Andrew Sarris - Life and Career

Life and Career

Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, Themis (née Katavolos) and George Andrew Sarris, and grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. After attending John Adams High School in South Ozone Park (where he overlapped with Jimmy Breslin), he graduated from Columbia University in 1951 and subsequently served for three years in the Army Signal Corps before moving to Paris for a year, where he befriended Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Upon returning to New York, Sarris began to write for Film Culture; in 1960, his first review for The Village Voice—a laudatory review of Psycho—was published. He is generally credited with popularizing the auteur theory in the United States of America and coining the term in his 1962 essay, "Notes on the Auteur Theory," which critics writing in Cahiers du Cinéma had inspired.

Sarris wrote the highly influential book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (1968), an opinionated assessment of films of the sound era, organized by director. The book was to influence many other critics and help raise awareness of the role of the film director and, in particular, of the auteur theory. In The American Cinema, Sarris lists what he termed the "pantheon" of the 14 greatest film directors who had worked in the United States. The list includes the Americans Robert Flaherty, John Ford, D. W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Buster Keaton, and Orson Welles; the Germans Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Max Ophüls, and Josef von Sternberg; the British Charles Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock; and the French Jean Renoir. He also identified second—and third—tier directors, downplaying the work of Billy Wilder, David Lean, and Stanley Kubrick, among others. In his 1998 book You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory 1927-1949, Sarris upgraded the status of Billy Wilder to pantheon level and apologized for his earlier harsh assessment in The American Cinema.

For many years, he wrote for NY Film Bulletin and The Village Voice. During this part of his career, he was often seen as a rival to Pauline Kael, who had originally attacked the auteur theory in her essay, "Circles and Squares."

His career is considered at length in For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, first with other critics discussing how he brought the auteur theory from France, and then by Sarris himself explaining how he applied that theory to his original review of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Speaking of his long-time critical feuds with Kael, Sarris says that, oddly, "We made each other. We established a dialectic."

He continued to write film criticism regularly until 2009 for The New York Observer, and was a professor of film at Columbia University (where he earned a master's degree in 1998), teaching courses in international film history, American cinema, and Alfred Hitchcock until his retirement in 2011. Sarris was a co-founder of the National Society of Film Critics. Film critics such as J. Hoberman, Kenneth Turan, Armond White, Michael Phillips, and AO Scott have cited him as an influence.

Sarris was married to fellow film critic, Molly Haskell, in 1969; they lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.