"The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968", 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.
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 is his most famous book, the American film history organized in the form of a guide to the work of two hundred film directors. Even though some of his opinions have become somewhat debatable (regarding Rouben Mamoulian, William Wyler, Stanley Kubrick, among others in the second half of the book), Sarris’s eloquence reveals a passionate writing and way to look at films that makes The American Cinema one of the most influential books ever written regarding this subject.

Excerpts:
"The art of the cinema is the art of an attitude, the style of a gesture. It is not so much what as how. The what is some aspect of reality rendered mechanically by the camera. The how is what the French critics designate somewhat mistically as mise-en-scène. Auteur criticism is a reaction against sociological criticism that enthroned the what agains the how. However, it would be equally fallacious to enthrone the how against the what. The whole point of a meaningful style is that it unifies the what and the how into a personal statement."

"[On D.W. Griffith] For Griffith, a tree was more than a tree. Its strength and vulnerability expressed metaphorically the emotional life of his heroines. Modern audiences have lost this sense of psychological harmony with nature to the extent that the trees in, say, Antonioni’s compositions serve as metaphors of cosmic indifference. The harmonies of Griffith have become the dissonances of Antonioni. The moral order to which Griffith’s scenarios refer no longer exists. What remains to delight the modern connoisseur are torrents and torrents of classical acting, forceful, direct and full-bodied, cleanly and inventively directed with full psychological accountability."

"[On Buster Keaton] The difference between Keaton and Chaplin is the difference between poise and poetry, between the aristocrat and the tramp, between adaptability and dislocation, between the function of things and the meaning of things, between eccentricity and mysticism, between man as machine and man as angel, between the girl as a convention and the girl as an ideal, between the centripetal and the centrifugal tendencies of slapstick."

"[On Josef von Sternberg] His characters generally make their entrace at a moment in their lives when there is no tomorrow. Knowingly or unknowingly, they have reached the end or the bottom, but they will struggle a short time longer, about ninety minutes of screen time, to discover the truth about themselves and those they love."

Link to the complete book in PDF:

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