Andrew Sarris's Reading List

"I read Agee in high school. He was deeply humanistic. He was an inspiring force for me as well as for many other critics. He was a message critic, very much concerned with what film said, and very sociologically oriented. “Before the auteurists, Hitchcock was considered trivial. Now the notion that Hitchcock’s body of work was important is not so controversial.” As someone who experienced so much success writing about topics other than film, he brought a great deal of style and a great deal of prestige to film criticism. I’ll give you an anecdote: When I was at Columbia, I applied for a creative writing course. During a personal interview with Professor F W Dupee, a legendary literary critic, I was asked what I wanted to write, and I said film criticism. He said: ‘Oh no, you don’t want to do that. We’ve already lost Jim Agee to movies. He was a good writer until Hollywood got to him.’ That was the attitude that people had. But Agee blazed a path that other great writers would follow."

"He died at a very young age – he was 37 – but he had a tremendous influence on many contemporary critics. You read him to get a different slant on film and criticism. He took movies as they were, and didn’t ask them to bear the weight of social messages. Warshow focused on the ‘immediate experience’ of the viewer – how a movie moved a man. He, in fact, preferred the term ‘movie’ to the more highfalutin ‘film’. He suggested that we should judge films based on the emotional effect they have on us. He concentrated on films that were not fashionable and directors that were not fashionable. He was a great champion of the B-picture and the action picture, movies that were dismissed by mainstream critics. He didn’t look down on films because of their genre. He had a tremendous effect on people in academe. He made people rethink films and rethink what made a great film. When you read him today, what he wrote still jumps off the page."

"Bazin was the antithesis of Russian film theorist and director Sergei Eisenstein, who posited that film didn’t become film until it was sliced up and served montage-style. Eisenstein advocated for the collision of images and conflict of classes in films. Bazin believed that films should be smooth, and needn’t be so socially weighty; he felt that films should have a realism to them. He focused on mise-en-scène, as opposed to montage. Auterism acknowledged that the director was the dominant personality in films and that films reflected a director’s vision. That was how it changed the trajectory of criticism. It was accused of ignoring every other contributor and technician involved in film – unfairly so. Auteurism helped us understand that a director’s work should be judged on its artistry rather than its subject matter. Before I became familiar with the work of Bazin, I felt that film had to be ambitious and socially conscious to be valuable. Bazin and Cahiers helped me realise that cinema was sui generis , that film didn’t have to prove its social relevance, and that film should be judged on its own terms. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But back then, bucking mainstream American criticism and showing appreciation for commercial pictures was a risky proposition. My first review (for The Village Voice) was of Psycho ; because I treated Hitchcock as a major artist, and Psycho as a masterpiece, I got a major, major amount of hate mail. Before the auteurists, Hitchcock was considered trivial. Now the notion that Hitchcock’s body of work was important is not so controversial."

"Manny Farber was the ultimate iconoclast. He pointed out the ways in which some of the most revered directors of the era, such as John Huston, were pretentious and insensitive to the medium. At times he would underrate people who were overrated. On the other hand, he brought to broader attention some directors who had previously been dismissed as insignificant, such as Samuel Fuller. Like Warshow, Farber uplifted action movies. He was a great writer. I think his reviews read better now than they did at the moment he wrote them. Farber took unpretentious films seriously, and encouraged others to do so too. He influenced not just filmgoers, but also filmmakers. He had the same kind of influence on the new directors of the 70s that Bazin had on the Nouvelle Vague of the 60s. I think the cinema of Spielberg and Scorsese was much influenced by Farber."

"This volume is a compendium of biographical profiles of just about every major figure in film. But it is really much more than a movie reference book; Thomson writes better than almost any other encyclopaedic critic. And he writes with a great deal of humour. He packs a lot into each entry in his Dictionary. Thomson is a great analyst of acting. He did the same thing with actors that Bazin did with directors: he ennobled their work and made us all see how cinema depends on them. The work of these critics is just much more nuanced than what you can find on Internet movie databases. Agee, Bazin, Faber, Warshow, and Thomson still make great reading today. They don’t just broaden our knowledge of film; they deepen it. All critics were in some sense consumer guides. There is nothing wrong with being a consumer guide. I know that the term is used in derogation. But the best writers were also the best consumer guides."