The Essential Raymond Durgnat

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Description

Raymond Durgnat was a maverick voice during the golden age of film criticism. From the French New Wave and the rise of auteurism, through the late 1960s counter-culture, to the rejuvenated Hollywood of the 1970s, his work appeared in dozens of publications in Britain, France and the USA.

At once evoking the film culture of his own times and anticipating our digital age in which technology allows everyone to create their own 'moving image-text combos', Durgnat's writings touch on crucial questions in film criticism that resonate more than ever today.

Bringing together Durgnat's essential writing for the very first time, this career-spanning collection includes previously unpublished and untranslated work and is introduced and annotated by Henry K. Miller.

Reviews

Cutting to the chase, this is the most welcome film book of the year - and one of the most fascinating... If anything can bring back long, hard looks at movies, this will.' - Sight and Sound 'Now, 12 years after this great critic's death at the age of 69, we finally have this superbly edited volume, encompassing previously uncollected pieces from 1963 to 1992. It furnishes a richer sense of his wide-ranging career and what made his writing about movies so generative and freewheeling, mixing realist and surrealist critical inclinations, plainspoken yet restlessly insightful.' - Film Comment 'The essential film book of this or almost any year' - Film Krant 'Miller's selection provides both an instructive primer for those new to Durgnat and a satisfying harvest of largely inaccessible or long out-of-print pieces for the already initiated... a colourful tour of the many styles of address and cultural context that Durgnat enthusiastically immersed himself in and explored to the hilt.' - New Review of Film and Television Studies 'Much-needed' - Cineaste

Author Bio

Raymond Durgnat (19322002) was a film critic and author of many groundbreaking books on cinema, including Films and Feelings (1967), A Mirror for England (1970; 2011), and The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (1974).

Henry K. Miller is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound and has taught film at the University of Cambridge, UK.