THE AMERICAN CINEMA Revisited [on Andrew Sarris]

I’m saddened that Andrew Sarris (1928-2012) didn’t live longer than 83, even though he had a very rich and rewarding career as a film critic.

This book review appeared in the sixth issue of Cinema Scope (Winter 2001) and is reprinted in Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia. — J.R.

The American Cinema Revisited

Citizen Sarris, American Film Critic:
Essays in Honor of Andrew Sarris
Edited by Emanuel Levy
The Scarecrow Press, 2001

Ironically, my enemies were the first to alert me to the fact that I had followers.
— Andrew Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist (1970)

One of the main emotions aroused in me by the 40 or so contributions to the millennial Festschrift Citizen Sarris is nostalgia –- specifically, a yearning for the era three or four decades ago when something that might be described as a North American film community was slowly emerging and recognizing its own existence.

This was just before academic film studies, radical politics, drugs and diverse other developments splintered that community into separate and mainly non-communicating cliques and ghettos, accompanied by an intensification of studio promotion that eventually took infotainment beyond its status as a minor industry and into an arena where advertising was coming close to defining as well as monitoring the whole of film culture, thus phasing out individual voices -– or at the very least bunching them together in sound bites, pull quotes, bibliographies and adjectival ad copy. Read more