Vale Tony Rayns - a long time great friend

My friend Tony Rayns died a sudden death on Saturday 27 June on his return from Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato. It happened only moments after he got back to his flat in Brixton and had a fall on the stairs within. There has been a huge outpouring of condolences and sympathy for his  family and many people have been in touch with me to say how saddened they are at his passing. He was 78 and had been in poor health for quite a long time and the trip to Bologna had been marred by the onset of some serious gastric pain. I took the photo above of Tony and former Sydney Film Festival Administrator Ross Barnard on Tuesday 23 June after we shared a Chinese dinner, almost certainly the last picture of him. 

I have been reflecting on just what it was about his life and work that was most memorable and likely to be most enduring. In doing so I looked up two pieces I wrote for Senses of Cinema following visits to Vancouver for their film festival. For eighteen years Tony curated a remarkable, indeed quite unique, strand of the festival devoted to East Asian cinema. He had sold the idea to festival director Alan Franey who backed the project to the hilt. I had attended the so-called Dragons and Tigers section several times before I filed a  report in 2000 in Senses of Cinema. By that time I had come to appreciate just what Tony was doing, which was providing a pathway out of Asia to the west.

Twenty six years ago I could write: In the meantime, the only portal of early work to the West is Vancouver which gives special attention to the programming of films particularly from East Asia. That festival is now utterly distinctive from the myriad of other events taking place around the English speaking world. Look back over most years and almost all the major city festivals will seem to circulate each year a selection from the same hundred or so new films that have been launched at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Sundance and Toronto. Almost all will have been processed through the bureaucracies, networks and other festivals of official European or American independent production.

And so it went for Tony's time. When it was all over I wrote another piece for Senses about how all of the Vancouver programs were presented. "In the 18 years that Tony Rayns programmed the East Asian selection at Vancouver there must have been more than 500 features and maybe that many shorts again screened. Each one of them got a serious introduction. Each filmmaker who managed to scrape together the funds to get there got a Q&A session full of relaxed warm insight and explanation. Everyone spent happy post-screening hours at the groaning tables of the nearby Jade Gardens restaurant, drinking and talking on into the night."

More than anything this period discovering figures, some of whom who would later go on to great international renown, was Tony's extraordinary achievement. He did it by ceaselessly tracking his way round the production centres of Asia. And not just the big studios. Independent producers, film schools, low budget doco makers all got his attention. The tributes on the internet all attest to his doggedness in tracking down films for VIFF. For awhile he also spotted talent for London, Brisbane and Rotterdam, he curated seasons for Sydney and other places but the remit was never the same as it was from Alan Franey.

I was reminded of this when I read Tom Charity's obituary for Tony on Facebook. Tom has kindly agreed to my republishing it here. (As an aside Tom reminds me of Tony's selection of Kim Kyung-mook's Faceless Things which contains the defecatory scene he mentions. It was a feature, the second half of which was a real time exposition of the deed. Kim was in Vancouver for it. Someone said to him "I hear your film is controversial?" "Oh no" said Kim "It's disgusting". At the screening Festival staff walked up and down the line of punters queued up to explain that this film was ...well, they didn't say disgusting. My friend David Bordwell replied "That's why we're standing out in the cold at 11.00 pm at night!" Memorable occasion.)

Tom writes: "Tony invited me to come to Vancouver to serve on the jury for Dragons & Tigers, the Asian programme he curated with such acumen for nearly 20 years. I turned him down a couple of times but relented in 1998. It was a trip that changed my life trajectory, and I wound up moving here in 2004. Tony was a tireless and fearless advocate for a cinema that was transgressive, confrontational, formally adventurous and/or dynamic. A cinema that matched his restless curiosity. He was a lucid, rigorous and insightful critic and he could be very gentle, very kind. But he also had a wicked sense of humour. When he laughed his eyes became slits, his cheeks reddened and his wide shoulders shook, so that he resembled a giant Buddha.

But he could also be impossible and his own worst enemy. If he felt slighted he would hold on to that grudge for years or forever. I was spared this fate but knew others scalded by his contempt for next to nothing.

He enjoyed being naughty I think. I remember him championing a short film in which the director indulged his kink for defacating on his lover. For 99 percent of us it was unwatchable but that’s what Tony liked about it, no doubt.

As everyone acknowledges, Tony largely discovered myriad talents in the late 80s and 90s. The first Bong Joon-ho films to play in N America were his student shorts, at VIFF. Because Tony put in the legwork, travelling across Asia, visiting local festivals and film schools. He had a great eye for artistic potential, but he also had the commitment to back it up and do the work. For this he is a genuine inspiration. He made a difference to so many careers, so many lives, my own very much included."

Vale Great Man...I'll miss you a lot...