Andrew Sarris, one of the architects of contemporary film criticism, died earlier this morning after complications following a fall. He was 83 years old.
The critical landscape is poorer for Sarris having left it. For nearly 30 years, from 1960 to 1989, he wrote on film for the Village Voice his prose was eloquent, sharply witty and endlessly passionate. He was an unapologetic populist, which occasionally put him at odds with the paper’s more insistently cultured readers – though, for context, the “commercial” directors of his day included filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock.
In 1962, Sarris expanded upon a movement among French film critics (among them François Truffaut and André Bazin) and created the auteur theory, which placed directors at the top of cinema’s creative pantheon – above writers, producers and actors – to argue that the man behind the camera is the true author of the motion picture. At the twilight of an American studio system built and run by hands-on producers like David O. Selznick and Jack Warner, Sarris’s theory sounded like sacrilege five decades later, it’s accepted wisdom.
The auteur theory gave artistic standing to formerly dismissed directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks, and galvanized a new generation of writers, including NOW film writer John Harkness, who studied under Sarris at Columbia University in New York City. (John delighted in short-circuiting arguments among younger critics by casually mentioning that Sarris had been his thesis advisor.)
It also put Sarris on the cultural map, and brought him into frequent conflict with Pauline Kael, the New Yorker film critic whose passions ran along different lines. (Kael was just as much an auteurist as Sarris it’s long been my suspicion that her loathing for him was rooted, at least in part, in his coining the auteur theory before she could articulate it herself.)
Kael and Sarris would clash often, and though Kael was respected and feared for her cutting wordsmithery, Sarris gave as good as he got. In 1971, he responded thusly to her massive New Yorker essay on Citizen Kane: “My disagreement with her position begins with her very first sentence: ‘Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened.’ I can think of hundreds of ‘American talking pictures’ that seem as fresh now as the day they opened. Even fresher.”
He was right about that, too.
Sarris’s books include The American Cinema: Directors And Direction, 1929-1968, American Voices: Interviews With Film Directors and You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film, History And Memory 1927-1949. He is survived by his wife, the film critic Molly Haskell.
