Durgnat, Raymond
| Raymond Durgnat | |
|---|---|
| Born |
1 September 1932 London, England |
| Died | 19 May 2002 (aged 69) London, England |
| Occupation | Film critic |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Pembroke College, Cambridge, Slade School of Fine Art |
Raymond Durgnat (1 September 1932 – 19 May 2002) was a British film critic, who was born in London of Swiss parents. During his life he wrote for virtually every major English language film publication. In 1965 he published the first major critical essay on Michael Powell, who had hitherto been "fashionably dismissed by critics as a 'technician’s director'", as Durgnat put it.
His many books include Films and Feelings (1967), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (1970), and The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (1974). He wrote principally for Films and Filming (in the 1960s), Film Comment (in the 1970s) and Monthly Film Bulletin (in the 1980s), and taught at various art schools and universities, notably St Martin's College and the Royal College of Art, where his students included Tony Scott. Toward the end of his life he was visiting professor at the University of East London.
Durgnat was born in London in 1932 to Swiss parents who had emigrated 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.
He was educated at the Sir George Monoux School, a state grammar school in Walthamstow, before serving his statutory two years of National Service, which he spent in the Education Corps in Hong Kong, then a British possession. After leaving the army in 1954, he studied English Literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge. With the filmmaker Don Levy, Durgnat became one of the first post-graduate students of film in Britain, studying under Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight and The Next of Kin) at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1960. The thesis he wrote there provided the source material for a number of his books.
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