Portrait of Andrew Sarris

For some of us, Andrew Sarris is a founding father. The founding that he did was in the area of film criticism; his 1968 book The American Cinema is, as Amazon puts it, the manifesto of the auteur theory. Agree with him or disagree with him, his influence on film studies is undeniable. The article in the NY Times brings us up to date on this grand old man of letters.

NYT: Mr. Sarris cut a curious figure at the congenitally contentious Village Voice of the early 1960s. He had passed a year in Paris, he said, drinking coffee with New Wave directors and later would edit an English-language edition of Cahiers du Cinéma. But back in New York he lived with his Greek monarchist mother in Queens and went to “Gone With the Wind” four dozen times, as besotted with Vivien Leigh on the 48th viewing as the first. More...