NEW YORK
Andrew Sarris, a leading movie critic during a golden age for reviewers who popularized the French reverence for directors and inspired debate about countless films and filmmakers, died Wednesday. He was 83.
Sarris died at St. Luke’s- Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan after complications developed from a stomach virus, according to his wife, film critic Molly Haskell.
Sarris was best known for his work with the Village Voice, his opinions especially vital during the 1960s and 1970s, when movies became films, or even cinema, and critics and fans argued about them the way they once might have contended over paintings or novels.
No longer was the big screen just entertainment. Thanks to film studies courses and revival houses, movies were analyzed in classrooms and in cafes. Audiences discovered such foreign directors as Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman, rediscovered older works by Howard Hawks, John Ford and others from Hollywood, and welcomed new favorites such as Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese.
Filmmakers were heroes and critics were sages, including Sarris, Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann and Manny Farber.
“Andrew Sarris was a vital figure in teaching America to respond to foreign films as well as American movies,” fellow critic David Thomson said Wednesday. “As writer, teacher, friend and husband he was an essential. History has gone.”
Sarris started with the Voice in 1960 and established himself as a major reviewer in 1962 with the essay “Notes on the Auteur Theory.” Acknowledging the influence of French critics and even previous American writers, Sarris argued for the primacy of directors and called the “ultimate glory” of movies “the tension between a director’s personality and his material.”
He not only helped write the rules, but filled in the names. He was a pioneer of the annual “Top 10” film lists that remain fixtures in the media. In 1968, he published “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929- 1968,” what Sarris described as “a collection of facts, a reminder of movies to be resurrected, of genres to be redeemed, of directors to be rediscovered.” Among his favorites: Ford, Hawks, Orson Welles and Fritz Lang. Categorized as “Less Than Meets the Eye”: John Huston, David Lean, Elia Kazan and Fred Zinnemann.
The critic himself would be criticized, especially by his enduring rival, Kael, a West Coast-based reviewer who in 1967 was hired by The New Yorker. In the 1963 essay “Circles and Squares,” Kael mocked Sarris’ ideas as vague and derivative, trivial and immature. She later wrote off the auteur theory as “an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence.”
Athough Kael herself went on to celebrate such directors as Altman and Brian De Palma, the two never reconciled and friends divided into “Sarristes” and “Paulettes.” When Kael died, in 2001, Sarris acknowledged that they “never much liked each other” and added that he found her passing less upsetting than the demise days earlier of actress Jane Greer.
“The terms of the battles he fought for the films he loved have receded into the past — the rivalry with Pauline Kael that we saw as epic at the time, the campaigns on behalf of the auteur theory,” Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern said Wednesday. “Yet Andrew’s passion for films — and for his beloved Molly — remained undiminished, despite declining health. Indeed, in recent years his film love seemed to intensify as it grew ever more inclusive.”
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