The Essential Raymond Durgnat

Henry K. Miller

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781844574513
• eBook ISBN: 9781838718800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

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together durgnat's essential writing for the very first time, this career-spanning collection includes previously unpublished and untranslated work and is thoroughly introduced and annotated by Henry K. Miller.

PART 1

AUTEUR WARS

INTRODUCTION

Just as Durgnat joined the Slade in the autumn of 1960, the season of the Lady Chatterley trial and the general release of Psycho, there began a revolution in transatlantic film culture. Earlier that year the student critics of Oxford Opinion, partly inspired by what they had seen of Cahiers du Cinéma, had mounted an assault on ‘the standards and prejudices of this country’s cinematic establishment’.¹ By this they meant principally the BFI, in particular ‘the attitude’, typified by ‘Stand Up! Stand Up!’, ‘which exalts right-mindedness above form, style, and technique’, and Sight and Sound’s consequent low valuation of such Cahiers favourites as Samuel Fuller. In response, Penelope Houston, posing the question ‘Samuel Fuller or John Ford?’, accused the young men of misusing art as ‘something for kicks’ and violence as a ‘stimulant’,² while Richard Roud charted Cahiers’s decline into ‘crypto-fascist’ nuttiness.³

Simultaneously, in the film society magazine Film, Oxford Opinion’s Ian Cameron reiterated his critique for a larger audience. BFI criticism, he wrote, ‘could have been written entirely from the plot synopsis […] To judge a film on anything other than its style is to set up the critic’s own views on matters outside the cinema against those of its maker. This is gross impertinence.’⁴ The argument, which began even as the Cahiers critics’ first films were appearing in London, spread into the Sunday papers and weeklies, and on to the radio. In December, the month Truffaut’s Shoot the Pianist opened in the West End, Lawrence Alloway gave his qualified support to the Oxford critics on the Third Programme. Meanwhile John Osborne, with the French example in mind, lamented that such rows were ‘substitutes for creativity’ in Britain.⁵

The argument was also carried on abroad, in San Francisco’s Film Quarterly and in the New York Film Bulletin, one of whose critics, Andrew Sarris, had recently made his debut for the Village Voice with a paean to Psycho and ‘the wild young men of Cahiers’.⁶ Cameron and his colleagues gained allies at home including Robin Wood, whose critical debut had been a piece about Psycho for Cahiers itself. They were also able to gain the material backing of Nicholas Luard, trust-funded business partner of Peter Cook in the Establishment Club, which opened in October 1961, and publisher from the following spring of the fledgling Private Eye. Published by Luard, edited and beautifully designed by Cameron, the pilot issue of Movie, with contributions from Sarris and Claude Chabrol as well as the British auteurists, was dated June 1962.

Durgnat wasn’t in it. Nor had he written for Sight and Sound since ‘Oriental Notebook’ in 1954. Since April 1960 he had been a regular reviewer for a publication less exalted than either of these, Films and Filming. Part of the ‘Seven Arts’ group of similar titles – Plays and Players, Dance and Dancers, etc. – founded by the eccentric publisher Philip Dosse, Films and Filming had a higher circulation – about 25,000 – than any other ‘serious’ film magazine, though its seriousness was not everywhere recognised. Perhaps not unrelatedly, ‘it was the only mainstream, pre-decriminalisation, mass-circulation publication in Britain to remain successful while actively courting a queer market segment’, most noticeably in the small ads.⁷ Its editors Peter Baker and Robin Bean, who seem to have taken a broadly non-interventionist stance towards their writers’ work, were endlessly generous with space, considerably less so with pay.

With his first feature article, ‘A Look at Old and New Waves’, Durgnat conveyed his mixed feelings about the official nouvelle vague by recalling the early 1950s, when a ‘“new wave” of the Occupation (Clouzot, Clément, Cayatte, Autant-Lara) suddenly belted out a batch of furious, brutally energetic protest films’.⁸ In the month Sight and Sound took on Cahiers and Oxford Opinion, he published an appreciation of Claude Autant-Lara,⁹ a director Truffaut had attacked in his essay ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’ for ‘his nonconformism, his “advanced” ideas and his fierce anti-clericalism’¹⁰ – qualities Durgnat valued – and belittled Cahiers’s ‘notorious adulation’ of Hollywood craftsmen as ‘a case of artists enthusing over talents convenient for their own development’.¹¹ Yet he praised Shoot the Pianist and called Truffaut ‘the Cinema’s key stylist’.¹²

