{"id":18488,"date":"2012-06-24T09:25:47","date_gmt":"2012-06-24T14:25:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=18488"},"modified":"2012-06-27T16:17:58","modified_gmt":"2012-06-27T21:17:58","slug":"octaves-hop-andrew-sarris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2012\/06\/24\/octaves-hop-andrew-sarris\/","title":{"rendered":"Octave\u2019s hop: Andrew Sarris"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

La R\u00e8gle du jeu<\/strong> (The Rules of the Game,<\/strong> 1939).<\/em><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

The death of Andrew Sarris last week isn\u2019t just a saddening moment for those of us who admire exhilarating film criticism. It also reminds us how much American culture can owe to a single person.<\/p>\n

Everyone who writes about Sarris writes about how they came to know his work. It was that powerful, and if it hit you young, you were never the same. (You never hear about the sixty-year-old who suddenly becomes an auteurist.) The period of his greatest impact was the 1960s-1970s when, to borrow a phrase from Dave Kehr<\/a>, movies mattered. But his influence has lingered, powerfully, a lot longer.<\/p>\n

I think that the best way to honor Sarris is to take his ideas–not just his opinions, but his ideas–seriously, so that\u2019s what I\u2019ve tried to do in this tribute. First, though, some comments that are obligatory in any discussion of Sarris.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Obligatory autobiography 1<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

1963:<\/strong> When I was sixteen I wrote to various film magazines\u00a0and asked for sample issues\u00a0as a \u201cprospective subscriber.\u201d Surprisingly, several answered, and I amassed a few copies of Film Quarterly, Films and Filming<\/em>, and Movie<\/em><\/a>. No gift from the land of film journals was more propitious than that fateful issue 28 of Film Culture<\/em> entitled \u201cAmerican Directors.\u201d It was the first draft of what would become Sarris\u2019 1968 book, The American Cinema<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Issue 28 was a dangerous item to give a kid. It contained what Georgie Minafer calls \u201ctouchy chemicals.\u201d At first I was baffled. There were those famous categories: How to distinguish \u201cLightly Likeable\u201d from \u201cLess Than Meets the Eye\u201d? Who were Budd Boetticher, Tay Garnett, and John M. Stahl? What did it mean to say that Robert Montgomery \u201cexecuted a charming champ-contre-champ<\/em> joke in Once More, My Darling<\/em>\u201d? To me it was all<\/em> Expressive Esoterica. Here was a cave of mysteries, but it hinted at treasures.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sarris\u2019s filmographies were packed with titles I\u2019d never heard of. How could I catch up? Around 1955, the studios had begun selling their pre-1948 titles to local television stations. By the next year, people living in major cities could tune in five or six movies a day. At the forefront of TV sales was the financially precarious RKO, which sold over seven hundred titles to an outfit called C & C. C & C packaged the library as 16mm TV prints under the rubric of \u201cMovietime.\u201d<\/p>\n

Auteurism owes a good deal to the 1950s-1960s equivalent of home video, the thousands of 16mm prints floating around local TV stations.\u00a0In Manhattan, WOR-TV screened their films under the rubric \u201cMillion Dollar Movie.\u201d The same film might run once or twice every night for a week (and twice or more on weekends).\u00a0Without benefit of WOR or New York\u2019s revival houses, I was still able to use Rochester television to sample some of the titles that Sarris had listed, especially those given in big caps. (Italicizing must-see items didn\u2019t show up until the book version.)\u00a0Sarris\u2019s essay, \u201cCitizen Kane<\/em>: The American Baroque,\u201d was published in\u00a0Film Culture<\/em>\u00a0in 1956, the same year that the RKO library began to be syndicated and\u00a0Kane<\/em>\u00a0was reissued in theatres around the country.<\/p>\n

