Richard Stanley Roud (July 6, 1929 - February 13, 1989) was an American writer on film and co-founder, with Amos Vogel,[1] of the New York Film Festival.[2] At the NYFF, he was a former program director, and latterly director, from 1963 to 1987. Jean-Yves Mock, assistant of Erica Brausen at the Hanover gallery, was a good friend of Richard Roud.
Richard Stanley RoudRoud was born in Boston on July 6, 1929. He received a degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1950, and after a year of study in France on a Fulbright Scholarship, spent two years doing graduate work at the University of Birmingham in England. He taught English at air bases in Britain for the University of Maryland's overseas extension program.
In the 1950s, Roud became the London correspondent of the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma. In 1960 he became the director of the London Film Festival,[3][4] and in 1963 co-founded the New York Film Festival, where he headed up the selection committee.[2][3] He worked for both festivals until February 1970, when he ceased to be the director of the London Film Festival to concentrate on the New York festival.[3][5] From 1963 to 1969, he was also film critic for The Guardian of London, a role from which he was fired after writing a one word review of The Sound of Music (simply, "No.") [6] and latterly a roving arts correspondent for the newspaper, and also wrote annual reports from the Cannes Film Festival, and other articles, for the British film publication Sight and Sound. 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. A volume of Roud's previously uncollected writings, Decades Never Start on Time: A Richard Roud Anthology was published by the BFI in 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.
Richard Roud died of cardiac arrest on February 13, 1989, in Nimes, France, where he had been in a coma in the Hopital Doumergue since suffering a heart attack on Jan. 15. He was 59 years old and lived in Paris. Roud had been vacationing in Nimes before going to the Berlin Film Festival. He had suffered from heart disease for some years and survived an episode of congestive heart failure three years before. At his death, Roud, whose title was director emeritus of the New York Film Festival, was finishing his critical biography of the director Francois Truffaut and was choosing films for a Film Society of Lincoln Center series, a series that was to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the French cinematic New Wave. ''The Film Society intends to dedicate this program to his memory,'' said Roy L. Furman, the president of the Film Society. ''Richard Roud was for 25 years a guiding force of the New York Film Festival. His knowledge and devotion to film will be sorely missed.''
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