Andrew Sarris was one of the leading American proponents of the auteur theory, which originated in the 1950s among the French film critics of the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Its proponents, among them future filmmakers such as Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, argued that film directors who exercised a high level of creative control could be described as the principal authors of their films. “Directors, not writers, are the ultimate auteurs of the cinema,” Sarris wrote. The writer may set the groundwork, but the director gives the film its distinctive style.
Sarris’s The American Cinema contains both the merits and weaknesses of the auteur theory. The theory gave the greatest filmmakers the recognition they deserved, but it downgraded many good filmmakers because it failed to find a “personal vision” in their work. It also had the tendency to treat all films by an auteur as more interesting than those of a non-auteur. A bad film by an auteur was sometimes considered better than a good film by a non-auteur.
The book’s first chapter, and probably its best, concerns “Pantheon Directors,” the directors whom Sarris regards as the highest-level auteurs. His observations on these directors are often fascinating and sometimes beautiful. John Ford is described as a “storyteller and poet of images” who recreated the past as a “luminous memory more real than the present.” Sarris observes of Orson Welles that he “imposed a European temperament on the American cinema” and was “the foremost German expressionist in the Anglo-Saxon world.”
However, Sarris is so obsessed with finding special meanings in a director’s work and discovering the “director’s personality” that he puts down several directors whose films he finds insufficiently “personal.” Thus, the great British director David Lean is described as being “embalmed in the tomb of impersonal cinema,” and his two masterpieces, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, are called “pointlessly obscure.” Sarris is equally derogatory about great directors such as John Huston, Elia Kazan, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann, who like Lean, are grouped together in a chapter titled “Less than Meets the Eye.” In other places, however, Sarris is bang on the mark. He describes the preachy, politically correct leftist Stanley Kramer as “the most extreme example of thesis or message cinema.”
An influential work in its day, this book serves as a useful mini-encyclopedia of filmmakers, some renowned, others long-forgotten, who worked during cinema’s first 70 years.
—Piers Shepherd
The concept of “ressentiment” may be the single most useful tool for understanding the warped moral politics that has become the worldview of most American elites.
Nietzsche was its inventor. He deliberately chose the French term, but for reasons he did not make explicit. The definition Larousse gives is “the memory one retains of a wrong, an injustice, or an injury that one suffered, with the desire for vengeance.” Nietzsche deployed ressentiment with withering effectiveness to destroy the socialists and anarchists of his day.
But he made a major mistake. He incorrectly claimed the Judeo-Christian moral universe was the source of ressentiment. Max Scheler’s book is an indispensable elaboration of the concept that preserves the usable elements of Nietzsche’s theory of ressentiment while roundly trouncing his mischaracterizations of Christianity.
Much of Scheler’s discussion of ressentiment, the cultural left, and Christianity centers on the relationship of egoism and altruism. Nietzsche was a proponent of an elitist egoism that he adapted from his reading of ancient Greek thought. The socialists he despised—and our contemporary wokeists—present a worldview in which only the wholly altruistic self-annihilation of oppressors as sacrificial payback to their victims counts as moral.
Scheler brilliantly explains that Christianity has a more robust and complete view than either of these competitors. Pure egoism is correctly rejected by the Christian. It claims to elevate the self, but fails to understand the self’s full value. It perceives it only as an acquisitive materialist entity in eternal competition to surpass others. But to imagine there is pure selflessness in the individual soul’s pursuit of immortality, the central dynamic of Christianity, is to err at least as radically. Neither position—pure egoism or pure altruism—takes seriously the Christian sense of the soul and its movement toward God. This is a movement toward the full realization of its inherent sacredness within the terms of compassionate love set by the Savior.
Both altruism, total erasure of the self, and egoism, total erasure of the other, are anti-Christian. The Christian view rides somewhere above both—in the pursuit of God. The pure altruist view ultimately ends up judging social utility as the primary good. But we do not fight against our own sinfulness only to keep from harming the common interest; we do it to win our own salvation. It is the belief in the soul’s immortality that is the difference maker.
—Alexander Riley
Leave a Reply