Andrew Sarris

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Andrew Sarris (born October 31, 1928 in New York City , † June 20, 2012 there ) 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 . It was there in the winter of 1954 that he met Jonas Mekas , who was just starting the Film Culture magazine . Sarris worked as an editor for this film magazine without pay and was able to publish the first film reviews there in 1955. From 1955 to 1965 Sarris worked as a story consultant for 20th Century Fox ; the activity essentially comprised reading and evaluating scripts. In 1960 he asked Jonas Mekas, who meanwhile wrote a regular film column for the Village Voice , to replace him there temporarily. Sarris' first film review for the Village Voice (for Hitchcock's Psycho ) appeared on August 11, 1960. After a stay in France beginning in 1961, he returned to New York in late 1962 and now received his own weekly column in the Village Voice , parallel to the from Mekas. The collaboration with the magazine only ended in the late 1980s.

During his time in France, Sarris had become a supporter of the auteur theory developed in the 1950s by André Bazin , François Truffaut and other critics of the Cahiers du cinéma , which he now popularized in the USA through his columns. It was only through Sarris that the director moved into the American discourse (for example Alfred Hitchcock , who was admired by the French , but also other "auteurs" such as Samuel Fuller , Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk , who were previously considered directors of ready-made goods or B-movies ) Focus on film viewing.

In his work The American Cinema in the 1960s, he listed what he believed to be the 14 greatest film directors who had worked in the United States to date. He took Charlie Chaplin , Robert J. Flaherty , John Ford , DW Griffith , Howard Hawks , Alfred Hitchcock , Buster Keaton , Fritz Lang , Ernst Lubitsch , Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau , Max Ophüls , Jean Renoir and Josef into his so-called “ pantheon ” of directors von Sternberg and Orson Welles . He saw other celebrated directors such as Billy Wilder , David Lean or Stanley Kubrick , however, only in the second tier, where he later upgraded Wilder's status and added him to his "pantheon". Such perspectives, which were very much focused on the person of the director and on the downgrading and upgrading, also drew sharp criticism, as in 1963 by the New York film critic Pauline Kael in her essay Circles and Squares . This resulted in a well-groomed and much-noticed archenemy between Kael and Sarris.

From 1965 to 1967, Sarris was editor-in-chief of the English edition of the Cahiers du cinéma . In 1966 he founded (together 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 scholarship ; at the same time he was writing two scripts ( Justine , filmed by George Cukor in 1969 , and Jules Dassin's Promise at Dawn , 1970). Also in 1968, Sarris published his most influential book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968 , in which he performed, among other things, his “Pantheon” of the 14 most important directors in American cinema. Since 1969, Sarris has taught as an associate professor of film theory at Columbia University.

Sarris suffered a serious illness in the mid-1980s and only wrote sporadically for the Village Voice after that . In 1989 he stopped working because of political differences. He then wrote film reviews for the New York Observer until June 2009 .

Sarris was married to the feminist film theorist Molly Haskell (* 1939) since 1969 . The two last lived 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 Ain't Heard Nothing Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927-1949 . Oxford University Press, New York 1999, ISBN 0-19-503883-5 .

literature

  • Emanuel Levy (Ed.): Citizen Sarris: American Film Critic - Essays in Honor of Andrew Sarris . The Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2001, ISBN 0-8108-3891-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andrew Sarris, Influential Film Critic, Dies at 83
  2. ↑ a b Keith Uhlich: You're Not Supposed To Be Full Of Yourself: A Conversation With Andrew Sarris (May 2001)
  3. ↑ First in his article The Director's Game (In: Film Culture No. 22-23, Summer 1961) and two years later in his most influential essay Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962 (In: Film Culture No. 27, Winter 1962/63 ).
  4. ↑ Andrew Sarris You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory 1927–1949, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 324–334.
  5. ^ Pauline Kael: Circles and Squares . In: Film Quarterly , Vol. 16, No. 3 (Spring 1963), pp. 12-26.
  6. ↑ http://www.nyfcc.com/membership/andrew-sarris/
  7. ^ Foundation Program Areas ( Memento from May 16, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ On the effect cf. Why Americans are Ignorant About Film History ( Memento from May 7, 2006 on the Internet Archive ) .
  9. ↑ The division of American directors into Pantheon Directors , Second Line , Third Line , etc. was first made by Sarris in 1963 in his article The American Cinema (In: Film Culture No. 28, Spring 1963).
  10. ↑ This “pantheon” of the Hollywood “auteurs” included in Sarris (1968) Charles Chaplin , Robert J. Flaherty , John Ford , DW Griffith , Howard Hawks , Alfred Hitchcock , Buster Keaton , Fritz Lang , Ernst Lubitsch , Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau , Max Ophüls , Jean Renoir , Josef von Sternberg and Orson Welles . Another 41 directors, including Frank Capra , Joseph Losey , Vincente Minnelli , Don Siegel and Douglas Sirk , sorted Sarris into the almost pantheon categories The Far Side of Paradise and Expressive Esoterica . In contrast, directors such as John Huston , Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder were relegated to lower ranks . See the list in extracts at http://www.theyshootpictures.com/sarriscategories.htm
  11. ↑ http://www.filmwell.org/2009/08/11/in-memory-of-andrew-sarriss-new-york-observer-reviews/

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Sarris, Andrew
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American film critic and writer
DATE OF BIRTH October 31, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH June 20, 2012
Place of death New York City