Tony Rayns (1948-2026)

[FrauBlucher]

Huge loss for all of us…RIP Tony. Check on your older relatives and friends everyone…

A very sad way to go. I’m going to listen to his UGETSU commentary this week

[pistolwink]

Just one more thing. I seem to recall that like a lot of folks of his generation—including David Bordwell—Rayns got intrigued by Chinese cinema thanks to the action films that played lower-rent theaters in the early 1970s (and sometimes earlier). But unlike many other kung fu buffs, Rayns took these films seriously as cinema, and quickly made connections with filmmakers and film critics in Hong Kong and elsewhere. He became not only key to bringing the work of various Asian film movements to the attention of Western cinephiles but also a prominent figure within those artistic milieux, as Jia Zhange's tribute indicates.

Has Rayns ever written at length about his discovery of Chinese (and later, Phillipines and South Korean and Taiwanese etc.) cinema and how he became, well, Tony Rayns as we know (and mourn and remember) him today?

[MichaelB]

He was in the right place at the right time with regard to the Fifth Generation filmmakers who started to emerge in the 1980s, not least thanks to being a very similar age. They were very keen indeed (understatement) to have an authoritative and articulate English-speaking champion of their work after spending so long in government-enforced national isolation, and he was just as keen to champion said work.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I met him once, and he just shrugged sheepishly when I asked him how he managed to subtitle films in so many different languages.

This is not to denigrate the guy in his obituary thread, but this is something I also wondered about and a big part of the answer is that he was working from first-draft translations by others who may or may not have been credited alongside him. I know he was at least conversational in Mandarin so that probably wasn't the case for everything, but he wasn't subtitling Apichatpong or Jang Sun-woo films directly from Thai or Korean. (I should emphasize that there's nothing really unusual about this—John Minchinton subtitled thousands of films in his career and this included plenty in languages he didn't know, Mandarin among them.)

[Forrest Taft]

Always a terrific contributor on special features, and to those on Letteboxd: the notTonyRayns account has less than one hundred of his reviews, but still worth a follow.

Saw him several times in Bologna (though not this year), but never introduced myself and said hello. I regret that now.

[Mr Sausage]

I met him once, and he just shrugged sheepishly when I asked him how he managed to subtitle films in so many different languages.

This is not to denigrate the guy in his obituary thread, but this is something I also wondered about and a big part of the answer is that he was working from first-draft translations by others who may or may not have been credited alongside him. I know he was at least conversational in Mandarin so that probably wasn't the case for everything, but he wasn't subtitling Apichatpong or Jang Sun-woo films directly from Thai or Korean. (I should emphasize that there's nothing really unusual about this—John Minchinton subtitled thousands of films in his career and this included plenty in languages he didn't know, Mandarin among them.)

This is not uncommon in lit translations. The reason why popular translators like Stephen Mitchell can translate texts as diverse as Rilke, Homer, Gilgamesh, and the Tao Te Ching is they’re working from someone else’s literal translations and turning them into something more readable or literary, sometimes to great acclaim (Mitchell’s Rilke is widely held to be the Rilke in English).

One of the most important translations in English literary history, Ezra Pound’s Cathay, rested largely on the work of a young sinologist named Ernest Fenellosa, Pound of course knowing not a word of Chinese, ancient or modern.

I don’t think this is a knock on any of the above. What they’re bringing is still something very important (especially if you’ve ever had to suffer through a leaden but no doubt accurate academic translation meant as a crib for language students).

[denti alligator]

Sad to hear about Tony. Love his work!