Pauline Kael
A follow-up on contrarian criticism, from an Artforum section published in 2002, after the death of Pauline Kael, called Prose and Cons:
Gary Indiana:
When Artforum invited me to write 800 words on Pauline Kael, I asked the editor why we couldn't dispense with 799 of them, as I could certainly summarize my opinion of Ms. Kael with even greater economy than that with which her opinions had for so many years been splashed across movie ads and even, for a time, theater marquees. Besides, the definitive autopsy on Ms. Kael's oeuvre had already been performed, twenty-one years earlier, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, by Renata Adler ("The Perils of Pauline"), and I consider Adler's an impossible act to follow. I have a fond memory of devouring that essay with Susan Sontag, peering over each other's shoulder, in the donut shop that used to occupy the corner of Third Avenue and Fourteenth Street, both of us nearly gagging with laughter at the sly, inexorable trajectory of every sentence, the devastating conclusion of every paragraph, the utterly damning thoroughness with which Ms. Kael's grotesquely inflated, even sacrosanct reputation had been laid out like a corpse for burial. [...]
The coercive effect of Kael's technique was not simply contrarian, which might have had its praiseworthy aspects; "For Keeps" makes it clear, as Adler noted years ago, that this is a critic who brooks no contradiction and turns herself into a pretzel to stun the reader into agreement that a worthless film has moments that outshine, and outmerit, actual masterpieces, if for no better reason than that the film was made by one of the directors she routinely fawned over, like De Palma. When it suits her, Kael does a complete volte-face and fetishizes the transcendent artistry of De Sica's "Shoeshine," for example, or treats us to an extremely long, extremely ill-informed analysis of how things work in Hollywood to explain "why today's movies are so bad." It is, perhaps, the absence of any real sensibility rooted in any consistent method of analysis that makes Pauline Kael's collections of reviews the kinds of books I don't like having in my house. She's not a real voice but more like a suet of arbitrary, extemporized pronouncements. She is Gertrude Stein's Oakland; There's no there there.
Paul Schrader:
Pauline changed criticism in a number of ways:
... Taking film criticism to the average filmgoer. She wrote for people who went to movies, not for those who read magazines--a technical distinction, but an important one. [...]
She validated film reviewing. Difficult as it is to believe today, at the height of America's countercultural upheaval movies truly mattered: It mattered which movies were made, which movies audiences saw, and what they thought of the movies they did see. Godard was important, Bunuel was important, Paul Mazursky and Hal Ashby were important. Art was not happening in the museums; it was in the streets and movie houses. Kael was the pied piper of reviewers who made readers believe that movies, even disreputable movies, were important. If movies were important, it followed that movie reviewing was important.
A considerable achievement, and I wish I could say a wholly beneficial one. Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline. She was able to rail against critical snobbery and High Art, defend mass-audience taste and extol "trash" because she never feared for culture. She knew that there would always be standards. Because she had standards. She appreciated great art and literature and opera; no amount of "trash" could change that.
Not long before she died, Pauline remarked to a friend, "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture." That's exactly the point. She and her foot soldiers won the battle but lost the war. Mass taste has become acceptable taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth. The pop films Kael most loved, such as "Hud" (1963), if made today, would be considered art-house fare.
Geoffrey O'Brien:
Returning to her writing after so many years, I'm still puzzled by a central ambivalence in her judgments that seems to gravitate around the notions of "art" and "trash." In her celebrated essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies" (Harper's, February 1969)--the closest she came to a general statement of intentions--she wants to celebrate the gaudy pleasures of cinematic vulgarity: "I don't trust anyone who doesn't admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies.... Why should pleasure need justification?" She directs withering scorn at those stuffed-shirt humanists who admire "Judgment at Nuremberg" or "Wild Strawberries" but can't appreciate "The Thomas Crown Affair" (1968). But she's equally at odds with anyone who likes trash a little bit too much, likes it enough to think that "trash" is perhaps a term of doubtful use: "If an older generation was persuaded to dismiss trash, now a younger generation, with the press and schools in hot pursuit, has begun to talk about trash as if it were really very serious art." It doesn't help that her examples of yesterday's kitsch now mistaken for art are "Shanghai Express" and -- amazingly for someone who would go on to grossly overpraise the Hitchcock imitations of Brian De Palma -- "Notorious." She goes in circles on this theme, churning up perplexities about pleasure and puritanism, bourgeois complacency and radical transgression, without ever coming to a comfortable resting point. What is clear is that there is no party of which she wishes to be a member; if she has to declare for anything it will be the sovereignty of her own taste.
Comments, anyone...?
