The American Cinema

The American Cinema is the Citizen Kane of film criticism, a brilliant book about American directors that elevated American directors from craftsmen to artists, launched the careers of numerous film critics, and shaped the aesthetics of a whole generation of viewers by providing new ways of looking at movies. --Emanuel Levy, the author of George Cukor, Master of EleganceThe auteur theory, of which film critic Andrew Sarris was the leading proponent in America, holds that artistry in cinema can be largely attributed to film directors, who, while often working against the strictures of studios and producers, manage to infuse each film in their oeuvre with their personal style. Sarris's The American Cinema is a history of American film in the form of a lively guide to the work of two hundred film directors, from Griffith, Chaplin, and von Sternberg to Mike Nichols and Stanley Kubrick.