AS He Was

Andrew Sarris has died.  He was probably the most influential film critic in the English language.  He certainly influenced me.  In college I read The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, where he discussed practically every Hollywood sound director up to that point and placed him in a category--from the Pantheon (Hawks, Chaplin, Welles, Lubitsch) to The Far Side Of Paradise (just missing greatness--Capra, Minnelli, Sirk) to Less Than Meets The Eye (overrated big names--Wilder, Huston, Lean) to Lightly Likable (Hathaway, LeRoy) to a bunch of other categories.

I'm not saying he was always right.  Sarris himself changed his mind on some of the names.  But he created the categories and then filled them up.  Since then, they've always been in the back of my mind, something to compare against my own notes.  More important, and more than anyone, he imported, domesticated and popularized the auteur theory--the idea that the director is the author of the film.  It's since taken root and is the natural language, for better or worse, of almost every critic today.

The concept, in some ways, is ridiculous.  Film is the most collaborative of arts.  Some directors, especialy those who write, may be said to be the author of their work, but there have been and continue to be plenty of films where the producer, the star or the screenwriter are more central in forming the final product.  Then there's the cinematographer, the editor, the composer, etc.

There are other flaws.  Pauline Kael had a famous feud with Sarris, and noted the theory makes no sense in Hollywood, where auteurists sometimes claim it's how the director fights against the projects he's handed that demonstrates his style--as if expressing yourself despite, rather than through the script, the actors, etc., is what makes art.  The theory also fetishizes certain directors, allowing critics to find meaning where it wasn't intended, and to raise later, often slower work above earlier, often more exciting or popular work.

But so what?  We're all Sarristas now.  In fact, his influence was so great that directors are now convinced they're the authors of their films, and demand (if they can get it) complete control over everything.  They get possessory credit, too.  A movie is a Michael Bay film, not a Bruce Willis film, a Joel Silver film or a David Peoples film.

Sarris was a reliable, readable critic for decades, spending his best years at The Village Voice.  His first piece in 1960 was a ringing defense of Psycho and Hitchcock in general, at a time when the director was seen as a popular craftsman but not much more.  So from the start, Sarris was involved in controversy--with Kael, John Simon, Stanley Kauffmann and other critics eventually joining in and taking their shots--in a conversation that continues to this day.

I met Sarris a few years ago.  He came to LACMA to introduce Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around The Corner. Afterward, I went up to him and we talked a bit (maybe a minute or two) about how he'd famously changed his mind about Billy Wilder but still hadn't come around on Jerry Lewis.  He'd been a working critic for almost fifty years then, but you could see he still had that original enthusiasm.