Andrew Sarris, one of the nation's most influential film critics and a champion of auteur theory, which holds that a director's voice is central to great filmmaking, died on Wednesday morning in Manhattan. He was 83.
His wife, the film critic Molly Haskell, said the cause was complications of an infection developed after a fall.
Courtly, incisive and acerbic in equal measure, Mr. Sarris came of critical age in the 1960s as the first great wave of foreign films washed ashore in the United States. From his perch at The Village Voice, and later at The New York Observer, he wrote searchingly of that glorious deluge and the directors behind it -- François Truffaut, Marcel Ophuls, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa. ...
He took his place among a handful of stylish and congenitally disputatious critics: Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, John Simon and Manny Farber. They agreed on just a single point: that film was art worthy of sustained thought and argumentation.
"We were so gloriously contentious, everyone bitching at everyone," Mr. Sarris recalled in a 2009 interview with The New York Times. "We all said some stupid things, but film seemed to matter so much. ..."
More (w/photos):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/movies/andrew-sarris-film-critic-dies-at-83.html?pagewanted=all
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