- Born
- Died
- Raymond Durgnat was born on September 1, 1932 in London, England, UK. He died on May 19, 2002 in London, England, UK.
- This hugely influential and controversial British film critic was born in London to Swiss parents on September 1,1932. He died (also in London) on May 19, 2002, just short of his 70th birthday.
- He was a prolific author over many years, his books including studies of such directors as Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel, Georges Franju and King Vidor.
- Occasionally published film criticism under the pseudonym "O.O. Green".
- He published his first article in a film magazine at the age of nineteen; his last book was published posthumously in the year of his death, 51 years later.
- He was co-editor (with Ian Johnson) of a British film magazine called "Motion", which ran for only a few issues in 1963 before ceasing publication and is now considered a collector's item.
- The great difficulty in talking about cinema style is that the cinema is a pot-pourri of art forms, sharing elements in common with each, but weaving them into a pattern of its own.
- [reviewing "Maniac" (1963), a Hammer horror film]: This is from a screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, which means, in effect, that a handful of effectively macabre ideas are worked out in a style as creative as the operation of a meat grinder.
- [on Cecil B. DeMille]: If DeMille had had a coat of arms, a cross and a bathtub would have been equally prominent thereon, and this moral dichotomy is characteristically Victorian.
- [on Ingmar Bergman]: Occasionally, one is tempted to divide Bergman's work into 'first-rate' and 'second-rate'. But wiser counsel prevails - each Bergman film explores and lyricizes experiences lying latent in the others, and Bergman's 'second-rate' usually results in a challenge more powerful, more intimate, more truly humane than almost everyone else's 'first-rate'.
- [on Jean Cocteau]: Cocteau's artistic personality is a complex blend of fin-de-siecle dandyism, a classical discipline of form, a disillusioned narcissism and a romantic preoccupation with the spiritual worlds on the borders of the 'real' one. One might speak of self-centredness in depth; he reworks a repertoire of obsessive themes into a dazzling variety of forms, so as to bring out the emotional ambivalence which inspires it.
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