The purpose of any truly great film critic is to enlighten as well as enrage, and Andrew Sarris, who died two weeks back at 83, did a hell of a lot of both in his half-century of writing about cinema. Sarris will forever be enshrined as the critic who brought la politique des auteurs to America, but at his best he also had a way of deftly summing up a filmmaker’s entire body of work in a few sentences — their themes, their visual style, and their narratives.Critics who argue that technique should not call attention to itself are usually critics who not do wish to call attention to technique. —The American Cinema, p. 54
He is someone
that all American film fans should know about, but since he was a writer first
and foremost and not a TV presence (no “thumbs up” for him) and championed film
as an art (no exaltation of the grindhouse, as with Tarantino), he is currently
best known by students who are assigned his work, critics who still admire his
fine writing, and those of us who are old enough to remember when reading
contemporary film reviews was an integral part of the moviegoing experience.
When a recent
biography and collection of Pauline Kael’s work were published in tandem, a few
“theme pieces” were written to nostalgize about the Sixties and Seventies, when
reading film reviewers (and film books!) was what movie buffs did in the hours
they were not in movie theaters (no VCRs!). Kael and Sarris have often been
linked together in articles of this kind, since they were the yin and yang of
American film criticism during that period, most importantly because of their
antithetical viewpoints about the auteur theory.
Kael was a
top-notch writer, don’t get me wrong — I loved reading her collections when
younger. But it was the strength of her writing that made all the difference. I
still find it hard to see any kind of sustained viewpoint behind what she liked
and didn’t like. Later in his career, Sarris developed into an idiosyncratic
critic whose reaction to a particular film was hard to gauge (sometimes even
after reading what he had written about it); Kael was always like that, with a
few modest exceptions.
Admittedly,
Sarris kept that “feud” with Kael alive for a while — she had fired the first
salvo with her derisive 1963 Film Quarterly article “Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris”;
Sarris’ obits carried a bitchy remark she made when declining an invite to his
wedding to critic Molly Haskell. But I remember AS making more remarks about PK
than vice versa.
Speaking of his
fellow critics, it was interesting to see in an online bio that rock critic
emeritus Robert Christgau said Sarris seemed “full of himself.” This struck me as odd, because Christgau’s letter-graded method of rating albums (which
is now copied *everywhere*, most particularly Entertainment
Weekly) was definitely a variation on his old Village
Voice colleague Sarris’s much-debated/love-and-hated notion of
assembling Hollywood filmmakers in a pyramid fashion, with a “Pantheon” at top
and “Less Than Meets the Eye” auteurs at the bottom.
He first wrote
about the “politique” in a 1962 essay in the magazine Film
Culture called “Notes on the Auteur Theory” (echoing Truffaut’s “Une
Certain Tendance du Cinema Francais”). According to his obits, Sarris spent a
year in Paris in 1961 and became friendly with, among others, the
critic-filmmakers who wrote for the Cahiers du Cinema. It was no
surprise, then, that he was the American reviewer who imported the auteur
theory.
I’m assuming
anyone reading this blog knows the theory by heart — that the director is in a
sense the “author” of a film, and that most filmmakers with any talent rework
the same themes, characters, and narrative approaches the way that a great
novelist does. In order to write this blog entry, I reread most of Sarris’s
seminal 1968 book The American Cinema, which introduced the
full range of his categorizing of American filmmakers.
I have very fond
memories of the book. A dog-eared copy (which I still own and refer to) was
given to me by my high school film teacher John Loose — who didn’t instigate my
love of movies (my parents did that), but who was infinitely important in
showing me how to look at films intelligently. The book became a key item on my
movie-book shelf, along with Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s
Companion (does anyone remember that tome?), the Movies on
TV collection (which I later contributed to and edited for an
edition), and various Films of-type pop paperback
collections and profiles of individual personalities and genres.
Another Sarris
volume that was important to me, which I borrowed from the library twice, was
Interviews with Film Directors, which was one of the few
other books Sarris came out with in his lifetime. That
tome contained a few dozen fascinating talks with the directors I was
discovering as a young film maniac and is rarely found in bookstores these days.
(I in fact never have seen a copy sitting around in all my years of going to
secondhand bookshops, but am sure some helpful soul has probably scanned it
into the big portable library we call the Internet.)
But back to
The American Cinema: I consulted it all through my college
years as a seminal source of knowledge and information, as well as opinions
that made me think “is he outta his fucking mind?” The book nonetheless struck
me the way that Breathless and Mean
Streets did: as a work that screamed to the rafters, “I LOVE MOVIES!”
In the first flush of my film-fixation, that was manna from heaven.
So how does it
stand up these days? Very well, because Sarris supplies in the preface, “Toward
a Theory of Film History,” all the reasons that the auteur theory is an
important and necessary tool for studying film, but he also elaborates at some
length the ways in which it *doesn’t* work in various cases —thereby defeating
the Kael-ist naysayers in one fell swoop.
The
American Cinema was Sarris’ American version of the 1965 Georges
Sadoul book Dictionnaire des cineastes, with his own
addition, the aforementioned categories of directors (some of which had titles
such as “Lightly Likeable” that were obviously intended to piss people off in
the way that Christgau’s “grades” did). In the intro he addresses that seminal
twentieth-century question: can a commercial work be a work of art?
The auteur theory
said yes, that a director working for a cold-blooded, money-driven corporation
could still make a personal work that mattered in the grand scheme of things.
Sarris’ own twist on the theory was to create the categories and to encourage
debate and argument (thus his long career in academia).
