Brooklyn-born film critic Andrew Sarris rose to prominence during his long tenure with THE VILLAGE VOICE (1960-89) as America's leading proponent of the auteur theory of film analysis. Inspired by the ideas expressed in Francois Truffaut's landmark 1954 essay "Une Certaine tendance du cinema francais", he introduced to the USA the notion that film, ideally, is a medium of personal expression for the director, who deserved recognition as an 'auteur' in his 1962 essay called "Notes on the Auteur Theory". Almost immediately, he found a virulent opponent in Pauline Kael who fired back furiously in "Circles an Squares". Sarris' best known book, "The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968" (1968), expanded his "notes" to full-fledged theory, and Kael responded with "Raising Kane" (1971), her repudiation of Sarris citing "Citizen Kane" (1940), supposedly the quintessential auteur film, as a collective achievement for which the contributions of scenarist Herman J. Mankiewicz and cameraman Gregg Toland had been severely underestimated.

Perhaps it was Sarris' absolutist tone that infuriated Kael most, his very seriousness, as if he were writing the final word on the matter. Though Kael and other critics like John Simon might have agreed that the best starting point for interpretation was the director, they rejected the universality implied in the theory. Sarris continued to uphold the influential critics of the French journal CAHIERS DU CINEMA, arguing that certain directors displayed stylistic and thematic concerns of sufficient integrity and profundity to be acclaimed as true artists. At a time when film critics and their personal tastes were news, Sarris publicly battled his opposition, and the coverage of these intellectual debates was an important element in the development of the new American film culture in the 1960s and 70s. Despite the problems (i.e., it does not account for the collaborative nature of creative filmmaking nor for the role of the film viewer in interpreting the film), "auteur theory" has, in its various manifestations, found a niche in circles both academic and popular. Nowadays, even the most routine film directed by the most routine director is billed as "A Name-of-Director Film" in its opening credits.

Sarris promulgated his ideas as a teacher, first at NYC's School of Visual Arts and later at New York University. Beginning his association with Columbia University in 1969, he rose to full professor in 1980, and his experience as an educator caused him to remark: "I'm too much a journalist for the academics, and . . . too academic for the journalists. I'm a mixed bag, like the movies. I'm not pure, I'm not this or that. I'm a lot of things." He even dabbled in the creative end of films, making uncredited contributions to the screenplays of "Justine" (1969) and "Promise at Dawn" (1970). Since 1989, Sarris has written film criticism for THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, but he also has continued to write and edit authoritative books on the cinema, including "You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory, 1927-1949" (1998), in which he revisited many of the auteurs discussed in his landmark "The American Cinema", revising some opinions, none more radically than his new appreciation for Billy Wilder. He has also proved to be a pleasurable interviewee on such TV documentaries as "John Wayne Standing Tall" (PBS, 1989), "Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer" (PBS, 1990), "Billy Wilder: The Human Comedy" (PBS, 1998) and "Charlie Chaplin: A Tramp's Life" (A&E, 1998).