“In cinema, as in all art, only those who risk the ridiculous have a real shot at the sublime.”

Andrew Sarris’ The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 is ground zero for the aspiring auteur theorist. Since its release its ideas have been adopted and criticized in equal measure, functioning as a roadmap for budding cinephiles anxious to explore the rich history of American movies, and a whipping post for those who find its assertions misguided, offensive, and dismissive.

The book comprises an incisive essay Sarris wrote for the Spring 1963 issue of Film Culture (titled “Toward a Theory of Film History”) that provides a framework for auteur theory, followed by analyses of around two hundred directors’ filmographies in which that framework is applied. The copy that’s in circulation today tacks on an afterword written in 1977.

In the opening piece, Sarris imports the critical writings of the Cahiers du Cinéma crew from France and configures their ideas into a cogent proposition, elevating the film director as the primary creative force behind the motion picture. Credit must be shared amongst the cast and crew, of course, and Sarris does not deny this. “Cinema could not be a completely personal art under even the best of conditions,” he admits. “The purity of personal expression is a myth of the textbooks.” Similarly, he acknowledges the limits of creative control afforded by the studio’s strict oversight. He says, “To look at a film as the expression of a director’s vision is not to credit the director with total creativity. All directors, and not just in Hollywood, are imprisoned by the conditions of their craft and their culture.”

In any case, he is not discounting the contributions of others so much as he is ascribing primacy to the vision and passion of the director. To Sarris, the director should be viewed in the same light as the sculptor, the painter, the writer, the composer, the poet. In other words, he’s the personality who most clearly controls the film.¹ His essay, then, suggests less a shift in emphasis than a revolution in the way the viewer approaches the medium altogether, recasting the director as an artist where before he’d been a mere craftsman, positing the film as a personal expression where before it had been coarse entertainment. In turn, the viewer becomes a connoisseur, because auteur theory turns a filmmaker’s career into an object worthy of careful study. As Sarris says, “A film historian must double as a drudge.”

What Sarris seems to desire more than anything is not to deify his favorite filmmakers, but for audiences to develop taste, to become discerning, to move on from assessing only plot elements and recognize the distinct visual dialects employed by individual filmmakers, to see artistic intention instead of just throwaway entertainment. At the time of Sarris’ initial essay, Hollywood films were perceived as mainstream dross when set against the artsier fare of Europe, Japan, and elsewhere. His enthusiasm leaps off the page as he introduces the hidden-in-plain-sight treasure trove of old American films, shouting from the rooftops (or at least the pages of Film Culture) that contrary to popular perception, Hollywood cinema can boast of artful high caliber filmmakers even amidst the pressures of the rigid studio system.

The second part of the book delves into the filmographies of specific directors, which Sarris contentiously divides into cheekily-named tiers, beginning with his Pantheon Directors and moving through The Far Side of Paradise, Expressive Esoterica, Fringe Benefits, and several other categories. There are a few problems here, chiefly that Sarris often falls short of his own lofty standards by using only a short paragraph to summarily criticize the life’s work of a filmmaker he doesn’t quite jibe with, and sometimes tries to lump all of his thoughts on a director into a single sentence and fails to convey anything meaningful. Elsewhere he gets hung up with the categorizing, frequently failing to provide sufficient reason within his short career assessments to make sense of a director’s placement in the hierarchy. For instance, he puts Robert Flaherty among his Pantheon alongside the likes of Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, and Welles (who all receive splendid entries), but his evaluation does not seem to indicate that the writer held him in especially high regard. Conversely, he writes a glowing piece on George Cukor but places him in The Far Side of Paradise. There’s also the fact that basically an entire category is devoted to non-American directors who made few if any American films.

Setting aside the bewildering system of categorization, numerous of the individual appraisals are enlightening, and reading an especially compelling one makes the reader want to seek out films by directors they’ve perhaps never encountered before (for myself, that includes Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, and Fred Zinnemann, among many others). Perhaps most importantly, for someone who works a full time job and has family responsibilities (or who wants to take in films post-1968 or from other countries)—and thus lacks the bandwidth to watch every film by Griffith or Chaplin or whomever—Sarris highlights the “must-see” films from each director he analyzes, his recommendations “intended as guides for the film enthusiast who lacks the lifetime in the darkness to check out every possibility of personal expression in cinema.”

Having been cinematically formed in a post-Sarris environment (he passed away the year I graduated high school and I didn’t learn the word “auteur” until college), many of his polemical stabs at the field of film criticism seem obvious to me because they’re commonplace, but that’s only because the teachers I learned from had inherited his viewpoints long ago. To wit, one of the best courses I had the pleasure of taking in college was a semester-length study of Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter Sofia Coppola as auteurs; I’m not sure if Sarris’ name ever came up. If The American Cinema is the bible of auteur studies, then it has suffered the same fate as the Christian bible: it has informed the culture to such a degree that even those who ostensibly disagree with its ideas cannot shake off its influence.

1. There are exceptions to the rule, of course. Sarris never denies the importance of cinematographers, screenwriters, editors, or actors, nor does he suggest that they cannot leave their own personal fingerprints on their films. In fact, despite his romantic tone when discussing his favorites, he states quite openly that his “theory” is not a one size fits all proposition (which technically disproves it as a theory, I think, but whatever) and that most of the filmmakers discussed in the book do not approach the realm of genius. Many don’t even deserve the status of “auteur.” “Not all directors are auteurs,” he says. “Indeed, most directors are virtually anonymous. Nor are all auteurs necessarily directors.” Further, he cites examples where non-directors leave a greater personal stamp on a film than the director, and others where a director’s personal touch ultimately detracts from the individual film even while distinguishing it.