Andrew Sarris, one of the nation’s most influential film critics and a champion of auteur theory, which holds that a director’s voice is central to great filmmaking, died on Wednesday morning in New York. He was 83.

His wife, the film critic Molly Haskell, said the cause was complications of an infection developed after a fall.

Courtly, incisive and acerbic in equal measure, Sarris came of critical age in the 1960s as the first great wave of foreign films washed ashore in the United States. From his perch at The Village Voice, and later at The New York Observer, he wrote searchingly of that glorious deluge and the directors behind it — Francois Truffaut, Marcel Ophuls, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa.

Film criticism had reached a heady pitch amid the cultural upheavals of that time, and Sarris’ temperament fit that age like a glove on a fencer’s hand.

He took his place among a handful of stylish and congenitally disputatious critics: Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, John Simon and Manny Farber. They agreed on just a single point: that film was art worthy of sustained thought and argumentation.

“We were so gloriously contentious, everyone bitching at everyone,” Sarris recalled in a 2009 interview with The New York Times. “We all said some stupid things, but film seemed to matter so much.

“Urgency” — his smile on this point was wistful — “seemed unavoidable.”

Sarris played a major role in introducing Americans to European auteur theory, the idea that a great director speaks through his films no less than a master novelist speaks through his books. A star actor might transcend a prosaic film, Sarris said, but only a director could bring to bear the coherence of vision that gives birth to great art.

He argued that more than a few of Hollywood’s own belonged in the pantheon — Orson Welles, John Ford, Howard Hawks and Sam Fuller, not to mention a British director whom purists had dismissed as a mere “commercial” filmmaker: Alfred Hitchcock — and he championed them.

Sarris’ book “The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968” stands as his opus. If Kael more often won points as the high stylist, Sarris’ metier was cerebral and analytic, interested always in the totality of a film’s effect on its audience and in the sweep of a director’s career.

He graduated from Columbia College in 1951 and served three years in the Army Signal Corps. He returned to live with his mother — his father had died — in Queens, passing his post-college years in, as he put it, “flight from the laborious realities of careerism.”

On one such footloose outing he passed a year in Paris, drinking coffee and talking with the New Wave directors, Godard and Truffaut, who were the first to champion auteur theory. Always his love affair with movies sustained him. He recalled sitting through four-dozen showings of “Gone With the Wind,” as besotted with Vivien Leigh on the 48th viewing as on the first.

He began to write for Film Culture, a cineaste outpost in Manhattan. But he was restless. He was 27, which he described as “a dreadfully uncomfortable age for a middle-class cultural guerrilla.”

In 1960, this self-consciously bourgeois man persuaded the editors of The Village Voice to let him review films. He quickly asserted his intellectual writ; in his first review he tossed down the gauntlet in defense of Alfred Hitchcock and “Psycho.”

The editors embraced Sarris as a controversialist. He survived to review films there for 29 more years. In defense of his favorites he was ardent; but to those who failed to measure up, he applied the lash.

Besides writing about film, Sarris also taught the subject, chiefly as a film professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts but also variously at Yale University, Juilliard and New York University, among other institutions. He obtained his master’s from Columbia University in 1998.

Asked a few years ago if he had soured on any of the directors he once championed, Sarris smiled and shook his head. “I prefer to think of people I missed the boat on,” he said.