered a necessary text in the Hitchcock bibliography. When Robin Wood returned to his writings on Hitchcock's films and published "Hitchcock's Films Revisited" in 1989, the multi-dimensional essays took on a new shape - one that was tempered by Wood's own development as a critic. This new revised edition of "Hitchcock's Films Revisited" includes a substantial new preface in which Wood reveals his personal history as a film scholar - including his coming out as a gay man, his views on his previous critical work, and how his writings, his love of film, and his personal life have remained deeply intertwined through the years. This revised edition includes all original eighteen essays and a new chapter on Marnie titled "Does Mark Cure Marnie? Or, 'You Freud, Me Hitchcock.'"

One of the most distinctive voices in film criticism explores relationships between narrative style and sexual politics. Robin Wood, well known for his books Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Hitchcock's Films Revisited, probes the political and sexual ramifications of fascism and cinema, marriage and the couple, romantic love, and representations of women, race, and gender in contemporary films from the United States, Europe, and Japan. He looks closely at the works of Leo McCarey and Jacques Rivette, Ozu's "Noriko Trilogy," and the recent Generation X films Before Sunrise and The Doom Generation. In a chapter on fascism and cinema that juxtaposes Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, Wood finds that what is most important is not these films' record of another time and place but "the light they can throw on our contemporary cultural situation." Wood's central concern in these chapters is the ways in which the films relate to sexual politics and the organization within our culture of gender and sexuality. Seeing humanity as a "battleground" of a struggle between forces for Life and those of Death, Wood holds out hope for a joining of the forces of feminism, antiracism, lesbian and gay rights, and environmentalism necessary for authentic movement toward liberation.

A workbook to help you design your own system of ethics, written from a Wiccan perspective.