Part of what continues to be so exceptional about Raymond Durgnat’s writing is the range of topics and disciplines it commands, and, as Manny Farber suggested, the speed with which he can navigate while moving from one topic and approach to another. Most film critics tend to focus mainly on either social and political issues or aesthetic and formal issues, as if these spheres should or could be mutually independent, but for Ray they were more often separate facets of the same ongoing concerns --  “matters arising,” as he put it – in a continually widening universe that encompassed both journalism and academic work. And he was equally ambidextrous when it came to considering both “high” and “low” forms of art without stooping to either condescension or elitism. Perhaps because he  stood alone and tended to avoid whatever fashionable habits of groupthink were current, he was able to move more quickly, intellectually and conceptually, than most of his contemporaries, in the U.S. and in the U.K. as well as in the rest of Europe. That’s why he could bring so much clarity and range to his reading of Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, for instance.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

I suppose I could claim to have been influencing Film Studies during its awkward age, or as the French say its "ungrateful age", i.e. the "ploughing season", stage, thus being, if not a Founding Father, then a sort of Elder Brother (or Brother Superior!). R.D.

(“Paul Schrader cited & embraced Durgnat’s analysis..”).
Alain Silver & James Ursini, ed., Film Noir Reader, Limelight, 1996, passim.

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", [1] (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 London Film-Makers' Co-op (LFMC), then based at Better Books off Charing Cross Road, a hub of the emerging British 'underground'. As the counter-culture turned left and, simultaneously, sought state funding for its activities, Durgnat looked to the past in major works on film style (Images of the Mind, 1968-9), Hitchcock and Renoir.
In the late 1970s he taught film in California alongside Manny Farber, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jonathan Rosenbaum. Returning to the UK at the close of the decade, he launched a series of withering assaults on the linguistics-based film theory that had come to dominate the young film academia over the previous decade.

Durgnat's socio-political approach - strongly supportive of the working classes and, almost as a direct result of this, American popular culture, and dismissive of Left-wing intellectuals who he accused of actually being petit-bourgeois conservatives in disguise, and dismissive of overt politicisation of film criticism, he can best be described as "radical populist".

Durgnat's 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 also wrote books on Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, Georges Franju, and King Vidor. A book on Hitchcock's 1960 classic Psycho was published posthumously. He wrote for Films and Filming, Movie, Time Out, Oz and Film Comment among many other publications, and often lectured on cinema at various academic institutions, notably as visiting professor at the University of East London[2] towards the end of his life.

Raymond Durgnat was one of the founding fathers of Film Studies in Britain.  Throughout his life he was a prolific and indefatigable reviewer and essayist.  His book- length studies (notable among them A Mirror for England, The Crazy Mirror, Films and Feelings and Eros in the Cinema) remain foundation texts for the discipline.
Professor Jeffrey Richards

[Durgnat] “knows almost as much about the screen image as I do."
Michael Powell, (Postcard to Faber & Faber, 1973)

"I wanted to be a critic like Raymond Durgnat of Films & Filming". Peter Greenaway in J.Hacker & D.Price, Contemporary British Film Directors, Take 10, 1992

"Raymond Durgnat, the Colonel Blimp of film criticism, wheeled out by the journalistic Establishment to discredit film theory” Paul Willemen, in FRAMEWORK # 15-17