Richard Roud

Richard Stanley Roud (6 July 1929, Boston – 13 February 1989) was an American writer on film and co-founder, with Amos Vogel,^[1] of the New York Film Festival.^[2] At the NFF, he was a former program director, and latterly director, from 1963 to 1987.

Roud graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1950, and after spending a year in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship, undertook post-graduate study at the University of Birmingham. In the 1950s, Roud became the London correspondent of the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. In the early 1960s, he was the director of the London Film Festival,^[3] and from 1963 to 1969, he was film critic for The Guardian of London, and latterly a roving arts correspondent for the newspaper. He also wrote annual reports from the Cannes Film Festival, and other articles, for the British film publication Sight and Sound.

Richard Roud's books include Cinema - A Critical Dictionary - The Major Film-Makers (1980), a two-volume work which he edited; A Passion for Film (1983), a biography of Henri Langlois, the former director of the Cinémathèque Française; and two books on nouvelle vague directors Straub and Godard. "Godard", with a new Introduction by Michael Temple, was reissued by the British Film Institute on December 7, 2010. A volume of Roud's previously uncollected writings, Decades Never Start on Time: A Richard Roud Anthology edited By Michael Temple and Karen Smolens with a Preface by David Thomson, will be published by the BFI in July 2014.

He was made a Knight in the French Legion of Honor in 1979 and was the recipient of the National Society of Film Critics Awards (USA) Special Award in January 1988.

References

External links

• Obituary, New York Times, 16 February 1989