I did wind up subscribing to Film Culture<\/em>. It was the least I could do to pay them back.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Obligatory autobiography 2<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fall 1965:<\/strong> At a state college up the Hudson, the English department hosted a debate on contemporary American movies. The adversaries were Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, both just coming into the national spotlight. One freshman came early and sat with comic earnestness in the front row, a spot he would fetishize later<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kael was witty and acerbic, tossing off judgments with a wave of her cigarette holder. The Cincinnati Kid<\/em><\/a> was the best of the current crop; Jewison showed great promise. She was riding high because I Lost It at the Movies<\/em><\/a> had come out that spring and was greeted with hosannas. The New Yorker<\/em> review contrasted her with \u201cthe far-out Sarris.\u201d<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t look so far-out. In a crumpled suit, he was resolutely uncharismatic, looking mildly unhappy to be dragged blinking out of the Thalia and shipped upstate. He talked fast, interrupted himself, and, finding few recent movies to praise, celebrated Max Ophuls and Jean Renoir. He delivered enigmatic observations like, \u201cAll movies should probably be in color.\u201d<\/p>\n

At evening\u2019s end, I knew which camp I belonged in. I got an appropriately nerdy autograph for my Film Culture<\/em> issue: \u201cCine\u00adcerely yours, Andrew Sarris.\u201d More important, I exulted in a sense that my almost grim obsession with movies had been validated. Not for some time would I realize that I had enlisted, to put it melodramatically, in a fight for American film culture. The battle lines were drawn more sharply in Manhattan than in Albany, but everywhere one thing was clear. Kael was clearly the standard bearer for them<\/em>, and Sarris was ours<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Obligatory comparison: S vs. K<\/strong><\/p>\n

Who were the them? <\/em>They were the hip intellectuals who enjoyed a night at the movies. At faculty parties throughout the 1970s I had to check myself when professors of lit or law asked me if I didn\u2019t find Kael\u2019s review that week intoxicating. And she writes so well!<\/em> As chief New Yorker<\/em> critic, Kael became the grand tastemaker, a person even filmmakers courted. But who would try to curry favor with the guy who wrote for the Village Voice<\/em>? It reminds you of the joke about the starlet so dumb she slept with the screenwriter.<\/p>\n

Of course like all acolytes we overplayed the differences. Both Kael and Sarris loved classic studio cinema, the performers and scripts as much as the directorial handling. Both critics bemoaned Soviet montage and what they saw as its descendant, the overbusy technique of the 1960s. Both deplored stylistic aggressiveness (the Tony Richardson Syndrome) and both idolized Renoir. Both loved lyricism.<\/p>\n

According to us, though, Kael wrote for those who dug movies, while Sarris wrote for those who loved cinema\u2014the medium itself, or rather an exalted idea of the medium\u2019s potential, an ideal form of expression at once dramatic, poetic, pictorial, and musical. He saw each film as bearing witness to the promise of what cinema might be, and he looked in even the tawdriest products for something approximating his dreams. Despite his enthusiasms, he tried for detachment, viewing the latest movie from some unpredictable historical perspective.<\/p>\n

Kael famously declared that she watched a new film only once, because that was the way her readers would consume it. But who, we thought, would want to write about a movie after seeing it only once? Mightn\u2019t it reveal some strengths or weaknesses on a second viewing? If it was a good movie, who wouldn\u2019t want to see it more than once? In that same freshman semester, when there were still first-run double features, I sat through The Glory Guys<\/em> twice in order to watch Help!<\/em> three times. And that wasn\u2019t even a particularly good movie.<\/p>\n

