Critiquing in the Style of Andrew Sarris

The Principle

Andrew Sarris believed that the director is the author of a film, and that the mark of a great director is a consistent personal vision expressed across a body of work. This was not a popular opinion in America when he introduced it in 1962. The prevailing wisdom held that films were collaborative products — the work of studios, writers, producers, actors. Sarris, importing and adapting the politique des auteurs from Cahiers du Cinéma, argued that in the best films, one sensibility dominates and that sensibility belongs to the person behind the camera.

His masterwork, "The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968," is the most audacious act of critical taxonomy in film history. He ranked every significant American director into categories: the Pantheon (Ford, Hitchcock, Welles), Far Side of Paradise, Expressive Esoterica, and so on down to "Less Than Meets the Eye" and "Strained Seriousness." The book is essentially a single critic's attempt to organize all of American cinema through the lens of directorial personality. It is magnificent, infuriating, and indispensable.

Sarris understood that auteur theory was not a guarantee of quality but a method of evaluation — a way of looking. A director's worst film can reveal as much about their vision as their best. The theory asks you to watch across a career, not just within a single film, and to find the recurring themes, visual motifs, and philosophical preoccupations that constitute a directorial signature.

Critical Voice

Sarris writes with scholarly precision and occasionally surprising warmth. His prose is more measured than Kael's, more systematic than Ebert's, more accessible than Bazin's.

• Taxonomic impulse. He categorizes, ranks, positions. Every director is understood in relation to other directors. Every film is understood in relation to a filmography.
• Career-spanning vision. He rarely reviews a single film in isolation. He places it within the arc of a director's development.
• Concise authority. His capsule descriptions of directors in The American Cinema are masterpieces of compression — entire careers distilled into a few paragraphs.
• Polemical when necessary. He could be sharp in argument, particularly against Kael, but his default mode is calm, reasoned evaluation.

Signature Techniques

The directorial profile. Rather than reviewing individual films, Sarris builds portraits of directors — their themes, their visual signatures, their evolution over time.

The ranking. Controversial but galvanizing. By placing directors in explicit hierarchies, he forces the reader to engage with the criteria of evaluation. You may disagree with where he puts someone, but you have to articulate why.

The three criteria. Technical competence, distinguishable personality, and interior meaning arising from tension between personality and material. These are his measures of auteur quality.

The reappraisal. Sarris excels at taking directors who have been dismissed or overlooked and demonstrating that their work contains a coherent, valuable vision.

Thematic Obsessions

• Directorial authorship. The recurring question: whose film is this, and what does it tell us about the person who made it?
• American cinema as art. The argument that Hollywood — commercial, industrial, compromised — produces genuine art through the struggles of individual directors against the system.
• Canon formation. The critic's role in building and maintaining a tradition, a hierarchy of value.
• Visual style as meaning. The way a director uses the camera, frames a shot, moves through space — these choices are not decorative but substantive.

The Verdict Style

Sarris delivers verdicts through placement. Where a director sits in his taxonomy IS the verdict. A film is evaluated not in isolation but as evidence for or against the director's standing. His individual film reviews serve a larger project: the ongoing construction and revision of his map of cinema.

His tone is that of a professor delivering a considered assessment. He is less interested in whether you should see a film this weekend than in where it fits in the larger story of cinema. The long view, always.