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Which exactly describes my own experience with Sarris’s classic volume—”I once was blind but now I see,” or at least see a damn sight better than I had before. It’s 40 years on since the The American Cinema: Directors and Direction, 1929-1968 was published by Dutton (in late ’68), and my gratitude for it remains undiminished, even if our still sometimes capricious author-critic loses me more often now than he ever did then (e.g., Juno as 2007’s best film?).
So: all about an identifiable “consciousness”—or awareness or empathy or whatever you want to call it—that, arguably and/or ideally, goes to the “creative” heart of what we see on-screen. Which isn’t leaving much room for necessary qualifiers and quibbles, so let’s give our auteurist in chief the final word on those—from the 2005 interview again: “I’ve always said to people that auteurism is nice, but it’s hypothetical, and gradually you learn how much or how little influence different directors had. You can see that Hitchcock had more influence than someone like Stahl. What it really is, is first you see something, and you like it, and then it’s a mystery, and you go into the mystery—and that’s what’s interesting. And the test of criticism is: can you make a case for it.”
