Andrew Sarris Quotes

Andrew Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York. He was an American film critic, a leading proponent of the auteur theory of criticism. 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. Sarris wrote the highly influential book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968, an opinionated assessment of films of the sound era, organized by director. In The American Cinema, Sarris lists what he termed the "pantheon" of the 14 greatest film directors who had worked in the United States. He continued to write film criticism regularly until 2009 for The New York Observer, and was a professor of film at Columbia University, teaching courses in international film history, American cinema, and Alfred Hitchcock until his retirement in 2011.