Sallitt was born on July 27, 1955, in
Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from
Harvard College in 1976 and a Master of Fine Arts in Screenwriting from the
University of California, Los Angeles in 1979. Sallitt resides in
New York City, where he works as a
technical writer for the
New York City Office of Technology and Innovation.
Film criticism Sallitt moved to
Los Angeles in 1976, where he served as first-string film critic for
The Los Angeles Reader from 1983 to 1985. He has written film criticism for outlets such as
Slate,
The Chicago Reader,
MUBI,
Masters of Cinema, and
The Village Voice. He maintains a film blog called
Thanks for the Use of the Hall. When
Sight & Sound published its list of the greatest films of all time in 2012, Sallitt was asked to submit a list of his top-ten films. His selections consisted of
Angel,
Daisy Kenyon,
Diary of a Country Priest,
The General,
The Mother and the Whore,
Morocco,
Notorious,
Rio Bravo,
Ruggles of Red Gap, and
The Searchers.
Filmmaking In 1986, Sallitt wrote and directed his first feature film,
Polly Perverse Strikes Again, which he financed solely from his work as a film critic. and was acquired for U.S. distribution by
The Cinema Guild. The film appeared on year-end top ten lists by
Amy Taubin,
Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Adrian Martin, and
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and was included in the afterword to the
Korean edition of Rosenbaum's
Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons. His fifth feature film,
Fourteen, premiered in 2019 at the
69th Berlin International Film Festival, and was picked up for U.S. distribution by Grasshopper Film.
Retrospectives and recognition In 2013,
Anthology Film Archives hosted a
retrospective of his work in conjunction with the theatrical release of
The Unspeakable Act. In
Film Comment, Jonathan Robbins noted that Sallitt's work was "rooted in the films of
Robert Bresson,
Eric Rohmer,
Jean Eustache,
John Cassavetes, and
Maurice Pialat". Later that same year, additional Sallitt retrospectives were held at the Cineuropa Film Festival in
Santiago de Compostela,
Spain and the CGAI Cinematheque in
A Coruña, Spain. In 2014, the
George Eastman House in
Rochester,
New York held a retrospective called "Three Weekends with Dan Sallitt." == Filmography ==