"Pauline Kael said it was 'meditative', but I fell asleep."

I'll have to think about the Destroyables, I seem to have forgotten most of them.

Also, Ruiz movies always send me to sleep. His new French one sounds good, tho' (if I had a euro for every time I said that to myself...)

I hate to be conventional but the best of these types of movies is certainly 2001, and L'avventura is not far behind. L'avventura is particularly frustrating sometimes - "Quit standing around!"

I haven't but it seems interesting - 198 minutes of daily chores and activities.

Jeanne Dielman is best film ever made obv (I haven't seen it)

And don't forget Carl Dreyer people! The actors seem like they are sleep walking in Ordert and Gertrud.

The best way to watch these kind of films (at least for me) is slightly drunk. It took me 4 tries to get through Andrei Rublev on DVD before I figured that out.

Barry Lyndon = odd experience but enjoyable.

Also two people mentioned equally as good movies, Barry Lydon & Yi-YI. Both are excellent.

Destroy: Can't think of one....

My current beef with Kael is her frequent implication that Robert Altman films are laugh riots. I enjoy them but they don't inspire me to freak out like some Def Comedy Jam audience member.

The protagonist cleans her oven. Twice. It's real good.

Bela Tarr's 9-hour (?) Satantango opens with a 10-minute tracking shot of a rural landscape, some cows, etc.

>Rohmer's 'Green Ray' is like watching paint dry though.

It's a great human comedy, and quoting that Night Moves "paint dry" line overlooks that a Francophile like Arthur Penn probably likes Rohmer, and the dis is supposed to illustrate that the Hackman character is a regular-guy philistine.

uh.

wtf?

*The Beautiful Troublemaker (La Belle noiseuse). Four hours about the making of one painting. Very slow, but brilliant.

*The aforementioned Eureka, Mother and Son, and Stalker.

*Beau travail. Not much dialogue here, but manages to convey what it has to say perfectly through images.

*L'Humanité. One of the most difficult "great films" I've seen, but in the end rewarding.

Destroy:

*Distant (Uzak). Has some good scenes, but all in all I didn't feel for it.

I wasn't completely on the film's wavelength, but Distant did have what I've been calling my favorite single shot of any movie I saw last year: that abandoned ship lying on its side in the harbor, rolling back and forth with the waves as snow clings to its masts.

decent... but not as great as "The Quince Tree Sun" ( which has similar subject matter but without the portentiousness")

i agree with the rest of Tuomas's and would like to see L"humanite again.

This thread also needs some Cassavetes action. "Shadows" and "Faces" are both quite slow.

See Jeanne Dielman anyway you can eventually, but a screening would add much.

L'humanite had some interesting stuff before turning into quite the ridiculous thing, but it was his follow-up (Twentynine Palms) where Bruno Dumont showed himself to be a real fraud.

btw yeah -- kael was someone who never dug 'meditative' film. she liked brian depalma!

I thought this film was hilarious but I'm not sure if I was meant to. No-one else in the cinema did anyway.

I thought La Belle noiseuse had too much plot and activity. I expected it to be much more 'just' painting.

Search: La Mamon et la Putain

Something is now compelling me to say
Search: Marguerite Duras' India Song and The Truck

>kael was someone who never dug 'meditative' film

NEVER is rather absolute. I'm pretty sure Kael liked some Antonioni, and if they qualify as 'meditative,' Renoir, Rossellini, etc.

Subtitles are impossible to read at least half the time. (Luckily, dialogue accounts for probably a collective 15 minutes of the three-hour-plus film.)

This is so great.

Yes. (Have seen, that is.)

If so, would you consider the image quality at least adequate to drop $20 on the thing, or no?

No. It will impugn your memory of that fantastic-sounding viewing experience.

