Submitted by
Roger Mellor
Raymond Durgnat
(1 September 1932 - 19 May 2002)
The Guardian: 24th May 2002
Raymond Durgnat
Prolific film critic contemptuous of his trade's doctrinal theories
Raymond Durgnat, who has died aged 69 after a short illness, was one of the
best known and most widely read writers on the cinema in Britain. His work
was published in every significant film journal in the English-speaking
world, with the exception of the establishment's Sight And Sound.
There were more than 15 volumes of film criticism, hundreds of magazine
articles, and entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica - much of it
translated into many languages. There were also books: Luis Buñuel (1967),
Jean Renoir (1975), Films And Feelings (1967), A Mirror For England (1970),
WR Mysteries Of The Organism (1999), and a forthcoming analysis of Psycho.
In 1969, Durgnat's poetry was anthologised for Penguin Books.
His style was always distinctive; it eschewed the impenetrable terminology
of 1970s film theory and offered something of its own, a form of visual
onomatopoeia with which he could describe What's New Pussycat as "Lubitsch
on roller-skates ... the Kinsey Report as presented by Mack Sennett". His
work is spattered with parentheses, associations or contradictions that seem
to have come to mind at the moment of writing.
Ray was no scholar; his work may be said to be distinguished by its absence
of references and footnotes. Essentially, he was a writer whose imagination
took flight with every observation he made. The cinema happened to be the
field for which he settled. He covered every aspect of cinema, including
animation and experimental film. He was an early member of the London Film
Cooperative in the 1960s, and helped shape screenings of the time at
London's Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Ray's Swiss parents arrived in England in 1924 as economic migrants. Before
the depression, his father worked as a window dresser and, after being laid
off in 1932, opened a haberdashery shop in Walthamstow, east London; at
Christmas, Ray and his older brother, Peter, would work there selling toys.
During wartime evacuation, Ray was shunted around half a dozen locations in
England, including an all-girls' school in south London, where he was
mercilessly teased. It was thought in the family, not frivolously, to be the
defining moment in his hostility to the feminist movement, or at least the
more hysterical side of it.
After St George Monoux grammar school, in east London, he read English at
Pembroke College, Cambridge, then joined the film industry as a writer for
Associated British Pictures. He had written suggesting novels that could be
converted to the screen; fortuitously, he came up with a title that ABP was
already considering. Alas, ABP was in decline and soon closed, but at least
he had, unusually for a film critic, experience in the industry.
In the late 1960s, he taught at St Martin's School of Art, and did
postgraduate research at the Slade School of Fine Art, under Professor
Thorold Dickinson. Later, there were teaching forays at American and
Canadian universities, the Royal College of Art, Kingston University and the
University of East London, where he was visiting professor from the mid-90s.
Durgnat adopted Dickinson's humanistic view, and saw the most important
films as those that enabled a receptive spectator to live more fully through
challenging experiences. He begged questions, but he was not burdened by
false principles or misleading axioms.
He was maliciously considered misogynistic; in fact, he was libertarian, and
saw militant doctrines as destructive of open thought. As a result, he had a
pronounced dislike of institutions, even those on which he depended
financially. He was genuinely shy and unusually private, but greatly valued
friendship.
Durgnat's feelings about doctrinal politics were only matched by his
response to 1960s and 70s film theory. He could never take it seriously, and
considered it an attempt at thought control - "another Marxist trap". The
so-called auteur theory, taken up by Movie and the British Film Institute
education department, he considered a "moth-eaten dogma".
Earlier than most writers on the cinema, Durgnat recognised that audience
participation and involvement was as much a part of the creative process as
anything that emerged from the director's own view or personality. He was
equally contemptuous of semiology, structuralism and the post-structuralism
of the 1970s, although, in reaction, he intensified his own approach, and
added more complicated qualification to his work.
Even his earliest writings from the 1960s remain fresh today, whereas the
meretricious writings of others that spun off from theory are now almost
unread.
He never married.
Kevin Gough-Yates
Raymond Durgnat, writer and critic, born September 1 1932; died May 19 2002
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