DaveKehr.com is a blog that features news for cinephiles
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About Me
I can’t lay claim to membership in the first generation of American auteurists, though I think I can qualify as Genration 1.5. I was fourteen years old and a painfully alienated high school student in the Chicago bedroom suburb of Palatine, Illinois when I came across Andrew Sarris’s elegant little volume “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions,” which had been waiting for me on the movie shelf at our local library. Though I’d long been obsessed with movies – my earliest enthusiasm had been for Laurel and Hardy, fed by the tantalizingly rare appearances of their shorts on local television, and later by an 8mm collection acquired from Blackhawk Films) – it was Sarris’s elegant, pithy volume that made me realize their was a something more to filmmaking that positioning actors in front of a camera.
Like a lot of young film buffs, I had discovered the miracle of direction through the work of Orson Welles and “Citizen Kane” (shown in a truncated form on the local ABC station, which had inherited the “C&C Cola” library of RKO films). But it was Sarris who introduced me to the less flamboyant, invisible auteurs who make up so much of the glory of American film – John Ford, Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Ernst Lubitsch, Don Siegel and so on. And Sarris gave me greater appreciation of the grand stylists of the American cinema, a list that did not stop and start with Welles but included Josef von Sternberg, King Vidor, Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, and supremely, Alfred Hitchcock.
By the time I made my way to the University of Chicago in 1970, I was thrilled to find a group of like-minded inviduals, who had banded together and taken over what was reputed to be America’s oldest student-run film society, the Documentary Film Group (known as Doc Films for short). This omnivorous bunch, which included several members like Aaron Lipstadt, Terry Curtis Fox, Frank Gruber, Michael Mahern, and Myron Meisel who have since gone on to careers in the film business, sponsored ten or twelve screenings a week, drawing on the vast reserves of 16mm prints that the major studios had created for television but kept around for rentals to college groups.
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