...All right, ONE more thing: has anyone ever seen Last Year at Marienbad? It's reportedly incredibly slow, and weirdly skewed w/r/t character and narrative, but also totally worthwhile.

its worthwhile, but not nearly my favorite of resnais'. hiroshima mon amour is so much better in my opinion.

Ha, Ken, I saw these the last two Tuesdays at the French Institute -- last night with John Waters discussing The Truck with Kent Jones of Film Comment! Hadn't seen any of hers (unless Hiroshima Mon Amour counts) before, and it'll be awhile before I try anymore. India Song really seems to stop time, but when Michel Lonsdale starts his 10-minute offscreen bellowing wail, omigod.
...Jeanne Dielman is paced like Run Lola Run by comparison.

Waters was funny ("They talk about the characters falling asleep! Very brave") and Jones suggested a US remake with Vin Diesel and Kathy Bates. And it was mentioned that Kael gave The Truck one of its few good NY reviews in '77.

Oh, I see.

and also to test my own boredomometer -- which is capricious of course (AND THAT'S HOW I LIKE IT)

ie TS: bein aged and havin less TIME for this kind of thing vs. bein aged and apprecitatin a good long sit down and doze

Actually-although I cleverly refrained from saying so in my first post- I love Le Camion. India Song I found a little tough-going, but, as with the corresponding moments in Fassbinder movies, I laughed along with the cruel godlike filmmaker at Lonsdale's embarrassing outburst.

Kiarostami
Koreeda

destroy: ulysses' gaze (which i couldn't get more than an hour into, though it did have some wonderful shots)

People above do not know what slow films are.

search: l'avventura, in the mood for love
destroy: fanny and alexander

one more to destroy: russian ark

fanny and alexander is one of those things i have forgotten so much of i start to wonder if i am having memory issues: it was six hours long, and there was a fire, and possibly a lesbian?

i liked russian ark, though

there was everything, there was lyfe

i also like russian ark

Search: Seventh Continent (lots of Haneke actually)
Avoid: Inland Empire - unless you really like David Lynch, then you might like it.

what's that hungarian one that's like 8 hrs long

begins with an s......

destroy: ulysses' gaze (which i couldn't get more than an hour into, though it did have some wonderful shots)

― gear

oh man, i made it all the way to the end(over 3 hours iirc)
terrible

bela tarr's satantango! i went to see it by accident once. i made it through 3 hours but i was too hungry to go on.

netflix keeps recommending the Decalogue to me, is it worth seeing?

bela tarr's satantango! i went to see it by accident once

haha how can u wind up seeing something like this "by accident"??? were u looking for the other 8 hour hungarian epic that was playing and got the titles confused???

decalogue is enh

i haven't seen it but i want to. but it's 10 parts, not one 10-hour thing, so maybe it would be ok.

(xp)

well someone told me it was good, "but long" (lol) and i usually pay close attention to how long something is but for some reason i didn't even look before i went. i was like "that's weird that this starts at noon but ok" ughhhhhhhhhhh

also the guy talking before it announced how many reels it was, so every time a reel was over i was like "ok only x reels left." it was impossible.

i like the parts of decalogue i've seen, like 5-6. can you get it in parts?

yeah iirc the dvds have a couple parts on them each?

at least you didn't have to see it for a class ... our college's film studies program - the intro classes anyway - were almost entirely about testing the students' patience. It was very effective at weeding out people that just liked movies. Probably the most excruciating were Wavelength and Laura Mulvey's Riddles of the Sphinx.

