This is a real blog entry right here, folks: ace critic Raymond Durgnat takes on Sight and Sound, the BFI, Hoggart, Leavis, the Free Cinema etc etc, forty years ago. (Later he made up with Anderson, a bit.)
Until it was posted, this piece was rare as hen’s teeth; elsewhere on the site there’s a round-table discussion between Durgnat, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and his mate David Ehrenstein from 1978. Rosenbaum remains a staunch Durgnat champion.
When ‘Standing Up For Jesus’ was written, S&S had just called out the young, pro-Cahiers critics of Oxford Opinion and Movie (Robin Wood, VF Perkins, Charles Barr, Ian Cameron) for being ‘hungry for kicks’ and determined that cinema was about ‘human situations, not spatial relationships’. For reasons I can’t go into right now, it all begins here, full stop. Hit it!