"Interviews with Film Directors", Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris (1928-2012) was an American film critic. He was the one who coined the term "auteur theory" (a not completely correct translation from the french politique des auteurs), brought from Cahiers du Cinéma to the American appreciation, mainly in his influent article Notes on the Autheur Theory. This "policy" is known for focusing criticism mainly in those directors ("authors") whose personal styles and visions of the world are consistent along their bodies of work. He wrote for Film Culture, The Village Voice and The New York Observer and his most famous book is The American Cinema: Directors And Directions 1929-1968, a guide to some of the most important American film directors.

Interviews with Film Directors is a compilation of interviews organized by Sarris from several publications, where 40 classic film directors (Ford, Godard, Hawks, Lang, Renoir, Hitchcock, among others) discuss their work. Sarris introduces each film director by describing his style and artistic concerns, raising awareness of the director's importance for the final form of each film.

Excerpts:
"The choice between a close-up and a long-shot, for example, may quite often transcend the plot. If the story of Little Red Riding Hood is told with the Wolf in close-up and Little Red Riding Hood in long-shot, the director. is concerned primarily with the emotional problems of a wolf with a compulsion to eat little girls. If Little Red Riding Hood is in close-up and the Wolf in long-shot, the emphasis is shifted to the emotional problems of vestigial virginity in a wicked world (...) Riding Hood are two contrasting directorial attitudes toward life. One director identifies more with the Wolf - the male, the compulsive, the corrupted, even evil itself. The second director identifies with the little girl - the innocence, the illusion, the ideal and hope of the race. Needless to say, few critics bother to make any distinction, proving perhaps that direction as creation is still only dimly understood." Andrew Sarris

"We might say that the selection of actors, of expressions, of clothing, of place, of lighting-all these are the various components of the. overall vocabulary; they are, so to speak, the nouns, the verbs, the adjectives, the adverbs, while the choice of camera movements, of framing, etc., is the syntax itself, the rhythmical arrangement of the various components into one complete sentence." Pier Paolo Pasolini

"But, you know, everyone really only makes one film in his life, and then he breaks it up into fragments and makes it again, with just a few little variations each time." Jean Renoir

"I believe that, in life, we don't think chronologically, that our decisions never correspond to an ordered logic. All of us have clouds, things which determine us. but which are not a logical succession of acts arranged in perfect sequence. I'm interested in exploring that universe, from the point of view of truth, if not of morality." Alan Resnais

Link to the complete book in PDF:

Andrew Sarris

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Signs and Meaning in the Cinema", Peter Wollen

Image
Peter Wollen (1938-2019) was a theorist, screenwriter (he co-wrote Antonioni’s The Passenger ), film critic (in addition to Screen magazine, where he developed his film theories, he wrote for the New Left Review under the pseudonym Lee Russell) and filmmaker. His most famous films were co-signed with his wife Laura Mulvey. His most remembered work is the seminal book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema , which discussed, in a captivating and accessible way, the semiotic and structuralist approach in the cinematographic context.  The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the theoretical and filmic work of Eisenstein. The second, about the auteur theory, investigates the recurrence of themes and images in some directors' careers, namely Hawks and Ford. And the third one develops how a film should be seen as a system of signs and codes, a bearer of a personal language to which the viewer has to adapt himself, referencing also the aesthetic innovations of Jean-Luc Godar
Read more

"Everything is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard", Richard Brody

Image
Jean-Luc Godard (1930) is, arguably, not only the most important living filmmaker, but also one of the greatest directors of all-time. A philosopher thinking with a camera, raising questions about cinema, society, politics and History, in innovative and non-conforming ways, his body of work has influenced filmmakers from Europe to America, from the mainstream to the avant-garde, more than any other director. He is best known for being part of the Nouvelle Vague with revolutionary movies as the cinephilic and exuberant noir À Bout de Souffle ( Breathless , 1960), the existentialist Vivre Sa Vie ( My Life to Live , 1962) or the disconsolately romantic Le Mépris ( Contempt , 1963). From the end of the '60s until mid-'70s he entered in a militant phase with Jean-Pierre Gorin and continued a controversial oeuvre with political films as Vladimir et Rosa (1971). In the '80s he returned to, in a way, more commercial pictures as Sauve Qui Peut ( La Vie ) (1980) or Prénom: Ca
Read more

"Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer", Paul Schrader

Image
Paul Schrader is a director, screenwriter and film critic. Raised in a Calvinist family who deprived him of the cinema in his youth, Schrader was only able to see the first film at age 17 ("Other college kids had to vandalize government buildings. go to movies. ", as he would say later). This led to the construction of his late cinephilia in a more intellectual than emotional way. Hence, in the films written by him, the spectator feels uncomfortable with the imperfection and lack of attachment to his protagonists, existentially disturbed and self-destructive, but redeemed in the last scene that justifies the long process of violence to which they had been subjected. Although he is most remembered for his collaboration with Martin Scorsese in 4 films - Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) - the ones he directed are equally astonishing [ Hardcore (1978) and Affliction (1997)], with a strong and inn
Read more