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Raymond Durgnat (1 September 1932 – 19 May 2002) was a distinctive and highly influential British...

Raymond Durgnat (1 September 1932 – 19 May 2002) was a distinctive and highly influential British film critic, who was born in London of Swiss parents. During his life he wrote for virtually every major English language film publication. With the filmmaker Don Levy he was 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. His views on the academicization of film study were always complicated. In the 1950s, he had written for Sight and Sound, but he later fell out with this British Film Institute publication after the exit of Gavin Lambert in 1957, often accusing it of elitism, puritanism and upper-middle-class snobbery, notably in his 1963 essay "Standing Up For Jesus", (which appeared in the short-lived magazine Motion, with which he was strongly involved) and in his 1965 piece "Auteurs and Dream Factories". He did, however, return to write for another BFI publication, the Monthly Film Bulletin, in the years leading up to its demise in 1991, and contributed to Sight and Sound again later in the 1990s. In the mid-'60s he was a major player in the nascent