WILLIAM R. ROBINSON, a member of what might be termed the Discoverer generation, the first generation of university movie theorist-critics, is author of the first eleven essays in this book, and in different ways the eminence gris behind the fifteen others. Bill taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Florida during his career. While at the University of Virginia, he taught and wrote about literature, while feeding his long interest in movies via the faculty/student film club and in other ways (during Bill’s time there, U.VA. offered no courses in film), but his work on the writers Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carson McCullers, John Hawkes,  Lawrence Durrell, and Ernest Hemingway has interesting parallels with his work on his major interest, movie theory and criticism. When he moved to the University of Florida, Bill created and taught the first film course, and over three decades there he directed many dissertations and master’s theses on movie topics. Wherever he has been during his long career, Bill has influenced people as teacher, colleague, and friend--as readily can be seen by reading the contributors’ biographical statements that follow.

            Bill was a young paratrooper at the end of World War II, and was with the University of Kentucky football team as a red-shirted freshman when the team was coached by Bear Bryant--examples of his engagement with the life and wisdom of the body via physical activity that finds its place in Bill’s movie theory as well as in his personal life. From 1950 to 1962 Bill attended Ohio State University, earning a degree in philosophy and then a Ph. D. in English, and writing a dissertation that became his first book (Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poetry of the Act) under Roy Harvey Pearce.

            Bill described the origin of his interest in the movies in this way: During the twelve years he was at Ohio State the Journalism School sponsored a free film series that offered a movie every Tuesday evening, and so for 12 years Bill had, in effect, an extended self-taught course in the then-classics of world cinema. He would attend each week, either with his wife Mina or by himself. At the same time, the art movie theater phenomenon--including coffee, cookies, and foreign subtitled films--was arising in American cities, including Columbus, Ohio, and there Bill would see contemporary European movies of note as they became available. Thus Bill was a constant moviegoer when Italian Neo-realism, French New Wave, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Bunuel, and then the second generation Italian directors like Fellini and Antonioni, etc., were first bursting into people’s consciousness.

            Bill remembers the general excitement of the times that surrounded attending art movies, a time when going to a classic or foreign movie was thought of as equivalent to going to a concert of classical music or a theatre performance of a serious drama. Bill had never had a course in movies, for the obvious reason that very few universities offered them at the time. Never having been trained in a college course, let alone a curriculum leading to a degree in film studies, on how to look at movies or how to critique them, Bill, like the other members of that first-generation of university movie critics, perforce the Discoverer generation, was free to create his own approach to movies and to select his own set of movies to teach in his courses. This Discoverer generation of critics enjoyed the excitement of discovering movies as a source of new vision and novel possibilities, and in this enthusiasm they were reinforced by the excitement of the new movies from Europe that they were being offered by a new generation of European directors.

            For Bill, the excitement his generation felt about movies has disappeared in our current era of post-modernism, and the second and third generation of university movie critics have all been processed through an academic curriculum that has taught them the academic habits of codification and survey of the tradition, rather than discovery and invention. Similarly with the movies themselves. As each country around the globe passes through the first, exciting stage of movie-making, they then tend to move into a more organized, less individual phase that privileges the controlling values associated with the word, rather than the liberating values associated with the image. Hence today, Bill says, the great modernist classics have been supplanted by special-effect movies.

            Bill’s first movie book Man and the Movies received very strong praise when it appeared: “A 21-gun salute for this editor and his splendid book!...The mood is highly contemporary,” wrote the reviewer in TV-Radio Mirror; The New York Times called it  “assertive, knowledgeable, very articulate”;  and  and from The Los Angeles Times, “One of the best books ever about motion pictures.”   Bill’s essay in that book, “The Movies, Too, Will Make You Free,” had made a philosophical statement about the movies, but it was left to his later essays, published in various journals or in several instances unpublished but circulated in manuscript among his colleagues and students, to elucidate the specifics of his movie theory and demonstrate the fruitful movie criticism the theory could produce. It is only in this book, Seeing Beyond: Movies, Visions, and Values, where all of Bill’s essays on the movies can be read together for the first time, that the coherent vision which they form is fully evident. In these essays can be seen Bill’s movement towards a complete moral view of the movies.