Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris ( born October 31, 1928 in New York City; † June 20, 2012 ) was an American film critic.

Life

Born in Brooklyn in 1928 Sarris grew up in Queens. He studied until 1959 at the Teachers College of Columbia University. There he got to know in the winter of 1954, Jonas Mekas, who just founded the journal Film Culture. For this film magazine Sarris worked unpaid as editor and was able to publish in 1955 the first movie reviews there. From 1955 to 1965 worked as a story consultant Sarris for 20th Century Fox; activity mainly involved the reading and evaluating scripts. 1960 asked him Jonas Mekas, who is now a regular film column for The Village Voice wrote, to represent him there temporarily. Sarris ' first film criticism for the Village Voice ( to Hitchcock's Psycho) was published on 11 August 1960. According to a 1961 beginning of the stay in France, he returned in late 1962 returned to New York and now got its own weekly column in the Village Voice, parallel to the Mekas. The collaboration with the magazine ended only in the late 1980s.

Through his time in France Sarris was a supporter of the auteur theory developed in the 1950s by André Bazin, François Truffaut and other critics of Cahiers du cinéma become that he is now popularized through his columns in the United States. Only by Sarris also moved in the American discourse of the Director ( by way of example the revered by the French Alfred Hitchcock, but also other " auteurs " like Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk, which were previously regarded as directors of ready-made clothing or B-movies ) in the center of the film viewing; However, this view also drew sharp criticism, so in 1963 by the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael in her essay Circles and Squares. This results in a well maintained and highly regarded arch-enemies between Kael and Sarris developed.

From 1965 to 1967 Sarris was the chief editor of the English edition of Cahiers du cinéma. In 1966 he founded (along with other New York film critics such as Hollis Alpert, Pauline Kael and Richard Schickel ), the National Society of Film Critics. In 1968 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship; at the same time he wrote two screenplays with ( Justine, 1969 filmed by George Cukor, and Jules Dassin's Promise at Dawn, 1970). Also published in 1968 Sarris his most influential book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, in which he stated, inter alia his " Pantheon " of the 14 most important film directors of American cinema. Since 1969, Sarris taught as associate professor of film theory at Columbia University.

Mid-1980s, suffered a serious illness Sarris and then wrote only sporadically for the Village Voice. In 1989, he stopped cooperating one because of political differences. He then wrote to June 2009 film reviews for the New York Observer.

Sarris was married since 1969 with the feminist film theorist Molly Haskell ( born 1939 ). The two lived most recently in New York's Upper East Side.

Works

• The Films of Josef von Sternberg. Museum of Modern Art, New York 1966.
• Interviews with film directors.. Bobbs- Merrill, Indianapolis, 1968 ( Republished under the title: Hollywood Voices: interviews with film directors Bobbs- Merrill, Indianapolis, 1972. . )
• The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1925-1968. Dutton, New York 1968.
• Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema, 1955-1969. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1970, ISBN 0-671-20554-4.
• The Primal Screen: Essays on Film and Related Subjects. Simon & Schuster, New York 1973, ISBN 0-671-21341-5.
• The John Ford Movie Mystery. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1975, ISBN 0-253-33167-6.
• Politics and Cinema. Columbia University Press, New York 1978, ISBN 0-231-04034-2.
• The St. James Film Director 's Encyclopedia. Visible Ink Press, Detroit, 1998, ISBN 1-57859-028-0.
• You Is not Heard Nothing Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927-1949. Oxford University Press, New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-503883-5.