Andrew Sarris

Film critic Andrew Sarris rose to prominence during his long tenure with The Village Voice as America's leading proponent of the auteur theory of film analysis. Inspired by the ideas expressed in Francois Truffaut's landmark 1954 essay "Une Certaine tendance du cinema francais," he introduced to American readers the notion that film, ideally, was a medium of personal expression for the director, who deserved recognition as an "auteur" in his 1962 essay called "Notes on the Auteur Theory." Sarris' best known book, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (1968), expanded his "notes" to full-fledged theory. As the decades passed, Sarris and his theory remained relevant to generations of new writers and filmmakers. Throughout it all, Sarris was among the key figures in American film criticism, and his collected body of work wielded considerable influence on film studies, as well as Hollywood's concept of the director's role in the conception of a film.