- Born
- Died
- Richard Roud was born on July 6, 1929 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He died on February 13, 1989 in Nimes, France.
- He arranged the London Film Festival for a few years in the 1960s, and was later the director of the New York Film Festival, a post he left amidst great controversy.
- He was educated at the University of Wisconsin and went to Europe for post-graduate studies on a Fulbright Scholarship. Deciding to stay in England, he had a part-time job teaching English at an American air force base, which he disliked. He began writing for "Sight And Sound" in 1956 and became a program officer for the National Film Theatre in London in 1959.
- He was the editor of, and most extensive contributor to, "Cinema: A Critical Dictionary", an ambitious, large, two-volume book in which many critics from around the world contributed monographs on famous directors and contributed essays on cinema history. It took around ten years to compile before its publication in 1979. It was, however, indifferently received, and some reviews were distinctly hostile; one such, written by Philip French, caused a violent reaction from Roud, who refused to speak to his former friend for several years as a result. There was some reconciliation near the end of Roud's life, though French remarked wryly that, where once there had been effusive friendship, there was now only a "reserved civility".
- He was the son of Mabel (Baker) and Charles Roud. His grandparents were all Jewish emigrants, three from the Russian Empire and one from England. His mother died at age 46 in 1940, when he was eleven. He had one sibling, an older sister named Edith.
- Most of the twentieth century has been characterized by the frantic search for the new. But, one is forced to remind oneself, this is not the only virtue.
- Anglo-Saxons do not take kindly to hypothetical truth. We are impatient with hypotheses; we are not trained, as are the French, to juggle with contradictory theories.
- [on "The Go-Between", 1971]: More even than in his previous films, Losey here achieves an almost palpable sense of reality, which gives the moral force of the film a greater intensity because of the heightened contradiction between apparent surface and true subject. You can feel the clothes, you can smell the heat; and because all these sensual details are so physically realized, you end up hearing the unsaid, seeing the unseen.
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