The American Cinemais theCitizen Kaneof film criticism, a brilliant book that elevated American directors from craftsmen to artists, launched the careers of numerous film critics, and shaped the aesthetics of a whole generation of viewers by providing new ways of looking at movies. --Emanuel Levy, author ofGeorge Cukor, Master of Elegance
The auteur theory, of which film critic Andrew Sarris was the leading American proponent, holds that artistry in cinema can be largely attributed to film directors, who, while often working against the strictures of studios, producers, and scriptwriters, manage to infuse each film in their oeuvre with their personal style. Sarris'sThe American Cinema, the bible of auteur studies, is a history of American film in the form of a lively guide to the work of two hundred film directors, from Griffith, Chaplin, and von Sternberg to Mike Nichols, Stanley Kubrick, and Jerry Lewis. In addition, the book includes a chronology of the most important American films, an alphabetical list of over 6000 films with their directors and years of release, and the seminal essays Toward a Theory of Film History and The Auteur Theory Revisited. Over twenty-five years after its initial publication,The American Cinemaremains perhaps the most influential book ever written on the subject.
Andrew Sarrisis film critic for the
New York Observerand professor of cinema at Columbia University. He is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle. Mr. Sarris has been the film critic for the
Village Voice,editor-in-chief of
Cahiers du Cinema in English,and an associate editor of
Film Culture.He is the author of
The Films of Josef von Sternberg, Interviews with Film Directors, The Film, Confessions of a Cultist, The Primal Screen, The John Ford Movie Mystery,and
Politics and Cinema.
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