Obituary: Andrew Sarris (1928–2012)

Abstract

A ndrew Sarris, a member of Film History’s Editorial Advisory Board since our first issue in 1987, passed away on 20 June 2012 from complications of an infection following a fall. A tribute from his students at Columbia University, where he taught for over forty years, can be found at http://earthwize.org/wordpress/directortalk/ where links to tributes from David Bordwell, Richard Corliss, Kent Jones, Armond White and Film Comment magazine can also be found. Like many other cinephiles of my generation, I read Andy’s columns in the Village Voice (where he wrote from 1960–1989) while a student in high school, and was tremendously influenced by them. Andy’s columns and books – not just the seminal The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (1968) but its predecessor, the groundbreaking American Directors issue of Film Culture (No. 28, 1963), as well as his exquisite Museum of Modern Art monograph on the films of Josef von Sternberg (1966) – functioned as my film school. We all used the American Cinema book as a map of the terrain of American cinema, tracking down the films mentioned in it at film society screenings, commercial retrospectives (the New Yorker was preferable to the Thalia, but let us never forget the Bleecker Street Cinema, the Elgin, and even the Carnegie Hall Cinema), and museums (MoMA and the New York Cultural Center at the Huntington Hartford museum). My education continued as I earned my cinespurs writing film reviews for The Village Voice under Andy’s nurturing wing (those of you who knew him will laugh at the cliched nature of my prose here). Believe it or not, he published my first piece of real criticism – “Griffith: Not only Great but Good,” making the trendy Voice one of the last papers to finally review Orphans of the Storm (1922). My Ph.D. came when I became his colleague at Columbia and we shared an office for eight years. Between bites into an egg salad sandwich and glances at the New York Post, Andy took my education into hand. But my best conversations with him came at dissertation defenses. (Students had learned they could eat up time in the defense by getting Andy and me into discussion with one another, thus dodging difficult questions addressed to them.) Marathon, all-day department meetings revealed the keen political strategist and master rhetorician (Andy was Greek after all) as Andy fought for the interests of history, theory and criticism against the onslaught of screenwriting and production. Those battles are surely the Film History, Volume 24, pp. 357–358, 2012. Copyright © 2012 Indiana University Press ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America