Remembering Robin

I can't remember when I first met Robin. It was probably back in the early 1960s, after I had joined the Education Department of the British Film Institute. Robin was beginning to write a series of monographs on a variety of filmmakers and, through the facilities of the BFI, I was in a position to lay on screenings for him--not that he really needed them. From the outset, Robin was exceptional in the amount of information he could receive from a single screening of a film--far more than I could do from six. At the same time, he didn't seem to notice--or didn't care--if the film was in black-&-white or colour, or in standard aspect ratio or cinemascope! What he was doing when watching a film was extracting a moral fillet. That was his great strength, it seemed to me: he went for the moral centre of the films he engaged with.