Kael pounced on faults, Sarris savored beauties. Kael made each weak film seem like a blow to her intelligence. Sarris, although he could be harsh, tended to forgive. He taught that it was better to leave a door open than to write someone off\u2014even Bergman, whom some of us would never learn to like until Persona<\/em>, some not until Fanny and Alexander<\/em>. Sarris subordinated his personality to that of the movie and its director, which made him seem less fiery than his uptown counterpart; but his attitude suited our own somewhat adolescent amorphousness of character. The arrogant certainty of our tastes was, paradoxically, born of a passionate humility, a sense of serving wise masters named Dreyer, Murnau, Mizoguchi.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rethinking film history<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Sarris is known primarily as the man who gave us the American version of auteurism, or what he called \u201cthe auteur theory.\u201d It wasn\u2019t a theory of cinema as such, but rather a heuristic approach to criticism: tips on what to think about and look for when you wanted to plumb a movie\u2019s artistry. But initially, auteurism claimed to be a theory of something else. The opening chapter of The American Cinema<\/em> is called \u201cToward a Theory of Film History.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Sarris\u2019s day, most people writing about the history of film as an art accepted a notion of technical progress. According to this view, filmmakers became significant by contributing toward the development of the medium. Editing emerged through the efforts of M\u00e9li\u00e8s, Porter, and Griffith, followed by the Russian Montage directors. Various national schools revealed more possibilities of the medium: fantasy and abstraction with the German Expressionists, derangement of sense with the Surrealists.<\/p>\n

When sound arrived, a few directors (Clair, Mamoulian, Hitchcock) explored the stylized possibilities of that new technology. But many historians, considering that cinema was inherently a visual medium, declared sound an unwanted intrusion. Clearly, the great days of cinematic artistry were over. Most synoptic histories of the period fell silent about the evolution of technique after the 1920s and concentrate on the emergence of certain genres, such as the musical and the film of social comment.<\/p>\n

Even Andr\u00e9 Bazin could be said to accept the premises of step-by-step artistic progress. Bazin showed that sound cinema wasn\u2019t a dead end, that new artistic possibilities were exploited in the 1930s and 1940s. These were mostly creative alternatives to editing-based technique: the long take, extended camera movement, deep-space staging, and deep-focus cinematography. Bazin claimed that these techniques were most fully on display in the works of Renoir, Wyler, Welles, and some Neorealists.<\/p>\n

Sarris was deeply influenced by Bazin\u2019s ideas, but he didn\u2019t accept the conception of film history as an accumulated technical evolution. Sarris called this the \u201cpyramid fallacy,\u201d with each filmmaker adding his slab to the rising and narrowing edifice of cinema. Instead, he proposed thinking of film history as an inverted pyramid, \u201copening outward to accommodate the unpredictable range and diversity of individual directors.\u201d<\/p>\n

In practice this demands that the historian survey entire careers, especially the works of ripe old age. It demands that the historian plot directors\u2019 creative trajectories as paralleling and intersecting and overlapping\u2014perhaps coalescing into broader trends, perhaps creating dead ends. The cinematic universe expands with each new film made, every old film rediscovered or simply re-seen. Auteurism \u201cplaces a premium on having seen every work by a director who is deemed worthy of a study in depth; and by the time all the cross-references have been pursued in every possible direction auteurism seems to insist that every film ever made is relevant to the inquiry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Film history becomes less a linear progress toward something than a vast network of affinities and differences. This idea naturally led Sarris the writer not to the mammoth survey but to multifaceted essay collections. His big book, \u201cYou Ain\u2019t Heard Nothin\u2019 Yet,\u201d<\/em><\/a> looks like a panoramic history but is in fact a free-range miscellany, a sort of unbuttoned late-career redo of that Film Culture<\/em> issue..<\/p>\n

You can argue that Sarris was proposing a non-historical history, one that dispenses with concepts of influence and cause and that pulverizes any coherent narrative. That seems to me a valid objection. Despite its claim to be a theory of film history, Sarris\u2019s auteurism strikes me as a historically informed approach to film criticism. The ultimate aim isn\u2019t a convincing historical narrative but a compelling aesthetic judgment. Sarris\u2019s idea of expanding filiation, infinite comparison and contrast, allows him to pursue what matters: evaluation.<\/p>\n

