Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris (October 31, 1928 – June 20, 2012) was an American film critic. He was a leading proponent and popularizer of the auteur theory of film criticism, particularly in The American Cinema.

Early life Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, Themis (née Katavolos) and George Andrew Sarris, and grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. After attending John Adams High School in South Ozone Park (where he overlapped with Jimmy Breslin), he graduated from Columbia University in 1951. He then served for three years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the Korean War. In the late 1950s, he was editor-in-chief of the English-language edition of the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma.

He continued to write film criticism for The New York Observer until 2009 and was a professor of film at Columbia University (where he earned an M.A. in English in 1998), teaching courses on international film history, American cinema and Hitchcock until his retirement in 2011. Sarris was a co-founder of the National Society of Film Critics.

For many years, he wrote for both NY Film Bulletin and The Village Voice. He was often seen as a rival to The New Yorkers Pauline Kael, who had originally attacked the auteur theory in her essay "Circles and Squares." Speaking of his long-running feuds with Kael, Sarris says that, oddly, "We made each other. We established a dialectic."

Sarris wrote, "When people have asked me to name the greatest film of all time—in my humble opinion, of course—my instant answer has been unvarying for the past 30 years or so: Max Ophüls' Madame de… (1953)." He added that "I usually answer questions about the greatest film of all time by immediately throwing in my own two runners-up: Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) and Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (1939). Then, if I can grasp the questioner's lapels long enough (much like Coleridge's crazed Ancient Mariner), I rattle off the rest of my all-time-ten-greatest-list: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), John Ford's The Searchers (1956), Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), F. W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927), Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1936) and Buster Keaton's The General (1927)."

Auteur theory Sarris is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the United States and coining the term in his Film Culture essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962", inspired by critics in Cahiers du Cinéma. In 1968, Sarris expanded his essay into the landmark book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, an opinionated assessment of films of the sound era, organized by director. The book would influence many other critics and help raise awareness of the role of the director.

The controversies sparked by the auteur theory prompted Sarris to frequently qualify and defend his position. In The American Cinema (1968), he wrote that his 1962 essay "was written in what I thought was a modest, tentative, experimental manner, it was certainly not intended as the last word on the subject". In a 1970 Film Comment article, he claimed that the auteur theory "was therefore never a theory at all, but rather a collection of facts, a reminder of movies to be resurrected, of genres to be redeemed, of directors to be rediscovered." In a 1972 interview, he offered a spirited defense of the auteur perspective, saying it was necessary to appreciate directors like Howard Hawks, "whom no one had ever said anything aboutand people like John Ford, and the totally neglected directors who built up large bodies of work that nobody paid any attention to." His 1977 essay "The Auteur Theory Revisited" was included in later reprint editions of The American Cinema.

Legacy In 2001, Emanuel Levy edited Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic: Essays in Honor of Andrew Sarris, a collection of 39 essays by notable critics (Dave Kehr, Todd McCarthy, Gerald Peary) and filmmakers (Martin Scorsese, John Sayles, Peter Bogdanovich, Curtis Hanson) alongside fans of Sarris's works.

J. Hoberman, Kenneth Turan, Armond White, Michael Phillips and A. O. Scott have cited him as an influence. His career is discussed in the documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, first with other critics discussing how he brought the auteur theory from France, and then with Sarris himself explaining how he applied the theory in his original review of Hitchcock's Psycho. In 1997, Camille Paglia described Sarris as her third favorite critic, praising "his acute columns during the high period of The Village Voice."

Personal life Sarris married fellow film critic Molly Haskell in 1969; they lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Works Sarris, Andrew (1966). The Films of Josef von Sternberg. New York City: Museum of Modern Art. . —— (1968). The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. New York: E. P. Dutton. . Sarris, Andrew, ed. (1968). The Film. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. . ——, ed. (1968). Interviews with Film Directors. New York: Avon Books. . —— (1970). Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955-1969. New York: Simon and Schuster. . —— (1973). The Primal Screen: Essays on Film and Related Subjects. New York: Simon and Schuster. . —— (1975). The John Ford Movie Mystery. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. . —— (1978). Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. . ——, ed. (1998). The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia. Detroit: Visible Ink Press. . —— (1998). You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet: The American Talking Film: History & Memory, 1927-1949. New York: Oxford University Press. . Levy, Emanuel, ed. (2001). Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic: Essays in Honor of Andrew Sarris. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. .