Andrew Sarris died on June 20th. Read died on June 20th. Read Richard Brody . Photograph of husband and wife Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris by Robin Platzer/Twin Images/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Andrew Sarris, who died today, at the age of eighty-three, is the one indispensable American film critic. He brought to American film criticism its crucial idea, its crucial word (“auteur”), and the crucial taste that it signifies: the recognition that the best of Hollywood directors are the equals of great directors anywhere in the world, and that they are the equals of painters, writers, and composers of genius.

Sarris (whom I met only briefly, at several screenings) was the American critic who meant the most to me when I was first learning about movies, because I sensed that he was interested in the essential thing—what makes the cinema an art. In the classic split between hedgehogs and foxes, he was the great hedgehog of American criticism. He knew one big thing: the colossal gravitational pull of the director, the true star that held all in its orbit and gave its light to reflect. Sarris may have suffered for staring too long and too fixedly into the directorial sun, but before he showed everyone which way to look, hardly anybody knew that it was there at all. Which is why, on this sad occasion, it seems fitting to talk about the idea and the word with which his name will always be linked.

The most interesting thing about the term “auteur” is that though it’s the ordinary French word for “author,” in English, it refers solely to movie directors, especially those whose work is deemed artistically ambitious. That’s because it was an aesthetic shock when the word was used, about sixty years ago, by a group of French critics at the newly founded Paris-based journal Cahiers du Cinêma. Their idea was that movie directors exert the same artistic control on (and bear the same moral responsibility for) their film as a writer does for a book, and can therefore be considered the “author” of a film.

They weren’t the first to recognize that directors are artists, yet their writings proved very controversial, for four reasons. First, they didn’t emphasize movies’ stories—they didn’t ignore them, but they didn’t take political subjects and the adaptations of major literary works to be of any greater intrinsic importance than crime stories, love stories, comedies, Westerns, or musicals. Second, they largely considered acting, cinematography, and the other elements of production in terms of their reflection of the director’s art. Third, they considered some Hollywood directors, working in the industry and serving its commercial ends, to be the equals of European filmmakers working within an expressly humanistic tradition (which is why they came to be known as “Hitchcocko-Hawksians”). Fourth, they saw the art of the cinema as the exemplary art of the era, and so considered directors to be the leading artists of the day. (There was also a fifth, strictly local, reason: they considered most of the major French directors of the time to be terrible filmmakers and denounced them and their films with flamboyant invective.)

From the time the idea of the auteur crossed the ocean, in the early sixties, to this day—thanks mainly to Sarris—it has been consistently misunderstood by its detractors, in part because of Sarris’s linguistic peccadillo. He referred to the “auteur theory,” as if it was something that could be proved. The phrase that the French critics used for their idea was la politique des auteurs. It was a “policy,” not a rule, and a “politics,” because it was aimed at power. These critics didn’t only seek the widespread recognition of the directors they admired but (as Jean-Luc Godard told me in 2000) thought they were, in a way, prolonging the French Resistance “against a certain sort of occupation, in the cinema, by people who had no business being there.” They were both asserting a living pantheon of filmmakers they admired and seeking to throw out interlopers in order to make a place for themselves in the film industry (thus the invective).

Of course, these critics—notably, Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and their “godfather” at the magazine, Eric Rohmer, about ten years their senior—did make a place for themselves in the industry and in the ongoing history of cinema. Their own films are the evidence that has confirmed, even canonized, their critical ideas. They were the first to consistently conceive of directors’ work psychologically—to identify themselves with directors and to pass from a consumerist guide to an inside view of the cinema. And this is where the most basic misinterpretation arises.

If auteurism were nothing other than the recognition of arcane patterns across a director’s body of work, it would have had a short and obscure run. But in fact, its power comes from its inspiration of artists. Wes Anderson described his primordial auteurist experience when I interviewed him for a Profile that ran in the magazine in 2009. His family’s Betamax tapes of Alfred Hitchcock’s films, “with an orange-colored box for ‘Vertigo’ and a blue one for ‘Rear Window’ and a beige one for ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much,’ ” was a central experience for him as a child: