Raymond Durgnat

Biography

Durgnat was born in London in 1932 to Swiss parents who had immigrated to England in 1924. Durgnat's family was of French Huguenot descent, and he was raised in a religious Calvinist household. Durgnat's father worked as a window dresser but lost his job in 1932; afterwards, he opened a drapery shop. (which appeared in the short-lived magazine Motion, which he co-edited with Ian Johnson) and in his 1965 piece "Auteurs and Dream Factories" (an edited version of which later appeared in Films and Feelings). From 1960, he was a regular presence in the monthly Films and Filming, writing reviews and serial essays.

During 1966 and 1967, Durgnat was a major player in the nascent London Film-Makers' Co-op (LFMC), then based at Better Books on Charing Cross Road, a hub of the emerging British underground. As the LFMC's chairman he was instrumental in promoting filmmakers such as Jeff Keen and Stephen Dwoskin, writing the first articles on both.

The rise of structural film (at the LFMC) and of structuralism (in the journal Screen) – and the far-left politics which accompanied the latter – saw Durgnat become an outsider figure within British film culture. In 1973 he moved to Canada, beginning a peripatetic teaching career in North America, which took him to New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the late 1970s, he taught film at the University of California, San Diego alongside Manny Farber, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Returning to London at the close of the decade, he launched a series of withering assaults on the linguistics-based film theory that had come to dominate film academia over the previous decade; perhaps as a result, he did not publish another new book until 1999. He did, however, return to write for the BFI publication Monthly Film Bulletin in the years before its merger with Sight and Sound in 1991, and contributed to that publication again later in the 1990s.

His last two books, including A Long Hard look at Psycho, were also published by the BFI. The Essential Raymond Durgnat, edited by Henry K. Miller and published in 2014 – again by the BFI – contains previously unpublished work, including a translation of an essay originally published in Positif on Michael Powell, on whom Durgnat began but did not complete a full-length book. It also includes such rare pieces as "Standing Up for Jesus". The collection was described by Adrian Martin as "the essential film book of this or almost any year".

Durgnat's socio-political approach can best be described as "radical populist." He was strongly supportive of the working classes, and resultingly of American popular culture, and was dismissive of left-wing intellectuals, whom he accused of being petit-bourgeois conservatives in disguise. He was also dismissive of overt politicisation of film criticism, refusing to bring his own left-wing views into his writings on film.