Andrew Sarris, 1928-2012

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• David Ehrenstein says:

  June 20, 2012 at 1:46 pm

  Very deeply saddened. A mar­velous film crit­ic and a very nice man.

• Robert says:

  June 20, 2012 at 2:00 pm

  There were crit­ics who got more atten­tion (Kael, Ebert, Farber) but none really had Sarris’ influ­ence when it came to chan­ging how American audi­ences thought about movies.

• lipranzer says:

  June 20, 2012 at 2:14 pm

  I have to admit I was more inclined towards Kael than Sarris, but there’s no deny­ing he was, in addi­tion to everything else, a very good writer.

• bstrong says:

  June 20, 2012 at 2:43 pm

  What Mr. Ehrenstein said. He was as intel­li­gent and approach­able in per­son as he was in prose.

• Hawksian says:

  June 20, 2012 at 3:35 pm

  I received a call from a friend recently telling me to be ready for this but it does­n’t make it any easi­er to hear.

• Bruce Reid says:

  June 20, 2012 at 5:10 pm

  The time and place I grew up, I had to read about many more films than I had the oppor­tun­ity to actu­ally see. So many of the films I fell in love with were, for years, only descrip­tions on the page, a high-contrast still or two, and the pas­sion of a writer con­vin­cing me I had to track this down some­how. Two of the great, tan­tal­iz­ing tomes I pored over were The American Cinema and Film as a Subversive Art. It’s been a hell of a year.

• Petey says:

  June 20, 2012 at 6:08 pm

  Petey’s Auteur Theory:
  In 400 years, due to gaps in the his­tor­ic­al record, a robust debate will have broken out about who REALLY dir­ec­ted Hitchcock’s movies.
  While the major­ity of schol­ar­ship will insist that Hitchcock indeed was the dir­ect­or, a minor­ity will dis­sent that a hammy act­or like Hitchcock, (many of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV shows will have sur­vived), not to men­tion the son of a green­gro­cer, could not have actu­ally been respons­ible for the great films.
  Among the dis­sent­ers, the two main fac­tions will divide between those who believe that Jean-Luc Godard was the REAL dir­ect­or, and those who believe it was Andrew Sarris.

• Chris L. says:

  June 20, 2012 at 6:20 pm

  A sin­gu­lar voice of wis­dom, dig­nity and good humor. Sorely to be missed.
  From what a dis­tant out­sider could glean, the “great rivalry” always seemed a bit one-sided in Sarris’ favor. But one would have had to be there to appre­ci­ate fully. At times like this, I wish I had been.

• David Ehrenstein says:

  June 20, 2012 at 7:22 pm

  What was one-sided about it was the fact that Pauline would­n’t admit to being an auteur­ist her­self. She just liked dif­fer­ent auteurs: Huston instead of Hawks and Brian DePalma instead of almost everyone.

• Pete Segall says:

  June 21, 2012 at 8:10 am

  All I’d like to add is that in the brief and very lim­ited capa­city that I knew him in a pro­fes­sion­al set­ting 12 or 13 years ago, he was unfail­ingly kind and warm. It did not take him long to con­vey a sense of caring – and this was a set­ting where it cer­tainly was­n’t neces­sary on his part to do so.