Ashes of Time was pretty slow/good as I remember

the dvd set is set up like a tv on dvd thing - couple of episodes a disc pretty sure. also i mean obv its arresting and theres a lot there but its just pretty tedious and hard to invest in i think. and its kind of a trap because i think its a "better" to watch them all so u feel obligated but theyre pretty same-y too

I think I love most of the movies on this thread. I like to wrassle with unwieldy cinema.

i think the guy said satantango has less than 100 cuts in the entire 7.5 hours too. so a lot of it is just like, watching it rain over a muddy field

i would actually attempt to watch it again, but not in one day

xxpost I especially like Satantango, Inland Empire and Jeanne Dielman.

destroy: fanny and alexander

so wrong.

i really liked decalog and inland empire and andrei rublev too, f all u haters

former was pretentious 17 year old me's usual answer for "what's your favourite film". number of friends i made by doing this: none, ever

I will echo the statement/s upthread about the bell maker sequence at the end of Andrei Rublev. The whole film is A+ fantastic, but that finale is near transcendent.

destroy: fanny and alexander

so wrong.

― circa1916, Sunday, July 5, 2009 1:53 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yeah i know i'm the only one who hates this movie.

"Fanny" is nothing in the movie; it should have been called Alexander/

I especially like Satantango, Inland Empire and Jeanne Dielman.

co-sign on all of these

one more to destroy: the leopard (more because i don't get it, not because it's bad)

first 2 hours of the leopard are a bore, 3rd one is great.

This is a good thread for my Michael Snow story. A friend and I went to see Back and Forth at the AGO sometime in the mid-80s. Snow was there to speak after the film. After a brief intro, the floor was opened for questions. Dead silence--after an hour of watching a continuous pan, followed by a couple of minutes of Snow's somewhat chilly personality, I think everyone was intimidated. So my friend leans over and whispers, "Ask him what he thought of Ghostbusters." I had the worst, most awkward giggling fit of my life; the theatre stayed silent, and I practically had to wrap my coat around my head to avoid detection.

an hour of watching a continuous pan

Hate to be nitpicky but it's not a continuous pan.

I saw him earlier this decade and found him to be very warm and inviting. Maybe that has something to do with older age. Or maybe it's because he was speaking in French. Then again, he wasn't around for the screening of Presents... which is much harder to take than <--->.

so what did he think of ghostbusters

didn't like l'avventura, LOVE Fanny and Alexander though I've only seen the standard film version, not the 5+whatever hour TV version.

i stand by my ulysses' gaze comment

fanny and alexander is dope

s: time out

man, this thread is really making me wanna see Andrei Rublev. i've loved the other Tarkovsky movies i've seen.

not sure if someone already said this, but Tokyo Story(!).

also, i think these fit, some might disagree: Through a Glass Darkly, Mouchette, The Trial, Eraserhead (and any other Lynch you might wanna include, including Inland Empire), Aguirre, Days of Heaven, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Sunset Boulevard.

i thought it was odd to see Barry Lyndon on this thread, i mean it is really long and there are some scenes that are drawn out, but its so freaking funny and entertaining and poignant.

in my experience these types of movies work waaaaay better when you watch them alone. its hard to relax enough to really enjoy them when other people are around, even if everyone is enjoying it, i find its hard to really forget yourself and get lost in it.

i watched a 4-hour japanese movie about upskirts and boners yesterday

"meditative" is a pretty great euphemism

andrei rublev is my fave of the tarkovskys i've seen. mirror bored me stiff.

Mouchette is pretty great.

i liked mirror too

otoh:

tarkovsky movies i have dozed off at least slightly at some point in their duration —

mirror
andrei rublev
solaris
stalker

tarkovsky movies i remained conscious throughout their entire duration —

the sacrifice

so, you know, even i don't really trust my opinions on tarkovsky

(i mean if i tried to think about him at all hard, i think i would be hovering around the idea that boredom is sometimes necessary and even aesthetically interesting, which is tbh what this whole sub-stratum of narrative film the thread's defining is about right? ... right?)

to me there is a difference between interesting boredom (sounds contradictory, but i think its true) and frustrating boredom. frustrating boredom is when i'm irritated and just not going with the flow of the movie at all and i'm just like wtf is wrong with these characters and why is this even happening (e.g. synecdoche, ny). interesting boredom is when nothing is happening, but i'm in love with the place that i'm in while nothing is happening, its like being at a boring nightclub vs being at a boring beach.