How can two people read something over each other's shoulders?
Somebody stick a hose in Gary Indiana before he becomes so full of himself he explodes. He's asked to write an article on Pauline Kael, but spend 90% of it talking about an article someone else wrote about her (without bothering to summarize or expand on the points he agrees with, just noting that it was funny and well written). Oh, and he read it with Susan SOntag, which has nothing to do with his point but makes him look cool to certain people.
I'm with Schrader. Although Indiana and John Gregory Dunne's withering essay on Kael (highly recommended, if you haven't read it) makes many good points about her shifting justifications. But I think Schrader is right: Most of the films considered trashy in the '70s could never be trashy enough to get made today. If you get beyond the media inner circle that endlessly debates her faults and merits, I think her place is secure as a writer and a literary stylist. She really was the last great critic, who happened to be writing about movies. I'm sorry, but nobody working today comes close in either style or insight. And, for the record, she's not wrong about De Palma.
Agreed. I despise Pauline Kael's writings. I think Schrader's comments in his "Canon Fodder" article from Film Comment sum up my feelings about her exquisitely. She's the Victor Frankenstein of film criticism and the "academic" validator of populist shit. De Palma also makes me shudder with disgust. Ewww.
It's amazing to hear the snobbery from one critic to another at times. How mean and ill-spirited people can be only because they enjoy different forms of film. I enjoy the occasional high budget action Hollywood flick, but hold even closer to my heart films by Bergman. And I'm smart enough to know how I enjoy those films. I think Pauline Kael expected people to know the difference or at least understand the difference. Her biggest malfeasance was in giving the public too much credit. Most people aren't smart enough to tell the difference. It was the same mistake Kubrick felt he made with "Clockwork Orange", before he pulled the film from its UK theatrical run.
It's strange to hear "She goes in circles on this them...without ever coming to a comfortable resting point," or "It is, perhaps, the absence of any real sensibility rooted in any consistent method of analysis that makes Pauline Kael's collections of reviews the kinds of books I don't like having in my house." Then I ask, isn't that what opinion and taste are all about? To be a great movie critic one has to be open to the possibility that any film, regardless of genre or budget, can have the possibility to entertain. To go into a film with your criteria and standards set so strongly would be unfair to the filmmaker that made the morsel you're about to partake in.
I've never read Pauline Kael, I'll admit, in film school though I was taught that she saved "Bonnie and Clyde", and without that we made not have had the insurgent of brilliant films throughout the 70's that we ended up having. All those films that these snob-critics praise and adore, were only possible thanks to "Ms. Kael's grotesquely inflated, even sacrosanct reputation". I hope Gary eats his words and chokes on them.
Brandon,
Schrader loved Pauline Kael.
I like Pauline Kael's writing quite a bit, even though I'm frustrated by it a lot of the times. But that frustration is part of what I like about it: I don't want to read a critic that I always agree with. (As if critics are supposed to be like partisan political pundits, who we read to shore up our belief in "our side").
Indiana writes that Kael didn't have "any real sensibility rooted in any consistent method of analysis" and, you know, that's another thing I like about her. Again - that seems to be part of her appeal: "the movies" isn't a monolithic experience, so by approaching it with a rooted sensibility, you risk cutting yourself off from certain kinds of movie experiences.
Reading her now, the "trash/art" thing kinds of bugs me - it seems overly arbitrary and it just isn't the kind of distinction I'm that interested in making - but I can see why she put it that way at the time. I try to read that essay fairly generously, though: the important point I take away from it is that you have to take a movie on its own terms and any judgments (subjective or otherwise) should make reference to those terms.
I find it weird that she's such a polarizing figure and that folks are so willing to dump on all of her work. I just don't think that it's worth throwing out her piece on The Long Goodbye or her Cary Grant essay, just because you think that, say, she was indulgent about De Palma or that she had a blind spot when it came to Kubrick. I mean, James Agee has his blind spots, too, and you don't see anywhere near the level of venom directed against him as you do against Kael.
I think Kael's legacy is mixed (though not as mixed as Ralph Nader's, if that helps put things into perspective). Gary Indiana never does reveal the one word he says he would use to describe Kael (why be so coy?), and his name-dropping and New York provincialism are pathetic. You can see how, from that donut shop on Third Avenue and Fourteeth Street (even the word "donut" placing him in a particular NYC bohemian milieu), Kael's monolithic influence must have felt, to him, like living under Stalin or something. He exaggerates her importance outside his narrow little circle (himself and Sontag in NY). But I did want to include what he said because of his reference to Adler's devastating (and probably mostly unfair) piece, which many today seem to have forgotten. It was a big deal in film circles (and squares) at the time.
