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Raymond Durgnat was sent the preceding review of his criticism, and responded with these "footnotes. " Italicized quotations are from the Rosenbaum article.
Biography and bibliography. I was a staff writer for Associate British Pictures at Elstree Studios, did postgraduate research in film at the Slade School of Fine Art, and lectured in film at the Royal College of Art. My Renoir book will be published by the University of California Press; Studio-Vista has announced Sexual Alienation in the Cinema for April of this year; and Faber & Faber is publishing a thorough revision of the Films and Filming Hitchcock series as The Strange World of Alfred Hitchcock this autumn. As for the Movie Sternberg piece, I'd been asked by another interested party to write for Movie anonymously only, so what looks like nutty self-indulgence was my only way of getting a credit out of it.
Punctuation. "Uncertainly placed commas"-I can't proofread-"and quotation marks"-this was the result of an unhappy early compromise between my academic bent and journalistic constraints. Quotation marks were meant to imply "I know this is a loose use of the word, but it has sense." Now I either define it or don't, and trust the reader to get the idea.
School of thought. I was close to Positif, especially in its 1960-'67 period. Surely Positif is an established school, and surely I'm within their pale, albeit writing from an Anglo-Saxon tradition (nearer I.A. Richards than F.R. Leavis).
Shifting strategies vs. systematic pursuit. The business of criticism seems to me to be "matters arising," and naturally varies from film to film. I'd rather be wrong but open up a perspective than be prematurely right, i.e., dismiss opportunities for the full intellectual, sensual, emotional experience of reflective hesitation-which seems to me to be of the essence of art, as opposed to brusquer communication (e.g., moral saws, the human sciences).
Convincing the reader to "go back to" LI'L ABNER. Is "going back to it" the only response a critic can hope for? I had a different end in view: to spell out some of the ways in which comedy calls on reality. Lawrence Alloway, of all people, couldn't understand what I was trying to do in the not dissimilar piece on this island earth,...