i watched a 4-hour japanese movie about upskirts and boners yesterday

I'll be watching this too, soon. Am I going to want my four hours back?

meditative? more like sed(it)ative!

otm! these kinds of movies are some of my favorites not because they're "difficult" but because they're the opposite, like people-watching somewhere just hanging out. xx-post

xp karl: yeah, I found Inland Empire to be an example of frustrating boredom - that didn't result in any sort of pay off. Haneke is the pro of frustrating boredom with pay off.

i felt almost the exact opposite. Lynch basically always has payoff for me big time, whereas Haneke sometimes comes across as so moralizing and smug i just want to die (really thinking of seventh continent here, i liked funny games and cache)

though i can understand why someone wouldn't like inland empire. i guess i just love lynch no matter what, idk, its not like i can really explain why anyone should like it, but i don't think its empty.

to me there is a difference between interesting boredom (sounds contradictory, but i think its true) and frustrating boredom. frustrating boredom is when i'm irritated and just not going with the flow of the movie at all and i'm just like wtf is wrong with these characters and why is this even happening (e.g. synecdoche, ny). interesting boredom is when nothing is happening, but i'm in love with the place that i'm in while nothing is happening, its like being at a boring nightclub vs being at a boring beach.

qft, and beautifully put (though i liked synecdoche)

xp karl: I can see where you're coming from re Haneke and Lynch. I think it's just a difference in sensibility. I just don't have a lot of patience for what I see as Lynch's gratuitous surrealism, and maybe it's because I'm not a strong proponent of that style/aesthetic.

I loved pretty much every movie Lynch made up to, say, 1995, but his newer stuff kinda bores me for some reason. Inland Empire was a rare example of a Lynch movie I couldn't finish watching.

xpost: yeah, understandable. though tbh i don't really associate lynch with other surrealists. i'm not in love with surrealism as a whole, but i have infinite patience for lynch, can't say why exactly, i'd have to think about it.

i don't think haneke ever does this.

or lynch tbh

true.

I think I love most of the movies on this thread. I like to wrassle with unwieldy cinema.

― bad crack (Eric H.), Saturday, July 4, 2009 9:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

me too. only thing is i HAVE to do it in the cinema. on home video i just cannot stay focused. too many distractions.

on the rare occasion that lynch draws out a scene to great length his intention is to draw out the dread and anxiety inherent in the scene and draw out your inner fears.

xpost

me too. only thing is i HAVE to do it in the cinema. on home video i just cannot stay focused. too many distractions.

― Michael tapeworm much talent for the future (s1ocki), Sunday, July 5, 2009 5:52 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is exactly my problem and why i have never gotten through andrei rublev even though i know i would love it

I'm the reverse -- sitting through long, slow movies in the theater is too distracting -- the other people, the fact I can't smoke or eat whatever I want, etc.

Jeanne Dielman video cooking contest!!!

http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1223

omg

i have to enter this

i make a dope meatloaf and i have watched this entire movie so

just don't turn tricks. Someone will suffer.

can i stab someone?

*SPOILER*

Oh darn it.

After suffering through Liverpool, it dawned on me that my days of tolerance for this sort of movie may finally be reaching an end.

Of course, it could be the whole home video thing s1ok referred to above. Maybe in a theater I'd have found the thing as transplendent as most everyone else whose opinions I usually respect did.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=4476
http://www.thehousenextdooronline.com/2009/09/liverpool.html
http://www.timeout.com/film/newyork/reviews/85797/liverpool.html

The title to this thread is funny because it's this type of shit that Pauline Kael would call out for being full of hot air 9/10 times. I also wonder if she ever got lazy enough to call any movie "meditative."

otm

apparently for kael, "meditative" = satyajit ray

The rhythm of his films seems not slow but, rather, meditative, as if the viewer could see the present as part of the past and could already reflect on what is going on.

