His many books include Films and Feelings (1967), A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence (1970), and The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock (1974).
[1] With the filmmaker Don Levy, Durgnat became one of the first postgraduate students of film in Britain, studying under Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight and The Next of Kin) at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1960.
In the early 1950s, he had written for Sight and Sound, but fell out with this British Film Institute publication after the exit of Gavin Lambert in 1957, often accusing it of elitism, puritanism, and upper-middle-class snobbery, notably in his 1963 essay "Standing Up For Jesus"[4] (which appeared in the short-lived magazine Motion, which he co-edited with Ian Johnson) and in his 1965 piece "Auteurs and Dream Factories" (an edited version of which later appeared in Films and Feelings).
[5] During 1966 and 1967, Durgnat was a major player in the nascent London Film-Makers' Co-op (LFMC),[6] then based at Better Books on Charing Cross Road, a hub of the emerging British underground.
In the late 1970s, he taught film at the University of California, San Diego alongside Manny Farber, Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jonathan Rosenbaum.