Schrader was, of course, an early favorite of Kael's. I appreciate his distinction between writing for people who go to movies rather than for people who read magazines (about movies) -- and, he implies, don't actually see the movies themselves. (Think of the patrons of the Film Society of Lincoln Center -- or Metropolitan Opera patrons through the centuries.) Kael wrote for the New Yorker, but the people Schrader is describing are the upper-class twits in New Yorker cartoons.
The whole "trash vs. art" obsession in Kael's writing has always puzzled me. She did much to communicate her pleasure in movies -- pleasure that had nothing to do with art, perhaps. But I thought those labels were too limiting and too arbitrarily applied. Is "Citizen Kane" trash, art, or trash-art? What about "Nashville"? And aren't there more fruitful terms to use when attempting to analyze them?
Perhaps the worst thing about Kael's writing was her insistence on the sovereignty of her own taste -- but for thousands of us, what we enjoyed so much was having arguments with her in our heads after we saw whatever movie she'd written about. I've always said you don't read Kael for her opinions; you read her for her enthusiasm and (especially) the insights she has when she thinks she's writing about something else. Time and again in Kael you'll find her tossing off a brilliant observation on her way to making some other point, when the REAL point was the observation she doesn't quite appear to have known she just made. Or, even more frequently, she will condemn a film by detailing something that is precisely what makes it so good, or vice-versa, by claiming it was or was not the filmmaker's intention.
Kael was the critic of her time both because of how she wrote and the times in which she wrote. More than ever we need to rescue films from museums and institutions where they are being enshrined and embalmed. Museums are great as places where art is collected and displayed, but they do a disservice to the art by putting it in a sterilized setting, sealed off from the world. Why don't they make museums with galleries that look more like the rooms in which people live? Better yet, why don't more museums actually use homes for their galleries (like the Fricke)? And we need screening spaces that feel more like movie theaters than classrooms or multiplex auditoriums. Most of all, I think, we need local film societies -- people who gather wherever they can to see movies that won't be shown in commercial thaters, or only by institutions. But the 16 mm nontheatrical market that used to make that possible has all but disappeared. That leaves us with DVD -- but people who are willing to chip in some money to buy or rent DVDs from overseas (playable on a region-free player) will have access to a lot of stuff that hasn't made it to the North American market yet. That's a battle we still have to fight...
It's funny how Kael's appreciation for De Palma always comes up as proof positive that she was a lousy critic. Indiana, O'Brien, and Brandon all mention it. And of course they all come across as elitist snobs who *of course* would hate a born subversive and provocateur like De Palma (and Kael).
Schrader's point is the most interesting--that Kael won the battle against middle-brow art too well, that we're all neck-deep in trash now. But then, she could only react to the film culture of her time, not the film culture (such as it is) of our time.
She's a great example of being in the right place at the right time -- when Beatty, Altman, Scorsese, Towne, De Palma, etc. were busting open movies. Her populist/subversive sensibility was right in tune with theirs. Of course Schrader's right that now such a sensibility is a minority taste. I often wonder if she would even bother to be a movie critic these days.
Hey man I just read your How Not to Make an Oscar Speech over on MSN. Very funny! Loved it, and so very true. Keep it up!
I was never fond of Kael's writing although she got off the occasional funny barb (of "Dances With Wolves," she wrote that Kevin Costner has "feathers in his hair, and feathers in his head"). The main complaint I have is not about her, but about her legion of admirers who seemed to think she was untouchable, that it was simply unacceptable to regard her as something other than the voice of God when it came to film criticism, hence the controversy that greeted Renata Adler's piece when it was first published.
I always found Kael interesting to read (mostly in anthologies, granted) whether she was being insightful or frustratingly confident that "we" all shared some bizarre opinion or other. I have no problem with the art/trash thing, either; it's worth talking about, in a world of so many snobs and anti-snob snobs, whatever labels are actually used. The "we" got to me, though. If only she had seemed more aware of her contradictions they would have been more charming. It also struck me that she often defined actresses completely by their physical characteristics: "soft, maternal, bosominess", etc. That was a bit weird.
Michael Atkinson, Village Voice, September 10, 2001:
Opening paragraph was omitted in the original post:
[The hot-pants Queen Victoria of American film criticism, Pauline Kael has now paid the debt of nature, providing the obituarians with the opportunity to finally top off their 35-year outpouring of ardor and awe. Never before has a film critic's living reputation sent so many scrambling for encomiums, and never has a film critic's passing left so many media mouths so verklempt. Don't expect it to ever happen again: Kael reigned supreme as film culture's fiery, maenadic Mrs. Grundy—what will she say?—during that culture's most fecund and dynamic day, which has long gone the way of film clubs, the Monthly Film Bulletin, Luis Buñuel, and the Bleecker Street Cinema.]