In this respect at least, he\u2019s agreeing with his predecessors, the writers who saw history as linear progress. But his criteria of value are different. For the traditionalists, the \u00a0filmmakers who grasped the next step that the medium should take in its creative development become the best. For Sarris, the best filmmakers used the resources at their disposal to create valuable works that also displayed a distinct conception of human life. \u201cGriffith, Murnau, and Eisenstein had different visions of the world, and their technical \u2018contributions\u2019 can never be divorced from their personalities.\u201d Innovation was secondary to expression, and expression could best be gauged by tracking the wayward currents of the history of film style.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Auteur, yes; but of what?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

New York Film Festival 1966: Pier Paolo Pasolini, translator, Andrew Sarris, and Agnes Varda. Photo by Elliott Landy.\u00a0<\/em>From\u00a0Film Culture<\/strong>\u00a0no. 42 (Fall 1966).<\/em><\/p>\n

The auteur \u201ctheory\u201d creates a decentralized and dispersed conception of film history\u2014not a tree with a solid trunk and clear-cut branches but a bristling, tangled bush. The historian will dissolve big changes and broad trends into the doings of particular film artists. Who are these artists? Well, obviously, directors.<\/p>\n

This move shouldn\u2019t have been controversial. Critics had long assigned primary creative responsibility to directors. In the 1910s Louis Delluc heaped praise on DeMille and Sj\u00f6str\u00f6m, while Griffith was acknowledged around the world as a great innovator. Later von Stroheim, von Sternberg, Eisenstein, Pabst, Clair, Welles, Hitchcock, Maya Deren, and many other filmmakers were recognized as the artistic authority behind their work. In the early 1950s, foreign-language filmmakers such as Kurosawa and Bergman were identified (and even promoted by their distributors) as all-powerful creators saying something through their art.<\/p>\n

Sarris\u2019s real innovation was, along with the critics around Cahiers du cin\u00e9ma<\/em> and Movie<\/em>, to transfer\u00a0 the idea of the expressive film artist from the headier regions of art cinema to the jostling, compromised world of Hollywood. There were obvious objections.<\/p>\n

*<\/strong>Filmmaking is a \u201ccollaborative\u201d activity, so you can\u2019t attribute the final work to a single hand.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet in the collaborative medium of opera we speak of a Zeffirelli production as opposed to a Peter Sellars one. Why can\u2019t a film director be a synthesizing artist orchestrating the contributions of many other artists?<\/p>\n

*<\/strong>But in opera and other theatre forms, you have a preexisting text, the script or libretto or score. Why isn\u2019t the screenwriter the artist, as Shakespeare or Verdi is?<\/em><\/p>\n

Because theatrical texts are designed to be instantiated on different occasions, while film scripts are written to be produced only once. The film\u2019s final form includes elements of the script, but that final form, being cinematic, can\u2019t be uniquely specified in verbal language. As we all realize, give the same screenplay to six filmmakers, and you get six different and equally free-standing films.<\/p>\n

*<\/strong>Popular film can\u2019t be compared to high art. Artistry demands control, and the novelist, the painter, and even the opera director will exercise complete control over the final work. A Bergman or Antonioni has the cultural clout to dictate every aesthetic effect, but the Hollywood filmmaker works as part of a larger process controlled by others. He is handed a script and shoots it, and not necessarily all of it; second-unit and visual effects staff have their input too. The producer may demand more close-ups. In the classic studio system, the director wouldn\u2019t typically get final cut; the producer would shape the released film. All these conditions constitute barriers to artistic expression. The auteur theory, when applied to Hollywood, is deeply inappropriate.<\/em><\/p>\n

One answer to this objection is that many directors, including some of the best ones, did have a good deal of control over their work: Hitchcock, Hawks, and others were their own producers and worked on their scripts and oversaw their post-production. Moreover, a director can control choices down the line in sneaky ways, as when Ford shot his films so that they could be assembled in only one way.<\/p>\n