-- 3/17/73, on Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest

Ray gives the action the distilled, meditative expressiveness that he alone of all directors seems able to give

-- 11/10/75, on Satyajit Ray's Distant Thunder

Haha. Thank you.

exactly what "sort" of movie, Eric? I wasn't thrilled w/ Liverpool but thought it was OK.

btw that Kael mini-reviews site has been taken down on Geocities.

(I mean, somehow Esther Kahn didn't make you want to go comatose)

EK had a plot, of sorts.

Again, this might be in part ugly video screener getting in the way. If there's something going on in the cinematography of Liverpool, I was blinded to it.

Was just thinking of recording Old Joy, coming up on TV next week, but then I saw the word "meditative" and thought of this thread.

maybe "meditative", but hardly boring. it's good, watch it!

This week I watched a couple of movies that fit this thread. L'avventura and Dead Man. Both had promising openings but were on the boring side tbh.

I've seen films by both those directors that were much more boring.

Ha.

I once scared off a guy who was trying to pick me up at a National Gallery screening by saying that anyone who preferred Lizaveta Markova to Valley of the Bees was prizing quantity over quality.

If I had tried to watch Silent Light in a theater, rather than on DVD, I'm sure I would have walked out in exasperation. And I DID walk out of The Tree of Life--the cosmos-and-dinosaurs sequence was great, but YET ANOTHER sequence establishing that Brad Pitt's character was disappointed with his life, and taking it out by being an exceptionally strict father....

Silent Light is deadly and has stopped me from checking out anything else by Reygadas to date.

Walking out of The Tree of Life because it was too heavy handed about Brad Pitt being disappointed with his life and taking it out on his family is seriously hilarious and WTF to me.

Search: Marguerite Duras' India Song and The Truck
― Ken L (Ken L), Friday, May 20, 2005 11:32 AM (9 years ago)

Saw India Song last night. Viscerally hated it. I was in such a hurry to vacate the theatre, I forgot my sunglasses. I'm all for Jeanne Dielman and Satantango; this was brutal.

That was the most difficult movie I've ever sat through, with the possible sole exception of a Scottish documentary on healing waters

Still kind of wonder if S. Ray was just some sort of exceptional outlier in Kael's viewing history.

More so than RW Fassbinder?

Was gonna say, at least there is the diva worship, but ...

Actually, going by India Song, I'm astounded she reviewed Le Camion so positively. I don't know, maybe they're very different. If they're not...India Song struck me as "The Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" turned into a movie.

The Apu films strike me as pretty close to Truffaut in tone. (Why I'm baffled that Truffaut was so condescending towards Pather Panchali.)

After re-listening to that Kael-McDonald-Simon recording from '63 again, it seems to me there were a lot of defenders of western civilization that were pretty condescending toward Ray.

A charitable interpretation would be that Truffaut felt threatened by Satyajit Ray, subliminally or otherwise and covered it up by adopting the guise of a stereotypical French snob.

Been trying to put my finger on my problem with PK for a while, think it comes down to something like this. She clearly had a talent for communicating her enthusiasm that is almost, um, seductive, and a way with words, an ability to write well-constructed, memorable sentences in idiomatic English that could run rings, not to mention circles and squares, around most of her contemporaries. But in the end there is some unforgivable flaw in her critical thinking. Perhaps it is because there is some ideal of a well-functioning critical mind, or maybe of any mind, that one has to learn to trust one's instincts but at the same time monitor them with one's analytic mind, to make corrections and provide explanations, to name a few of the many functions involved in this balancing act. Her general approach as I understand it, to watch everything only once, then run home to type out a fever dream to bowl the readers over with an ever more garrulous outpouring of Paulinist Prose (okay maybe there was some editing or revising of the words but not of the opinion), is not really a system, it can't be tinkered with or fixed once it starts misfiring and veering astray. The end result becomes a Cult of Personality of The Gatekeeper, requiring a few well-chosen favorites, old and new, to bestow praise on while others are vilified and not permitted to enter the city walls. As a case in point, maybe if she had anything like a modicum of self-reflection and correction, at least as a critic, she might have recovered from the trauma she experienced when she Went Hollywood and discovered that the Studio Bosses Had No Clothes.