Kael occupied an utterly unique throne in the nation's cultural consciousness: a film reviewer as high priestess, a self-invented demagogue who often garnered more attention than the movies she reviewed and seemed, by virtue of her combative style of argument, to elide any subsequent opinion. She was never the nation's eyes and voice, as much as she had wanted to democratize the filmgoing community; rather, she was the cognoscenti's peppery permission slip to love their love of trash. Her public profile was a stunning balance between notoriety and highbrow respect, and so she reached readers many other critics could not. Her 12 volumes of collected pieces were routinely lauded in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and other pivotal venues that rarely, if ever, reviewed film books of any other stripe.
Perhaps most tellingly, she was the focus of gossip (a film critic!) that speculated on her liaisons with colleagues and with certain testosterone-dizzy filmmakers. She was the obvious model for Clare, the tempestuous, pint-sized San Francisco-to-New York über-critic in Theodore Roszak's Pynchonian movie-conspiracy novel Flicker. Stories still circulate about Kael the wolverine bitch and her coterie of male critic cubs, nicknamed the "Paulettes" by the excluded, disrupting screenings of films she didn't like and rallying New York Film Critics Circle votes by intimidation or threat. Her fragging of Andrew Sarris's auteurism, however preposterous (she misread auteurism, and at the same time saw every movie through the scrim of its maker's intentions), became an anthologizable wrestling match. Though far from the most influential critic in terms of box office—Vincent Canby wielded a mightier sword in that respect—Kael so terrified Hollywood executives that they attempted, once, to bring her into their fold and experimented with a doomed development deal. Smarting from Kael's one-paragraph dismissal of Star Wars as "plodding" and "exhausting, too, like taking a pack of kids to the circus," George Lucas even named Willow's arch-villain Kael.
What other American film reviewer—without the benefit of ever actually writing a full-length book—became so famous for his or her opinions? Kael was known for her withering assbites, but her extraordinary handstand over Last Tango in Paris ("Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?") dates horribly, and she was too quickly forgiven for singing hosannas about a director's cut of Altman's Nashville no one else got to see. Every reviewer digs cesspool ditches that he or she cannot help but fall into decades later, but few go as far toward the earth's core as Kael did in making claims for, say, De Palma's The Fury or Reed's Oliver! Still, looking back over her oeuvre, Kael was often right when it was important: She witnessed the peaking moments of Godard, Buñuel, Antonioni, Bergman, Altman, Bertolucci, Coppola, Wiseman, and Scorsese, and yawped approval.
It's also stunning to ponder the amount of films she didn't review. From 1961 to 1980, this most hallowed of cineastical judgment-makers never critiqued a single new film by Samuel Fuller, Andrei Tarkovsky, Jacques Rivette, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Andrzej Wajda, Miklós Jancsó, Jean-Pierre Melville, Monte Hellman, Ermanno Olmi, Dusan Makavejev, Jean-Marie Straub, or Sergei Paradjanov. As an avid Kael consumer from high school—I'd read her long, ropey, luridly subjective reviews at the newsstand and then put The New Yorker back on the rack—I loved her for her chutzpah. She launched at a movie like a feckless boxer, taking as long as she needed to rationally explain her wholly irrational reactions, and caring little if the process was bloody, aimless, and cruel. (Kael's castigation of directors for making obvious thematic statements could just as easily be aimed at Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Renoir.) More than anything, Kael's ham-and-egger energy opened a conversational loop in your head, and in the '60s and '70s, conversation was what movies were for. (She was particularly awake to the gritty American New Wave, believing as we all did that Hollywood had finally, irrevocably grown up.) Virtually Whitman-like in her rangy meanderings and obsession with the visceral and sensual, she was a critic who'd found her moment—imagine Kael trying to make her special sort of sense of this year's movies. Her breathless blathering about a movie she adored—and no one's world ever shook, rattled, and rolled after a good movie like Kael's did—was emblematic of its present: a lovely lost age when a love for movies was a Romantic passion, a lantern-lit children's crusade that went with first love, sex, dope, and freedom like cigarettes go with coffee....
Continued...:
NOTE: The above was originally posted, by an AOL user, without attribution. Because Atkinson's piece is so strong, I'm going to leave it here. But no more comments from this person will be allowed.