Sarris advanced another reply to the control objection. If it owed something to the Cahiers<\/em> young critics, he articulated and practiced it more keenly than they. He proposed a critical method:\u00a0Take as many films signed by the director as you can find. Attend to the way they exercise their craft, the way they tell their stories and convey their meanings. Seek out an expressive core that seems distinctive, even unique.<\/p>\n

Most directors\u2019 collected works won\u2019t yield this. \u201cNot all directors are auteurs. Indeed, most directors are virtually anonymous.\u201d Only the best directors will display a distinct expressive quality. Hawks and Hitchcock evoke radically different worlds of action and feeling, just as Mozart and Rembrandt can.<\/p>\n

Fifteen years after his initial statement on the matter, \u201cNotes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,\u201d Sarris suggested that the elusive concept of personality was not to be derived from the director\u2019s biography. \u201cI was never all that interested in the clinical \u2018personalities\u2019 of directors. . . . A director\u2019s formal utterances (his films) tell us more about his artistic personality than do his informal utterances (his conversation).\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, we understand John Ford\u2019s respect for what Sarris calls \u201ccodes of conduct\u201d not through the old curmudgeon\u2019s interviews but by confronting the tangible texture of the movies. One of Sarris\u2019s favorite examples occurs in The Searchers<\/em><\/a>. Drinking his coffee, the Ward Bond character glances toward the wife of the household. Then his point of view reveals her stroking the uniform of her husband\u2019s brother, played by John Wayne.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Cut back to Bond as the wife and her brother-in-law meet for a tender farewell. Bond stares off into space, chewing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cNothing on earth,\u201d writes Sarris, \u201cwould ever force this man to reveal what he had seen. There is a deep, subtle chivalry at work here, and in most of Ford\u2019s films, but it is never obtrusive enough to interfere with the flow of the narrative.\u201d The economy is part of the point. \u201cIf it had taken him any longer than three shots and a few seconds to establish this insight into the Bond character, the point would not be worth making.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

In the Hollywood studio context, there was something heroic about the rare director who could surmount all the pressures, filter out all the noise, and shape the impact of his work. \u201cThe auteur theory values the personality of the director precisely because of the barriers to its expression.\u201d Like a great Renaissance painter paid by a pope or a duke and pledged to illustrate well-known stories, the Hollywood director working for a studio could occasionally conjure up something powerful and distinctive.<\/p>\n

Auteurism, Sarris claimed, is our straightest road to determining a film\u2019s value. The great films, by and large, will be those that evoke distinctive directorial sensibilities. But \u201cby and large\u201d allows for the possibility of excellent movies that we can attribute to other forces\u2014script, stars, source material, the happy intersection of talents. Casablanca<\/em><\/a>, writes Sarris, \u201cis the most decisive exception to the auteur theory.\u201d Sarris loved movies more than he loved his theories.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Compare, contrast, repeat<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sarris\u2019s breakthrough essay, \u201cCitizen Kane<\/em>: The American Baroque,\u201d appeared in Film Culture<\/em> during the 1956 revivals of the film. This detailed explication, published when Sarris was twenty-eight, betrays his grad-school training at a period when the New Criticism reigned. In a single stroke, he pioneered the sort of close reading that would become central to Anglo-American academic film criticism.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t recall any later Sarris essay offering such an intensive analysis of a single film. As he developed his historically-guided critical appraisals, he favored synoptic appreciations of directorial careers. These became the occasions for him to point out interacting directorial personalities that comprise that vast network of cinema.<\/p>\n

Instead of \u00a0macro-analysis, Sarris embraced a strategy of \u201cdrilling down,\u201d we\u2019d now say, to a single revelatory passage. The chief tactic is comparison, often involving two directors faced with a comparable situation. Both City Lights<\/em><\/a> and The Goat<\/em> show a protagonist hiding on a statue about to be unveiled. Chaplin seizes the chance to deflate the ceremony.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But Keaton, says Sarris, is less interested in satire; he is \u201ca pessimist in perpetual motion.\u201d In The Goat<\/em>, \u201cKeaton remains mounted on the clay horse until it begins to sag and crumple under his weight, and the sculptor, a bearded nincompoop in a beret, proceeds to break down and weep.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cKeaton\u2019s expression here,\u201d Sarris claims, \u201cis mercilessly pragmatic. What good is a clay horse (art?) if you can\u2019t mount it to your own advantage? There is something unabashedly ruthless about Keaton\u2019s comedy, which chills his humor.\u201d This was the period when critics, having just rediscovered Keaton\u2019s films, claimed him as a \u201cmetaphysician.\u201d Sarris likened him to Beckett.<\/p>\n

