“There’s some old man on the Chinese extras,” said the producer, “sitting on a sofa, talking about the film. I don’t know who he is.”

I immediately recognised the picture I was sent. He was indeed old, and bald, and somewhat portly by now, but it was unquestionably Tony Rayns.

“Whatever he’s saying,” I said, “you want it on your disc.” I scraped up Tony’s email from my address book, and sent it along. It would become one of Tony’s last media deals, salvaging his lounge ruminations on Zhang Yimou from a limited-edition Chinese release for the new Blu-ray of Red Sorghum.

Tony’s love of film manifested early – he organised his first cinema society at high school in the 1960s. At the time, it was one of the only ways that an interested film fan could get to see movies they had heard about – there was no video, and television screenings were minimal. His primary source was the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin, a fantastic magazine which had a frankly OCD attitude towards movies, dedicated to covering everything that came out in the UK, with complete synopses and cast lists as well as critical commentary.

By the time he was at university, he was running several film societies, confronted with the logistics of programming, not merely of getting reels to venues, but of finding films that would bring punters to a cinema. He also dabbled in film himself, with an experimental piece in which two different hours of 8mm footage were projected side-by-side at the same time. He also contributed back-projected imagery for the multimedia show Make Me Make You (1969), a satire of swinging London. He accompanied it to the Edinburgh film festival, where he met Jan Dawson, shortly before she became the assistant editor of Monthly Film Bulletin. It was Dawson who offered him first article assignment, on Andy Warhol.

At the time, Hong Kong movies were below the radar of the British censor, distributed and watched in Chinatown clubs without troubling the overseers at the BBFC.  When the business went legit post-Bruce Lee, Rayns’s underground cinema-going stood him in good stead. In 1977, he was invited to the inaugural Hong Kong Film Festival as a foreign expert. He was typically self-effacing about this, claiming in his long interview with the Independent Cinema Office, that he was “scrabbling for a foothold in a culture about which I knew nothing, really.” He quipped that the Hong Kong festival runners were probably tired of his error-ridden commentary, and wanted to show him the city first-hand “so I would make fewer mistakes.”

He fell in love with the city on arrival, cementing what would become a life-long interest in Asian film, which slowly overwhelmed his writing on other cultures. He took a particular interest in the young film-makers, raised on television, who were filming literally on the streets, finding them to be a refreshing alternative to the Shaw Brothers film factory, which would shoot largely on standing sets until the true-crime film wave of the 1980s. Back in Britain, on one of his annual three-month stints at the BFI working on the London Film Festival film notes, he began enthusing about Tsui Hark’s The Butterfly Murders (1979). Before long, he became the LFF’s go-to guy for Asian film recommendations, inadvertently steering their reception in Britain for years. He would go on to perform in a similar role from 1988-2006 at the Vancouver International Film Festival, which became a point of entry for Asian films into North America.

He had given up on making his own films for a decade or more, before he was lured by Channel Four to make programmes about films. This was where I first encountered him, presenting documentaries about Asian directors. I, and many other British cineastes of my generation, often first heard of many creatives through Tony’s programmes, or his introductions to the accompanying broadcast festivals, such as his New Chinese Cinema in 1988.

For my teenage self, living by the Thames Estuary a world away from the exotic East, Rayns’ accounts in Monthly Film Bulletin and Sight & Sound of Beijing night clubs and Hong Kong Film Festivals were like dispatches from another planet. He was present at many critical moments in movie history, including the premiere of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994), which started an hour late because the projectionist refused to begin before the last two reels had arrived from the developing lab. Such experiences made Tony a pivotal presence in the exhibition and distribution sectors, sometimes as the programmer who discovered them, sometimes as the subtitler who made them comprehensible.

“I often think of him as ‘the honourable schoolboy,’ wrote Bérénice Reynaud, “the protagonist of John Le Carré’s novel that bears the same title – an intelligence agent who has spent most of his life in Asia, but remains endearingly (and awkwardly) British throughout his travels. When among aficionados, we sometimes exchange knowing smiles at a screening: ‘Oh, this is a Tony movie’. Meaning that, as a curator who knows his terrain, Rayns can’t help but project his vision of the world onto his selection of films– as a true auteur does.”

Tony was an exemplar of the value of film criticism. In 1991, despite not really liking anime all that much, he wrote an incisive, enduring piece on Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira for the Monthly Film Bulletin. It was accompanied by an interview he conducted with Otomo, which remains to this day one of the most crucial English-language sources on the director and his work. I most recently found myself quoting from it only this year – nobody has surpassed it in three decades.

“Anime was totally a niche thing at this time,” he told Simon Ward. “The majors were completely unaware of the impact of published translations… I was well aware from patronising comics shops that this was an obsession for a large number of people in the western world.” It was, he would claim, at his urging that the small independent ICA label approached Kodansha in Japan and offered to buy the film rights. The rest is history.

He came into his own in the 21st century, when the invention of the DVD transformed the nature of film criticism. Suddenly, someone like Tony was a marketable commodity, a knowledgeable viewer who could talk on a separate audio track while a film was playing, effectively doubling the running time of the asset. I fondly recall his appearance on the Blu-ray for Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, delivering a 44-minute discussion of the director Nagisa Oshima, seemingly without prompts or notes, of sufficient quality for me to predict that a number of future Film Studies classes on Oshima would just pop it in the player and leave it running. He was particularly favoured by Criterion and Eureka, setting a gold standard by which other commentators would be judged.

“I think the spaces to publish thoughtful film criticism are definitely reducing,” he said in his long 2022 interview with the Independent Cinema Office. “The Internet promotes a much glibber kind of film criticism…. There is some very good stuff that appears online… but the amount of noise does tend to overwhelm the rest, and certainly makes it harder for the more thoughtful stuff to reach a wider readership.”

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of the Martial Arts.