On another note, have you guys heard that My Favorite song that references Hiroshima Mon Amour?

"Burning Hearts" is what it's called. Kind of amazing, ineffable. Art-damaged, Smiths-damaged Long Island kids reimagine fallout-damaged star-crossed lovers as first imagined by imperialism-damaged cinema-saving French aesthetes.

But perhaps I am overrating. Unlike PK, or at least my impression thereof, if I have even the slightest sense of having overpraised something, then according to some variant of Newton's Third Law I have to push in the other direction and distance myself from it.

Kael was ultimately incurious in a distressing way

applaud her for smelling out Celine & Julie tho

That's a more concise way to put it

I prefer to regard her as Gore Vidal's Burr did John Adams: what he knew he knew well; what he didn't he could hardly imagine.

She's one of the great essayists of the century more than a mobie writer.

If they're not...India Song struck me as "The Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties" turned into a movie.

Sorry what does this mean?!

Love to watch The Truck someday..

Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Party was famous dismissive PK put down of most Euro art film, clevering smiting at least two giants, Bergman and Antonioni, along with various fellow travelers, with one blow. This is implicitly in opposition to her love and approval of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang "vital" life-affirming cinema.

Keep in mind that she adored L'Avventura and praised several Bergman films after the essay, notably Shame and The Magic Flute. How La Notte and L'Eclisse diluted the first film's legacy she doesn't say since listing their the strengths and flaws require more adumbration than she's willing to give. These days I prefer L'Eclisse myself because it's zippier and faster and Alain Delon.

Yeah, in the beginning she was more open to that stuff but at some point it became de riguer for her to knock it presumably because it appealed to the effete East Coast intelligentsia or something like that.

Truth be told, there was a time long ago when I might have been under her thrall, but I finally had to rebel, like Sandy Stranger had to rebel against Miss Jean Brodie.

De rigueur

There's no reason to fuss over it though – unless pockets of Paulette recidivism still cause trouble. I ignore Christgau's blind spots and weaknesses too.

B-b-but Xgau has much more catholic tastes and obviously revisits, relistens and reevaluates otherwise how would he be able to change the Original Grade?

Sure. But Edmund Wilson could hardly read poetry and Greil Marcus hyperventilates in the presence of Elvis Costello. At this point I tolerate her crochets.

I'm with Alfred (even though I have to look up "crochets"...they all knit?). All these people we argue about--Kael, Marcus, Christgau, Bill James on ILB--they've all got their blind spots, quirks, and mannerisms. So do I, so does everyone. What I get from them on the other side far outweighs any of that. If you don't take anything positive away, then yes, I'm sure the blind spots, quirks, mannerisms, and knitting are exasperating.

(I actually wasn't even thinking about Kael when I revived this--just looking for a thread to express my dumbfoundedness over India Song, and a search turned up this one.)

Pauline Kael is a bit more interesting than boredom.

Does Oxford have a Very Short Introduction to boredom yet?

spiral_scratch.embed

She's one of the great essayists of the century more than a movie writer.

I guess this is why I'm not an aesthete; I don't care how pretty the pirouette is if it's bullshit at the core.

unless pockets of Paulette recidivism still cause trouble.