Sarris wasn\u2019t alone in turning to detailed commentary at the period; we had Dwight Macdonald\u2019s appreciative 1964 essay on 8 \u00bd<\/em> and John Simon\u2019s book-length study of \u00a0Bergman<\/a> (1973). But Sarris got there early with the Kane<\/em> piece, and throughout his career he used analysis to pinpoint authorial personality. Attention to nuanced differences allowed him to create a kind of connoisseurship.<\/p>\n

The ultimate expression of this connoisseurship emerges in his concern for privileged moments. A critic has to be alert for shots or gestures or lines of dialogue that encapsulate the emotional tenor of a film and a director\u2019s sensibility. Sarris\u2019 example is a moment in La r\u00e8gle du jeu<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Renoir gallops up the stairs, stops in hoplike uncertainty when his name is called by a coquettish maid, and then, with marvelous post-reflex continuity, resumes his bearishly shambling journey to the heroine\u2019s boudoir.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If I could describe the musical grace note of that momentary suspension, and I can\u2019t, I might be able to provide a more precise definition of the auteur<\/em> theory. As it is, all I can do is point at the specific beauties of interior meaning on the screen and later catalogue the moments of recognition.<\/strong><\/p>\n

No director but Renoir, Sarris suggests, would have Octave break the scene\u2019s rhythm in exactly this way–and in a manner, Sarris\u2019s bear-metaphor hints, that anticipates Octave\u2019s costume for the climactic party in the chateau. The nonchalant, slightly awkward interruption epitomizes Renoir\u2019s entire style of filmmaking, which has room for casual deflections from neat plotting and groomed performances. The critic\u2019s words can\u2019t wholly capture the force of Octave\u2019s hop, and its resonance for Renoir\u2019s film and his oeuvre. It is, says Sarris, \u201cimbedded in the stuff of cinema.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both cinephiles and ordinary viewers are seized by luminous instants that change our skin temperature. We come out of a film satisfied if a few epiphanies have flashed upon us.\u00a0The critic can signal them but not explain them fully.\u00a0Interior meaning is the product of craft and personality, but it can\u2019t be reduced to them. It creates a tingling, fugitive beauty that is unique to cinema.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Everyone has his or her own Sarris. The foregoing offers merely bits of mine, and they\u2019re largely academic in slant. That\u2019s because I think that Sarris changed, among other things, the way film history and criticism were taught in American universities. While Kael influenced film journalism, particularly in the upscale markets, Sarris\u2019s legacy is best seen in cinephile criticism (Film Comment<\/em>, Film Quarterly<\/em> et al.) and academic film studies. Some Paulettes went to work for the New York cultural weeklies, high and low. Many people who were Sarrisites to some degree (Jeanine Basinger, James Naremore, \u00a0John Belton, William Paul, Elisabeth Weis, Chuck Wolfe, Mark Langer, Robert Lang, et al.) became professors. Kael\u2019s followers turned out essays, but Sarrisites like Todd McCarthy and Joseph McBride wrote books based firmly in research. Sarris\u2019s\u00a0version of auteurism has been reworked, in plenty of intriguing ways, in directorial monographs from university presses. He\u00a0once remarked ruefully that he was an academic among journalists and a journalist among academics, but he managed to bridge the gap adroitly.<\/p>\n

Sarris was too far-out for the New Yorker<\/em> in 1965, and probably for the New Yorker<\/em> of today. But history, and not just the history of movies, was on his side.<\/p>\n

