The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968

Related e

Featured:

Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (1968) by Andrew Sarris.

It is an opinionated assessment of films of the sound era, organized by director. The book was influential on other critics and helped raise an awareness of the role of the film director and, in particular, of the auteur theory. In The American Cinema, Sarris lists what he terms the 'Pantheon' of the fourteen greatest film directors who had worked in the United States. The list includes the Americans Robert Flaherty, John Ford, D. W. Griffith, Howard Hawks, Buster Keaton, and Orson Welles, the Germans Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, Max Ophuls, and Josef von Sternberg, the British Charles Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, and the French Jean Renoir. He also created second and third tiers of directors, downplaying the work of some such as Billy Wilder, David Lean, and Stanley Kubrick. In his 1998 book, You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet: The American Talking Film, History and Memory 1927-1949 Sarris upgraded the status of Billy Wilder to pantheon level and apologized for his earlier harsh opinion of the director in The American Cinema.

Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.