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.