\n

Sarris\u2019 life and death have called forth many eloquent tributes. Among the best are Kent Jones\u2019 career overview<\/a>, Richard Corliss\u2019s moving memoir<\/a>, and Jim Emerson\u2019s calm discussion<\/a> of the excesses of the Sarris vs. Kael dichotomy. See also Ben Kenigsberg\u2019s memories<\/a> of Sarris\u2019s teaching style.<\/p>\n

My quotations are taken from Film Culture<\/em> no. 28 (Spring 1963), The American Cinema<\/em><\/a> (Dutton, 1968), Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955\/1969<\/em><\/a> (Simon and Schuster, 1971), The Primal Screen<\/em><\/a> (Simon & Schuster, 1973), and The John Ford Movie Mystery<\/em><\/a> (Secker & Warburg, 1976). Thanks also to email conversations with John Belton of Rutgers and Dennis Bingham of Indiana University.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>When I received Film Culture<\/em> no. 28, I didn\u2019t know that it represented a continuation of a Cahiers du cin\u00e9ma<\/em> tradition. In December 1955, the journal had published a special issue, \u201cSituation du Cin\u00e9ma Am\u00e9ricain\u201d (no. 54). It included not only critical essays but a \u201cdictionary\u201d of contemporary American directors: small-print filmographies followed by a paragraph of lapidary commentary. (\u201cLang\u2019s work is founded on a metaphysics of architecture.\u201d) Later issues devoted \u201cdictionaries\u201d to current French cinema (no. 71, May 1957), the Nouvelle Vague (no. 138, December 1962), and more recent American cinema (no. 150-151, December 1963-January 1964). In his American Cinema<\/em> project, Sarris altered the format significantly by expanding the commentaries into essays and then grouping directors within sharp-edged, highly memorable categories of value. In turn, Sarris\u2019s catalogue seems to have been the model for Martin Scorsese\u2019s \u201cPersonal Journey through American Movies.\u201d<\/a> In the same tradition is Jean-Pierre Coursodon and Pierre Sauvage\u2019s too-little-known American Directors<\/em><\/a> (1983).<\/p>\n

For more on C & C, which was a soda-pop company, go\u00a0here<\/a>. By 1956, WOR-TV was owned by the same company that owned RKO, so it\u2019s no surprise that Kane<\/em>, King Kong<\/em>, and other items from the Movietime package played ceaselessly on that station. WOR\u2019s radio station intersected my life from another angle<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For more on the standard version of the history of film art, along with Bazin\u2019s revision of it, see my\u00a0On the History of Film Style<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The homage volume, Citizen Sarris: American Film Critic<\/a>,<\/em> includes many fine pieces, but please don\u2019t read my contribution. Editorial carelessness has mangled it beyond recognition. The version I\u2019ll stand by, \u201cCinecerity,\u201d is available in my Poetics of Cinema<\/em>. Portions of this blog entry are lifted from that essay, but I\u2019ve omitted most of my discussion of Sarris\u2019s conception of film style.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

New York Film Festival, 1966: Nat Hentoff, Pauline Kael, Parker Tyler, Arthur Knight, Judith Crist, Hollis Alpert, Andrew Sarris. Photo by Elliott Landy. From\u00a0Film Culture<\/strong>\u00a0no. 42 (Fall 1966).<\/em><\/p>\n

PS 24 June 2012: <\/strong>More moving commentary<\/a> in memoriam at the Film Comment<\/em> site.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

La R\u00e8gle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939). DB here: The death of Andrew Sarris last week isn\u2019t just a saddening moment for those of us who admire exhilarating film criticism. It also reminds us how much American culture can owe to a single person. Everyone who writes about Sarris writes about how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74,12,5,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-criticism","category-film-history","category-film-technique","category-people-we-like"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18488"}],"version-history":[{"count":71,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18580,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18488\/revisions\/18580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}