David Walsh Meets Andrew Sarris

Andrew Sarris, of course, is one of the more prominent figures in twentieth century American film criticism--the one who introduced Americans to the auteur theory emergent in the circle centered on the French film journal Cahiers du Cinema.

Sarris also played an important role in the politics of the era's film criticism. As Peter Biskind argued, Sarris and Pauline Kael were the two predominant figures of the post-war years, and Sarris as well as Kael a Cold War centrist, along with her fighting against "ideology" in filmmaking with his typewriter.

Naturally Sarris' exchange with film critic David Walsh makes for very interesting reading, the more in as in spite of their significant intellectual and political differences each is respectful of and gracious to the other. Indeed, Sarris, at least the Sarris of the interview, can come off as more leftish than one might expect from having read a good deal of his work. Answering a question from Walsh about the tenability of the social situation Sarris confessed that it was "awful" and no "fair-minded person" seeing anything at all could call "the situation . . . ideal," the "bourgeois complacency" of political debate reached "a stage . . . such as even a bourgeois like me finds unthinkable," the more in as, if comfortable and secure in his own life at this point, Sarris says that he "can understand the pain out there."

Sarris' remark is the more interesting because the exchange took place way back in 1998--just when the tech boom was reaching its climax, when we were constantly being told how great everything was, globalized info-utopia that would just get better and better near at hand--illusions today long since shattered as the realities to which Sarris alluded remain, and grow only more pressing.