I mentioned her to a rather peripatetic ex-critic not long ago; he put a finger in his mouth and made a gagging sound. Qualifies?

he put a finger in his mouth and made a gagging sound.

when he saw you coming?

quoting Addison deWitt's outtakes now, i see

champion to champion

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PlrXXfn9_Cg/SrO5syYFA5I/AAAAAAAACF4/BN111w9zfNQ/s1600-h/2341973,57RcmBk1FkB4xOPiPAtbxXaZ8losuKFZ4EpfFXDwEb3UuQZpM6LPlArm0UA5ENB2KSQKrAPtYcJjzPcJVNgyTw%3D%3D.jpg

http://media.web.britannica.com/eb-media/06/69106-004-3B98C103.jpg

And I don't care how spotless a movie's diaper is if it doesn't have a few flowers on it.

out of a medieval melodrama!

Are the medievalists back from Iceland yet?

she's a weird critic because she's at her worst when she loves something

Maybe not "worst," but I agree her raves are less convincing than her pans.

to make this thread not all about PK but "meditative" too, i actually did fall asleep during Norte, the End of History

Saw India Song last night. Viscerally hated it. I was in such a hurry to vacate the theatre, I forgot my sunglasses.

I really wish clemenza could see Duras' Nathalie Granger as i did tonight. It makes India Song look like Bringing Up Baby.

How great is it that Kael praised El Camion in the same column in which she savaged Star Wars?

Even a broken clock, etc. *ducks*

Been trying to put my finger on my problem with PK for a while, think it comes down to something like this. She clearly had a talent for communicating her enthusiasm that is almost, um, seductive, and a way with words, an ability to write well-constructed, memorable sentences in idiomatic English that could run rings, not to mention circles and squares, around most of her contemporaries. But in the end there is some unforgivable flaw in her critical thinking. Perhaps it is because there is some ideal of a well-functioning critical mind, or maybe of any mind, that one has to learn to trust one's instincts but at the same time monitor them with one's analytic mind, to make corrections and provide explanations, to name a few of the many functions involved in this balancing act. Her general approach as I understand it, to watch everything only once, then run home to type out a fever dream to bowl the readers over with an ever more garrulous outpouring of Paulinist Prose (okay maybe there was some editing or revising of the words but not of the opinion), is not really a system, it can't be tinkered with or fixed once it starts misfiring and veering astray. The end result becomes a Cult of Personality of The Gatekeeper, requiring a few well-chosen favorites, old and new, to bestow praise on while others are vilified and not permitted to enter the city walls. As a case in point, maybe if she had anything like a modicum of self-reflection and correction, at least as a critic, she might have recovered from the trauma she experienced when she Went Hollywood and discovered that the Studio Bosses Had No Clothes.

― I Don't Zing Like Nobody (James Redd and the Blecchs), Thursday, July 24, 2014 5:00 AM (2 months ago)

this is a great post, and pretty much otm.

tho i think kael's early work -- the stuff collected in "i lost it at the movies," and i think her second collection as well -- is still really great and mostly avoids the pitfalls you describe.

I don't disagree with anything in James' (yes, excellent) post, and to count her as a major, or even your biggest, influence does not mean you're oblivious to his reservations. She had a way of doing things, and you take that into account. To me, the sainted Manny Farber had his own kind of breathlessness too.

i think i'd need some examples of other critics showing off this analytic self-monitoring system in their later years before i buy that this is what negatively distinguishes her from her peers

As a case in point, maybe if she had anything like a modicum of self-reflection and correction, at least as a critic, she might have recovered from the trauma she experienced when she Went Hollywood and discovered that the Studio Bosses Had No Clothes.

what makes you think she suffered from a trauma the rest of her life? I've said this already but her writing shows no loss of verve in the eighties.

Besides, the first essay in her first book is this Didion-esque account of California phonies. I don't think it's an inhuman reaction when she got a chance to work in Hollywood it was worse than she expected.

she abused the second person for sure, but when guys talk about her like this whirling dervish who lacked their critical distance and intellectual restraint it just sounds like a chickenshit, self-flattering way to disqualify her prose despite its relative memorability and influence. "yes, i can't compete with her language and passion, but i'm smarter, trust me."

