Andrew Sarris
I just read this appreciation of film critic and champion of the "auteur theory" Andrew Sarris in Film Comment. I only had a chance to read him a little in the 80s, when he still wrote for the Village Voice. (He now writes film reviews for The Observer.) But some consider him to be the most important American critic -- at least on a par with Pauline Kael, with whom he had an ongoing feud over the AT. From the Film Comment piece:
| It's one of the odd quirks of history that, at least at this moment in
time, the name of Pauline Kael has to come up if you're discussing
Andrew Sarris. They go together like Petruchio and Kate, Zeus and Hera,
Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King. Despite the fact that they shared
certain predilections and preferences (for Godard in the Sixties,
Altman in the Seventies, and The Earrings of Madame de...
now and forever), they never stopped battling after 1963, when Kael
tossed a grenade into the auteurist cell with the lively but ridiculous
"Circles and Squares," and right up to Sarris's deflating goodbye to
his old nemesis in The Observer. "Not that I have any desire to
continue playing good old Charlie Brown to Miss K's Lucy," wrote Sarris
in 1970, "but I can't really discern any overriding moral issue
involved in the conflicting tastes of two movie reviewers." Perhaps
not, but just as Godard recognized the tracking shot as a moral affair,
so one might say the same of a critic's stance toward the art form
they're contemplating. And while Kael in death is just as popular as
she was when alive, if not more so, I think it's Sarris who has had the
more positive and lasting effect on the way we look at movies. Sarris met every challenge head-on, and Kael sidestepped them all - Resnais, Malick, Fassbinder, late Bresson, late Dreyer, post-Dr. Strangelove Kubrick, post-Last Waltz Scorsese, Shoah, and, last but not least, the classical American cinema that was getting such a spirited revision from both sides of the Atlantic during her ascendancy. Moreover, she made a practice of encouraging her readers to sidestep right along with her, and provided them with a series of snappy alibis that jangled in the brain like hook-laden Top 40 tunes - Hiroshima, mon amour was "an elaborate masochistic fantasy for intellectuals"; Barry Lyndon "says that people are disgusting but things are lovely"; The Merchant of Four Seasons is "an art thing, all right, but perhaps not a work of art." Of course you can't "get drunk on" the aforementioned films and filmmakers. You can fall in love with them (believe it or not, some of us have fallen in love with Barry Lyndon and The Merchant of Four Seasons, and I'm pretty sure we weren't duped or intimidated into it), but it's a very different kind of love from what you might feel for The Godfather or Dressed to Kill. Where Sarris often shared Kael's ambivalence over art cinema, he almost always tried to come to terms with it - for him, the uncrossable line of viewer tolerance that Kael watched like a hawk was nonexistent. As long as filmmakers didn't lose their nerve or cop out, Sarris reckoned that the ideal, sympathetic viewer owed them their best. One could say that for Kael the artist is guilty until proven innocent, while for Sarris he/she is innocent until proven guilty. "I suppose... I am a revisionist in the most restless sense of constantly revising myself," Sarris wrote in the introduction to Politics and Cinema. "Consequently, every movie I have ever seen keeps swirling and shifting in ever changing contexts." This openhearted stance before the wonder of cinema, the polar opposite of Kael's famous one-viewing/one-judgment credo, is crystallized for me in Sarris's return visits to Kubrick. "It's not that I have seen the light," he wrote in 1975, "but that I have come to appreciate Kubrick's particular form of darkness." But he had started with 2001, which prompted a little-remarked report on a second re-viewing of a film he had vilified in The American Cinema ("The ending·qualifies in its oblique obscurity as Instant Ingmar"). It was two years later when he took this "enhanced" look, resulting in one of the most charming passages in all of American film criticism. "I must report that I recently paid another visit to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 while under the influence of a smoked substance that I was assured by my contact was somewhat stronger and more authentic than oregano on a King Sano [cigarette brand] base. (For myself, I must confess that I soar infinitely higher on vermouth cassis, but enough of this generation gap.) Anyway, I prepared to watch 2001 under what I have always been assured were optimum conditions, and surprisingly (for me) I find myself reversing my original opinion. 2001 is indeed a major work by a major artist." I'm not sure what I love most about this passage - the fact that it's impossible to imagine anyone else writing it (in 1970! in The Village Voice!!), its complete lack of guile, or its corresponding lack of self-consciousness. And then, a few sentences later, a kind of peak is reached: "I don't think that 2001 is exclusively or even especially a head movie (and I now speak with the halting voice of authority)." |
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