Take A Mirror For England: British Movies From Austerity To Affluence Curated By Raymond Durgnat Depicted In Digital Copy

Durgnat's wonderfully eccentric prose style renders the academic study truly delightful, No directorial sacred cow from Alfred Hitchcock to Laurence Olivier is safe from his scabrous wit, and though his opinions are harsh, his expression of them always remains intelligent and actually gutbustingly hilarious.
I'd recommend reading it aloud, Raymond Durgnat's classic study of British films from thes to thes, first published in, remains one of the most important books ever written on British cinema.
In his introduction, Kevin GoughYates 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, A Matter of Life and Deathand The Blue Lamp, 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.
.