tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5550868480663112358.post3637705825847571579..comments2024-02-25T10:27:34.057-05:00Comments on Media Funhouse: L’auteurist americain: Deceased Artiste Andrew Sarris (part two)Media Funhousehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15243301374887605164noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5550868480663112358.post-18424798659515297812012-07-07T03:08:52.636-04:002012-07-07T03:08:52.636-04:00"People have asked me if I intend to update m...<i>"People have asked me if I intend to update my categories in the American Cinema Compilations of 1963 and 1968. The answer is no. My Pantheon directors are secure. If I could go back in time I would add Leo McCarey, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. I would add a new category for dissonant, against-the-grain temperaments like John Huston, William Wellman, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah. In the polemical 1960s I underrated more directors than I overrated.... Another new category if I could go back in time: The Objet d'Art Directors: William Wyler, Carol Reed, Rouben Mamoulian, Jack Clayton, Rene Clair, Rene Clement, David Lean."</i><br /><br />- Andrew Sarris, "Notes of An Accidental Auterist" (Film History, Winter 1995)<br /><br />This brief essay with its notebook-like reflections on auteurism, Kael, his favorite foreign films, the writers his criticism was most indebted to, and various charming asides ("I prefer Michael Powell's <i>The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp</i> to Orson Welles's <i>Citizen Kane</i>. I prefer Welles's <i>The Magnificent Ambersons</i> to <i>Kane</i>. Why? The respective treatments of women.") should be the preface for <b>all</b> future editions of <i>The American Cinema</i>. <br /><br />It's also worth noting (not mentioned in your otherwise marvelous memorial posts) that Sarris did, in a sense, revisit <i>The American Cinema</i>, by way of the volume <i>You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet</i> published in 1998. That is where readers can turn, for instance, for his mea culpa on Billy Wilder, but also for expanded thoughts and reconsiderations of several directors (pre-1950). Here, too, he included entries on meaningful actors and actresses, studios, and genres. Plus appendices full of several new lists.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15251334972768788129noreply@blogger.com