Andrew Sarris (1928–2012)

As I write this, the tributes are undoubtedly piling up on the Web. I won't read them, though, until after I've written my own.

Andrew Sarris died on Wednesday. I was one of the thousands of students he enlightened during his decades of teaching film at Columbia University. He reached countless others through his movie reviews and longer think pieces in Film Culture, the Village Voice, the New York Observer, and Film Comment, as well as through his several books—especially The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968. Were it not for him, it's doubtful the French word auteur would ever have found its way into English-language dictionaries. That's because he was the chief U.S. proponent of the idea, originally conceived in the pages of the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema, that if movies are to be considered an art form, it is the director who is the key artist—the author, the auteur—at the heart of the creative project.

That idea has become so ingrained in the way we think about film that it's hard to imagine the controversies it once stirred. What especially infuriated some folks back in the days when Sarris's star was ascending—the late fifties and early sixties—was the notion that auteurs could be found within the Hollywood "factory system," that directors like Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock could be considered artists, not to mention such figures as Sam Fuller, Raoul Walsh, Robert Aldrich, Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, and Anthony Mann, most of them working in "disreputable" genres like Westerns and thrillers. Sarris's dispute with Pauline Kael over auteurism is legendary, though in her own way, she turned out to be as much an auteurist as he was: read her mid-seventies pieces on, say, Brian De Palma and Robert Altman. On the whole, I think, Sarris's enthusiasms and the ideas that sprang from them have held up much better than Kael's.

What distinguished Sarris, particularly, was the long view he took of film history. He urged his students and readers to think not just in terms of individual films but of directorial careers, of the way styles and themes emerged as bodies of work grew and evolved. That's why he was always looking backward, even as his weekly reviewer's job demanded that he stay in constant touch with the latest openings in theaters. He liked to say that we couldn't truly evaluate a moment in film history as it was happening. Years would have to pass, the dust would have to settle, before we could judge whether this or that director had achieved greatness or what, exactly, the tenor of that particular moment was. Compare that to Kael's perpetual trumpeting of the latest thing. She claimed never to see a movie more than once, and then she was off and running in search of something new to dazzle her. Sarris, by contrast, rewatched old favorites dozens of times, and he was never afraid of revising his views. In The American Cinema, he had relegated Billy Wilder to the ranks of "Less Than Meets the Eye," but some years later, this ever-thoughtful critic reassigned him to the Pantheon. He even eased up a bit on John Huston late in that director's career.

There is so much more I could say about Sarris, so many memories I could summon. His style in the classroom was off the cuff, anecdotal, and frequently quite funny—as well as brilliant. A few of my classmates, though, felt they weren't getting their money's worth; and, this being the late seventies, they were more smitten by the latest cultural theories—semiotics, structuralism, deconstruction—then on the rise in academic film study. Sarris's resistance to such trends got him pegged in those quarters as a bourgeois reactionary or hopeless romantic. Ah, those were heady times. It's always fascinated me, however, that in the years since, so much theoretically inflected film scholarship has focused precisely on the directors and genres that Sarris originally championed. In a very important sense, he blazed a trail for the theory crowd: he showed them where to look; he set the parameters for their further research.

So, rest in peace, Andy Sarris. I doubt you would have remembered me today since our paths hadn't crossed in over twenty-five years. But I will never forget you.

The Latest Oscar Yawnfest

I can't give up the Oscar habit—as I noted a year ago, it's the only awards telecast I ever watch—but I have to admit that the show does seem to get duller every year. In last night's proceedings, Billy Crystal, doing his ninth stint as host (after an eight-year absence), told only a couple of jokes that elicited so much as chuckle from me, and I've already forgotten them.

As for the award recipients, I can only say that the best-picture winner, The Artist, is an enjoyable trifle, a charming and skilfully made valentine to Hollywood's silent era, but of the nominated films I've seen, I think The Descendants and The Tree of Life are far more compelling. The Artist's big win no doubt owes more to distributor Harvey Weinstein's marketing and promotion chops than to to the movie's intrinsic quality.

At least there were only two nominees in the "Best Song" category, neither of which was performed in full. Small favors, I guess.

A (Hopefully Temporary) Loss to Film Criticism

It was more than a little depressing to learn that the Village Voice recently let go of its longtime film critic, J. Hoberman (the "J" stands for James). I knew Jim slightly back in the late '70s when we were both MFA candidates in the Columbia film program, and I remember him as an exceptionally bright guy. He had just recently snagged a post at the Voice, writing mainly about avant-garde/experimental cinema from a progressive political perspective. His duties became a bit more mainstream some years later when he graduated to lead critic, but he never abandoned his devotion to more esoteric fare.

Since leaving New York over two decades ago, I haven't read the Voice regularly, but I'd occasionally check out Jim's reviews on the paper's website. I didn't always agree with him, of course, but even when he trashed a movie I liked or praised one I didn't, I remained impressed by the acuity of his insights. It's a damn shame he doesn't have a regular gig at the moment, and I hope that another publication, whether print or digital, has the good sense to add him to its masthead—and soon.

The Voice, so I've heard, is but a shadow of its former self, a "glorified shopper" in the words of another Columbia classmate, George Robinson. Maybe it's just as well that Hoberman is no longer at the Voice. It sounds like the once proud (but now sadly in decline) alternative weekly doesn't deserve him.

NY Times critics A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis "sat down" (via email) with Hoberman for an interesting conversation a couple of weeks ago. You can check it out here.