"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

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