A key book on British film is re-issued......

[julian_craster]

A key book on British film is re-issued in a 2nd edition by the FBI....


I trust that KEVIN GOUGH-YATES has corrected the various 'errors' in the 1st edition (written before the age of the VCR, so excusable,....)

Seen at:
A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence BFI Silver: Amazon.co.uk: Raymond Durgnat: Books



A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (BFI Silver) [Paperback] - Raymond Durgnat


Raymond Durgnat's classic study of British films from the 1940s to the 1960s, first published in 1970, remains one of the most important books ever written on British cinema. In his introduction, Kevin Gough-Yates writes: 'Even now, it astounds by its courage and its audacity; if you think you have an 'original' approach to a filmor a director's work and check it against A Mirror for England, you generally discover that Raymond Durgnat had said it already.' Durgnat himself said about the book that 'the main point was arranging a kind of rendezvous between thinking about movies and thinking, not so much about sociology, as about the experiences that people are having all the time.'

Durgnat used Mirror to assert the validity of British cinema against its dismissal by the critics of Cahiers du cinéma and Sight and Sound. His analysis takes in classics such as In Which We Serve (1942), A Matter of Life and Death (1946) and The Blue Lamp (1949), alongside 'B' films and popular genres such as Hammer horror. Durgnat makes a cogent and compelling case for the success of British films in reflecting British predicaments, moods and myths, at the same time as providing some disturbing new insights into a national character by whose enigmas and contradictions we continue to be perplexed and fascinated.



Book Description
A new edition of Raymond Durgnat's classic study of how the middle-class view of life as expressed in British cinema transformed our understanding of British films and the British national character
About the Author

RAYMOND DURGNAT (1932–2002) was the author of many groundbreaking books about the cinema, among them Films and Feelings (1967), Sexual Alienation in the Cinema (1972), The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir (both 1974), a study of WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1999) in the BFI Film Classics series, and A Long Hard Look at Psycho (2002), a second edition of which has also published in the BFI Silver series.

KEVIN GOUGH-YATES Film historian. He is considered the authority on European film-makers in Britain and has written extensively about them. His published interviews and retrospectives in the early 1970s were the first to bring the work of the British director Michael Powell to wider critical attention.

[waldo_lydecker]

Great news!

[Steve Crook]

A key book on British film is re-issued in a 2nd edition by the FBI....

I trust that KEVIN GOUGH-YATES has corrected the various 'errors' in the 1st edition (written before the age of the VCR, so excusable,....)

See A Mirror for England for some examples of the errors.

It's not just being in the age of the VCR (or the DVD & Blu-Ray player) but also having many of the old films discussed being available at all. This book was written in 1971 and all that Ray Durgnat had to work with was his memory of having seen the films at the cinema when they were first released. A lot of them had never been screened since those first showings. Bearing that in mind, it's a remarkable piece of work, even with the mistakes.

Ray (and Kevin G-Y) were some of the few people promoting the Powell & Pressburger films at the time. There's a whole chapter about P&P films as well as mention of them in quite a few other parts of the book as well

Steve