The American
Cinema is a very odd sort of time-capsule, assembled by Sarris in
1968 just as the studio system was imploding entirely (thanks to the failures
of big, awful musicals and the appearance of Easy Rider and
the golden age of “maverick” American cinema — a period that Sarris wrote about
on a weekly basis in the pages of the Voice). At points, he
goes straight for the nearest play on words, as when he notes about Cassavetes
that “too much of the time he is groping when he should be gripping.”
Those lines are
somewhat cringe-inducing, but the reason the book has remained so important was
Sarris’ ability to literally sum up a filmmaker’s career in a single line, as
well to situate his visual style within certain traditions, be they that of
Murnau and the moving camera, or Eisenstein and the miracle of montage. (I say
“his” by the way, because his entry on Ida Lupino is one-stop-shop collection
of sentences about every woman director he could think of to that date — except
the avant-gardists, whom he never wanted to acknowledge.)
Beautiful
examples of Sarris at his most incisive appear in the chapter entitled “The
Pantheon,” where he discussed the 14 filmmakers (including the guy he's standing with in the pic above) he thought were the finest-ever
to work in the American cinema (two of whom, Renoir and Ophuls, only made a
handful of films over here) and in his “Far Side of Paradise” chapter (where the
also-rans dwell).
There, in his
entry on Nicholas Ray, he contrasts the approaches of Ray and John Huston by
noting that, if one compared They Live By Night and
The Asphalt Jungle, “one will notice that where Ray tends to
cut between physical movements, Huston tends to cut between static
compositions. Ray’s style tends to be more kinetic, Huston’s more plastic, the
difference between dance and sculpture.”
In this sense
Sarris carried on from James Agee, Manny Farber, and Otis Ferguson, the
American film critics who would mingle theory and purely emotional statements
about the films they loved (the same is true of Godard, Truffaut, and the Cahiers
posse, of course). Along these lines, Sarris drops into his chapter on Keaton
the fact that a scene in The General, where Buster makes a
gesture to choke his girlfriend but then kisses her instead, is “one of the
most glorious celebrations of heterosexual love in the history of the cinema,”
This is perhaps
Sarris greatest strength as a critic — his emotional connection to the films he
wrote about; the underside is the fact that he openly admitted here that he had
no emotional connection to animation, documentaries, and the avant-garde. At
one point in the book he pretty much cancels out the possible influence of the
avant-garde on the mainstream, which means he wasn’t partaking of the
then-gestating psychedelic cinema of the Sixties, which drew heavily on the
avant-garde. He also couldn’t take into account the profound effect that
Kenneth Anger and other undergrounders’ pop-saturated short films would have on
future generations of music-videomakers.
The
American Cinema is indeed a mixed bag of brilliant insight and
sometimes blind devotion to, or misguided dislike of, certain filmmakers. The
oddest thing about the book, which I’ll discuss below, is that he chose to
never update or revise it. The filmographies were updated a bit (the single
best inclusion being the addition of Napoleon to Stanley
Kubrick’s filmo), but the entries were never rewritten by him in the forty-plus
years since the book’s publication.
In later years,
he publicly admitted he had gotten Billy Wilder (whom he put in the “Less Than
Meets the Eye” category) horribly wrong. The Wilder entry in the book portrays
him as a filmmaker who was too cynical for his own good; Sarris seems
particularly irritated by the ways in which he saw Wilder forcing beautiful actresses
to act out unpleasant suicide scenarios.
He even discounts with a single phrase
Double Indemnity, which is, was, and forever will be, one of
the finest film noirs ever made. He was a big enough man to admit that he was
dreadfully wrong on the issue of Wilder, but never revisited his book to
elevate Billy to “the Pantheon.” (His feelings about Kubrick similarly
flipflopped, most notoriously when he finally 2001 when
high, and realized it was a far better film than he’d thought it was previously.)
Sarris’ views on
comedy were indeed both wonderfully on-target and then hopelessly misguided. In
the latter category was his devotion to Blake Edwards, whom he praises to the
heavens (and kept on praising throughout the Eighties in his Voice
columns), while slamming Wilder, Tashlin, and Quine, whom time has proven were
far better and much more interesting comedy filmmakers. (Blake Edwards had his
moments, but my god, there was a preponderance of absolute tedious garbage,
even in the “golden era” — his encountering Sellers was the miracle.)
On the positive
side of the ledger, though, Sarris’ oddball categorical system of evaluating filmmakers once and forever
enshrined the great movie comedians as the “auteurs” of their own movies. He
conspicuously undervalued Laurel and Hardy, but his evaluations of W.C. Fields,
Mae West, and the Marx Bros as “auteurs” of a kind wasn’t just lip service for
the cults those comics gods had in the late Sixties. It was an acknowledgment
that sometimes a dominant performer was indeed the “auteur” of his/her starring
vehicle.
Of course, given
my obsession with all things Jerry Lewis, I am still fascinated by Sarris’
entry on Jerry, which is in the form of a list of 12 reasons he doesn’t think
Jerry is a good filmmaker. It’s quite a detailed argument — whereas it’s rather
obvious that the love or hatred of Jerry (and the odd mixture of the two that
some of his modern fans have) is a personal thing that is hard to justify, no
matter how much critical acumen you possess. However, Sarris does sum it all up
in his last two sentences on Lewis:
He has never put one brilliant comedy together from fade-in to fade-out. We can only wait and hope, but the suspicion persists that the French are confusing talent with genius.
To be continued…
