About Andrew Sarris
Andrew Sarris (October 31, 1928 – June 20, 2012) was an American film critic. He was a leading proponent and popularizer of the auteur theory of film criticism, particularly in The American Cinema (1968). == Early life == Sarris was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Greek immigrant parents, Themis (née Katavolos) and George Andrew Sarris, and grew up in Ozone Park, Queens. After attending John Adams High School in South Ozone Park (where he overlapped with Jimmy Breslin), he graduated from Columbia University in 1951. He then served for three years in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the Korean War. Following his military service, he spent a year in Paris where he befriended French New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut and was exposed to the auteur theory, the notion, expressed in the writings of André Bazin and others, that great directors place a personal stamp of "authorship" on their films. Upon returning to New York's Lower East Side, Sarris briefly pursued graduate studies at his alma mater and at Teachers College, Columbia University before turning to film criticism. In the late 1950s, he was editor-in-chief of the English-language edition of the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. == Career == After initially writing for Film Culture, Sarris moved to The Village Voice where his first piece—a laudatory review of Psycho and of Alfred Hitchcock's "auteurism"—was published in 1960. Sarris later recalled the reaction to his review: "The Voice had all these readers—little old ladies who lived on the West Side, guys who had fought in the Spanish Civil War—and this seemed so regressive to them, to say that Hitchcock was a great artist".
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