Tony Rayns (1948-2026)

[andyli]

Heard report from Peggy Chiao's social media account that Tony Rayns has passed (no public news yet as it appears). RIP.

EDIT: Confirmed now.

[ryannichols7]

we have many hard losses all the time, yes

but this, this really hurts. a true titan of our medium of art

[hearthesilence]

An enormous loss. The English translator for countless Asian cinema masterpieces, if you’ve seen a Wong Kar-wai movie with English subtitles you know his work. Will never forget he once drafted a few of us to subversively help rescue Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer from Harvey Weinstein. Rest in peace .

[domino harvey]

Damn. When you saw him listed in the extras, you knew you were getting an in-depth discussion

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Exactly. It feels like I've barely learned enough and it's all through contributions like his. His love for these films and manner of delivering it was always such a joy to see.

[Aunt Peg]

Such a huge loss. Over the years Tony curated some Asian related line-ups for the Sydney Film Festival and they were always a must see. His introductions were priceless.

I remember back in the 1970s when I was a teenager reading his work in Monthly Film Bulletin & Sight and Sound.

[MichaelB]

I first met Tony towards the end of 1989 and have known him on and off ever since, including collaborating directly on a handful of Blu-ray extras—and so I can confirm first-hand that he really did turn up, casually ask what he was expected to be talking about, and would then run off a one-take interview that needed virtually no editing. Kim Newman is the only other person I know who can reliably do that every single time, which is a major reason why you see them popping up over and over again; quite aside from anything else, they make things delightfully straightforward at the production end!

But I was familiar with his writing for several years before that. It's hard to recall just how vital Time Out was in the pre-internet 1980s, but London cinephiles would buy it religiously every week for its combo of intelligent film writing that was usually tied to something that was actually being screened imminently, and Tony persuaded me to check out innumerable films and filmmakers, from John Woo and Tsui Hark and Chang Cheh to the Fifth Generation filmmakers that he knew personally (he was more or less exact contemporaries with them, and of course they were very keen indeed to have an English-speaking champion, a huge deal for artists who were only just emerging from years of government-enforced isolation). I also remember him raving about Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo: The Iron Man, which was then so new that there wasn't an English-subtitled print—so he turned up to the ICA to introduce the screening, apologising for the lack of subtitles but assuring us that it didn't really need any (he was right).

Like the late Tom Milne, he was one of those major behind-the-scenes players whose output was far more extensive than the public-facing writing/talking. Whereas Milne subtitled a ton of French-language films, Tony would do the same for countless East Asian ones—which was no small challenge linguistically. I remember someone saying "why don't you just offer literal translations in subtitles?", but the structure of Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese is so radically different from English that this simply isn't possible in a way that would be comprehensible at subtitle-reading speed. So it takes real skill, as well as intimate knowledge of what the film is trying to achieve, to pull it off properly—and Tony did it for decades. There are very few people in this business who are genuinely irreplaceable, but I honestly can't think of a credible successor, or at least not someone who was as much of an all-rounder as he was. RIP.

[Peacock]

Wow, RIP Tony. A major champion of Eastern cinema that raised awareness of and chronicled many great filmmakers who otherwise may have either slipped through the cracks in the West or have taken many years longer to break through.

With love and respect I fondly smile at his memorable special feature interviews where he would call a spade a spade and wryly admit when a film wasn’t very good etc. He often had just the perfect amount of exasperation in his voice like the audience are asking too much of him, it always kept me alert and focussed like I was back in a strict teacher’s class at school!

A major loss for everyone but the knowledge and passion for film he shared with us all will live on.

[MichaelB]

With love and respect I fondly smile at his memorable special feature interviews where he would call a spade a spade and wryly admit when a film wasn’t very good etc. He often had just the perfect amount of exasperation in his voice like the audience are asking too much of him, it always kept me alert and focussed like I was back in a strict teacher’s class at school!

He once took me to task in the Sight & Sound letters page for getting Chinese names wrong (or inappropriately transliterated) in a review. They gave me an advance look to see if I wanted a right of reply, but I said "nah, he's probably right". I didn't even check to see if it was my original mistake or one that was imposed on me by Sight & Sound subeditors, because it's just the kind of mistake that I could very easily have made.

Which reminds me: he was the editorial consultant on that Sight & Sound book on Chinese cinema, and I remember its editor James Bell telling me that he couldn't have done it without Tony's help; merely getting the transliteration right over decades of changing practice was a colossal task in itself.