To come down hard on either side of the love/hate-Kael divide replicates, I believe, her most destructive legacy as a critic: the brutally exclusionary stance towards anyone who wasn't on side (a tendency noted by many other contributors to this post). I think it's needless to pay the customary obeisance to her literary ability (which was considerable) when the far more serious issue is the number of critical avenues she sought to cut off. Jonathan Rosenbaum has written persuasively of the extremely limited frame of reference she brought to film writing, and her enchantment with her own voice - at the expense or the actual film under consideration - has passed on to her acolytes, both direct and indirect (the dreaded AW being only the most obvious example).
Personal experiences aside, of course, I've found there's little to learn in Kael's writings except aggressive rhetorical tactics - certainly handy, but not of much use in divining what the film before us is. Kael's ultimate cause was the freezing of "taste" at a certain level of development, which has validated legions of the uninformed and uninterested in the sovereignty of their own undernourished ideas of cinema's capabilites - just look at her successor in the august pages of the New Yorker, Anthony Lane.
My opening caution against one-sidedness has naturally been revealed as a sham by this point. But while I don't want to retreat into singing the praises of Kael's evident virtues, I will note, in an attempt at moderation, that the ultimate effects of Kael's writing (as Schrader points out) were neither within her control nor, perhaps, her intentions - Marx isn't to blame for Marxists, after all...
I read that Adler piece a while back, (in a rather dull part of Toronto, paid $3 online for it, no one with me except a geriatric cat who did not seem to have a fully formed opinion on Kael). Anyway, it is a remarkable example of how to insert the stiletto, down to mocking stylistic tics like Kael's fondness for rhetorical questions. But the memory of Adler's attack has faded, despite the truth of a lot of her criticism. I don't read Kael to agree with her or even necessarily to argue with her. I read her because she jump-starts my critical thinking. She is capable of raising a dozen points worth pondering in a single essay, even if one point is appallingly silly. Maybe even *especially* when one point is appallingly silly.
There never was a donut shop on the corner of 3rd Avenue and 14th Street.
Two people can, however, read something over each other's shoulders, but not at the same time. You must alternate, the person in front jumping to the back and vice versa. Awkward and seemingly pointless, but possible.
Responding to Phillip Kelly, yes, Schrader once loved Kael. He was basically her disciple. However, in the "Canon Fodder" article that I mentioned he called her ideas about film, when it came to her views about trash and art and the nature of film "not only wrong-headed but deleterious" (36) and assessed of "Trash, Art and the Movies" that "it remains a hugely influential essay, now for negative reasons" (36). He goes on to criticize his mentor saying, "Kael set in motion the legitimization of trash: ideas float obliquely through culture, and once that idea took root - there was no turning back. Kael was writing during the most artistically vibrant era of film's short history. I don't think she imagined that trash would actually prevail. She's become, unwittingly, the Victor Frankentstein of film criticism" (36). He continues, calling Kael's most influential and noted work as "yet another in a series of 20th-century attempts to avoid judging art, particularly popular art, as 'art'" (36). Therefore, while I'm aware that Schrader definitely admired Kael earlier in his career, as of September 2006, he appears to have had a retrospective change of heart.
Nomi: That's perfect. I don't believe Gary Indiana and Susan Sontag ever hung out in a donut shop, anyway. If anything, it would have been a doughnut shop.
Josh: Thank you for a terrific, beautifully written and sharply observed overview of Kael's career! I've been planning to write something myself about how Kael was, in her writing, just as much an auteurist as Sarris, despite her protests.
I liked Josh's observant overview of Kael's career too: I loved it even more the first time (word for word) in Michael Atkinson's Voice obit back in '01. I guess if you're gonna swipe prose, Atkinson's is pretty solid.
JE: Thanks, Sean. I'll fix that!
Not only is the Adler piece almost entirely forgotten, even more obscure was the revelation that it was actually written by 4-5 people.
While I disagree with many of Kael's opinions, her eye was very precise and she still stands head and shoulders above all other reviewers from the period.
Gary Indiana sure has a lot of hate.
Gary Indiana's piece I found to be the most accurate with regards to Kael.(But why not publish the whole thing?) Found the indomitable length and patronising tones of Kael's reviews (more often than not) close to unbearable. Round in round in circles she went-stating the same thing over and over again.
Paul Schrader says:
Not long before she died, Pauline remarked to a friend, "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture."
My question is this:
Is there some interview with or article by some person X where person X actually says:
As Pauline Kael said to ME just before she died "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture."
I don't believe she ever really said that. It's too pat - like David Hume or Bertrand Russell converting th Christianity on their death beds, etc. It's the kind of thing people make up and then it goes around forever. I want to see the evidence.