The New Republic film critic Stanley Kauffmann has died at the age of 97 on Wednesday in Manhattan.
The New York Times reports that literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, confirmed that Kauffmann passed away from pneumonia.
Kuaffmann had plenty of different entertainment based jobs throughout his life, such as actor, stage manager, book editor and philosophical writer. He joined The new Republic in 1958 as a film critic and worked there pretty much for the rest of his life. In 1966 he took a break to be the theater critic for NY Times. He would return just a year later and resume his thoughtful critical writing.
Phillip Lopate, essayist and editor of American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, said in 2011, "He was a literate, quarterly sort of writer, and to the extent that he had disciples, they wrote in quarterlies. He had a good influence on film criticism by pushing it away from teenage gaga enthusiasm for the joy ride and toward adult responsibility."
Kauffmann was known to be a fan of more old-fashioned structured films, which often put him at odds with the auteur-style of filmmaking.
According to TheWrap, came up with the term "film generation," which refers to film criticism and movies during the 1960s through the 1970s.
In a tribute in The New Republic to Kauffmann, James Wolcott wrote, "For a man who never seemed to raise his voice in print, who practiced a sweater-vest decorum, he was rapidly deceptive to rebel outbreaks on the screen from such crafty iconoclastic insurgents as Jean-Luc Godard to Quentin Tarantino."