Shortly before the first Movie appeared, Durgnat made his debut in another little magazine, Motion, which had been founded in 1961 by Ian Johnson, a student at the LSE. Lacking Luard’s means, Motion used ‘an old and sometimes battered typeface’, Johnson recalls, but it had set a high standard with its first two issues and had a print-run of 5,000 against Movie’s 9,000, no mean achievement.¹³ It served as British distributor for the New York Film Bulletin, and (in theory) vice versa. To its third issue Durgnat contributed ‘The Apotheosis of Va-Va-Voom’, an analysis of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) – loved in Paris, all but ignored in London, and therefore ripe for auteurist revaluation. Instead he wrote of the commercial cinema as ‘a “group art”’, ‘designed to appeal to, and to embody the beliefs, values, hopes and fears of a group, of a culture, rather than those of the artist himself’.¹⁴

The first Movie, conversely, included a ‘talent histogram’ that ranked directors from ‘Great’ to ‘Talented’ and downwards. Much of its second issue was given over to the ‘Brilliant’ Otto Preminger, much of its fifth to the ‘Great’ Howard Hawks. Movie did not last long as an almost-monthly – Nicholas Luard Associates went bankrupt in June 1963, soon after which the magazine went into hibernation – but its eleven issues during 1962–3 were a decisive factor in the auteurist turn in critical opinion. The Hawks issue, dated December 1962, coincided with a Hawks retrospective at the National Film Theatre, first mounted at New York’s Museum of Modern Art by Movie and NYFB contributor Peter Bogdanovich. In the spring of 1963 came the first version of Sarris’s The American Cinema, with its more enduring categories (‘Less than Meets the Eye’, ‘Lightly Likeable’, etc.), in a special issue of New York’s Film Culture.

Durgnat was unimpressed. A year later he wrote that ‘it became apparent with each succeeding issue of Movie that they worshipped their talent histogram with the same unswerving devotion that Sight and Sound lavished on their chosen few. However vicious some of the surface conflicts have been, criticism has stayed very much the same in terms of fundamentals.’¹⁵ Some of these fundamentals would be called into question in the fourth Motion. The Motion ‘Companion to Violence and Sadism in the Cinema’, which Durgnat assembled with Johnson at Durgnat’s family home in Chingford, was published simultaneously with Durgnat’s first book, the ‘Motion Monograph’ Nouvelle Vague, in February 1963. The Movie critics, sharing at least some of Houston’s assumptions, had taken umbrage at her ‘something for kicks’ line. The Motion ‘Companion’ reappropriated it.

The Newcomers (1964): ‘a life of books and films and hats’

Wasn’t art, in a manner of speaking, for kicks? To deny the possibility was to cut away art’s roots in ritual. Durgnat had defended screen violence in his maiden Sight and Sound article, which began: ‘Because violence is a leading characteristic of the postwar world, it is reflected in a good deal of contemporary art’.¹⁶ ‘An essential part of films like Psycho and Peeping Tom’, he had argued in his first Films and Filming series, ‘Erotism in Cinema’, in 1961, ‘is that the whole pattern of guilt, terror, suspicion, pity, hope-against-hope and so on, is brought into play. […] One would completely misunderstand the way Psycho orchestrates the audience’s feelings if one tried to make a distinction between the “sexual” elements and the others.’¹⁷ (Here, presumably, were the ‘Freudian components’ of Durgnat’s Slade thesis at which Thorold Dickinson ‘bristled’.)¹⁸

The argument was put with more force and sarcasm in Motion’s opening pages, after a series of citations that juxtaposed Houston’s remarks with gobbets from Freud and Artaud. Taking its cover image from Mario Bava’s banned Black Sunday (aka The Mask of the Demon, 1960), the ‘Companion’ was an A–Z – not a histogram, nor a pantheon – of the disreputable, with entries on science-fiction, monster movies and ‘Dentures, Death by’. Johnson provided a seminal piece on Peeping Tom, almost universally reviled on its release in 1960 and a shared passion of the two editors, while Durgnat’s contributions included a note on the recently released Dr. No. Dated for the month before the release of the Beatles’ first LP and the outbreak of the Profumo scandal, it was, according to Johnson, ‘our best-selling issue, especially in Soho’.¹⁹

On 30 April, Durgnat promoted the ‘Companion’ with an ‘evening on Violence in the Cinema’ at the ICA, titled ‘The Art of Scaring You to Death’. Later, the magazine made a cameo appearance in John Boorman’s The Newcomers, a television documentary about a young couple living in Bristol, broadcast in the spring of 1964 on the newly launched BBC 2. The ‘Companion’ is shown in a montage sequence introducing the series’s subjects, Alison and Anthony Smith, in the first episode. According to Anthony, seen reading it, the magazine was in fact ‘specially planted’ by Boorman ‘to flesh out the cinéaste image of us that he wanted. The Newcomers was billed as a documentary but the BBC later allowed that it would be more accurately described as “television’s first novel”.’²⁰ The voiceover accompanying the sequence defines a generation – that of Motion’s contributors and readers, perhaps – as much as a couple:

the first Welfare State people, succoured on free school milk and weaned on social security. They’re both successes of the system. They passed eleven-plus, won scholarships to university, received grants, allowances, and bursaries. […] Godless, uninhibited, people without ties […] living the all-night talking life, a life of books and films and hats and time-consuming games: a long quest for the good life.

Motion’s next, and last, issue, given the title ‘Puritans Anonymous’, would shape the subsequent course of Durgnat’s career. Its centrepiece, ‘Standing Up For Jesus’, is an extended Jimmy Porter rant against Arnold, Leavis, Hoggart, grammar schools, Eng. Lit., the New Left, Free Cinema and, above all, Sight and Sound, subsumed together under the general heading of ‘puritanism’. It is also, as this list suggests, an agonised reckoning with Durgnat’s own background.

Decades later, writing about René Clément’s ‘ancienne vague’ Gervaise (1956), Durgnat observed that, despite its fame, Truffaut’s ‘strange, challenging diatribe’ ‘A Certain Tendency’, whose targets included Gervaise’s screenwriters, ‘was not reprinted in his book The Films in My Life’.²¹ Of his own diatribe, which likewise ‘involves some central questions’, he told interviewers that ‘I’d let it be reprinted, but given footnotes and frameworks around it.’²² ‘Puritans Anonymous’ was the last Motion for the usual reasons, ‘shortage of both money and time’, rather than any backlash, but it did lead to Durgnat’s exclusion from the most powerful institution in British film culture, the BFI – and not only Durgnat’s.²³ In 1977 Dickinson wrote to his former student that Houston had ‘barred you and the Slade – and me for that matter – from Sight & Sound’.²⁴

Durgnat’s formal studies at the Slade had ended in mid-1961, but his connection with Dickinson’s department, whose activities included screening series and seminars, continued through the decade. In early 1965, Dickinson told an interviewer that Durgnat ‘is turning out what is in fact a thesis of his work here. He was here from ’60 to ’61 and in ’65 all these masses of notes had been boiled down to this statement about cinema which is running as a serial and it’s very interesting reading.’²⁵ It is probable that ‘Erotism in Cinema’ derived from the same source, but the first instalment of what was billed as ‘a series of articles on style in film-making’, based on the Slade thesis, had appeared in the December 1964 Films and Filming.²⁶ Readers were advised that it was ‘designed to raise your temper to bursting point’.

The penultimate part, ‘Who Really Makes the Movies?’, takes on the auteur theory. Expanding on ‘The Apotheosis of Va-Va-Voom’, it reveals Durgnat’s affinities with the similarly sceptical Alloway, who had written in Movie that ‘To consider movies primarily as unique products of single controlling individuals to the same extent that poems and paintings can be so considered has vitiated a great deal of ambitious film criticism.’²⁷ Gently chiding his hosts, Alloway had gone on to recommend that the critic discover ‘to what extent themes and concepts present in them can be found in movies by other, and for this purpose, less distinguished, directors’.²⁸ Durgnat’s essay, consciously or coincidentally, takes up what Alloway called ‘the necessity for considering movies in groups not necessarily dependent upon directors’.²⁹

It helped that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Divided Self
• Part 1: Auteur Wars
• Part 2: Jet-Propelled Photographs
• Part 3: Images of the Mind
• Part 4: Britain through the Looking Glass
• Part 5: California Split
• Part 6: Looking Back
• Appendix I: Pacific Film Archive Programmes
• Appendix II: Top Tens
• Index
• List of Illustrations
• eCopyright