"after all, she liked that DePalma movie"

Plus, critics are artists too and thus lack the Olympian detachment and capacity for self-analysis that no one has.

it feels like her willingness to be direct, to express her enthusiasms without intellectual hedges, without trying to fit everything into a system, is what lets people who've in no way proven their intellectual superiority, talk about her like an idiot savant. "what does she know, she only sees movies once" - as if watching a movie multiple times means you know anything more than what's on the screen.

again, i do think she was a presumptuous bully - while you only need to see a movie once to convey to the reader what it was like to see the movie for the first time, you might want to employ diligent fact-checking - but nobody who says something was broken in her critical mind has any right to claim THIS is what made her stand apart.

Plus, critics are artists too and thus lack the Olympian detachment and capacity for self-analysis that no one has.

disqualify her prose despite its relative memorability and influence. "yes, i can't compete with her language and passion, but i'm /smarter/, trust me."

so she had a flaw in her critical mind because she didn't change the b+ to an a- when she compiled 5001 nights at the movies?

Of course she saw movies more than once. In one of her earliest essays she makes a casual remark about how certain movies with average visuals like All About Eve look great on TV.

"grrr, she hasn't admitted that nashville ain't all that in the final edit? something is broken in her brain!!!"

unlike ebert, with that fine system that allowed him to truly know what were The Great Movies

Plus, assuming she didn't rewatch stuff, if you're a critic reviewing at the pace she does, you don't often rewatch old stuff! And in the pre-VHS/cable days it was hard. Why waste time watching a B-list John Farrow film to see if it deserves reevaluation when you can watch Bertolucci?

because is how you prove you are king dick of the auteur theory

As much as I wish she had revisited and (when necessary) revised opinions, the one thing I'll say, based on my own writing, is that it's the ultimate rabbit-hole. I do it way too much when it comes to music, and I often think "What difference does it make that in 2014 I'm sick of this song that I once loved? Am I really accomplishing anything in pointing this out?"

Exactly. "I don't rewatch movies!" was to provoke poor Andrew Sarris.

I think there's a way to do that without overdoing it. Kauffmann was excellent in that regard.

in her mind to rewatch Hurry Sundown for the sake of proving Preminger was a Great Director was less fun than poking the Sarris tiger.

while most would pray sarris submitted his obituary of pauline before 9/11 (she died on september 3rd, the observer street date was the 17th), i kinda hope he was describing the bruises she inflicted on him that week.

without trying to fit everything into a /system/,

is what lets people who've in no way proven their intellectual superiority, talk about her like an idiot savant.

"what does she know, she only sees movies once" - as if watching a movie multiple times means you know anything more than what's on the screen.

In what other art form is okay to write about something after experiencing it only once?

James, seriouslY?

I don't think Hurry Sundown had a future with her nohow. I guess the kind of film I would have most liked to see her to back to were her oddball enthusiasms, something like Shoot the Moon. When she reviews Mississippi Burning a few years later, a brief mention of whether or not the film held up for her. She was so different than most critics there, I think that's of value.

"go back to"

Last post was xpost. So the argument is now: she really did rewatch stuff, she was just trying to tick Andy off and have the last laugh, and if she didn't it was okay because there was another raft of masterpieces waiting to be watched and time waits for no one?

Beyond the number of critics who do the same with books and music, you answered your own question: she saw and wrote so well about that so-called first viewing (which you can believe if you want) that it looks like a fourth.

Okay, I fell into your trap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPxxG31JOCg

with music i prefer critics who listen deeply because if a song is good i plan to hear it more than once, and want to know it holds up over many listens. most movies i'll only see once and therefore i'm cool with critics doing likewise, assuming they've got a good memory or fact-checker

yeah I get that. A song is three minutes, listened to wherever. You gotta make time for movies.

I'll betray my rock-critic heritage here, but investing deeper attention and more repeat visits to a three-minute song than a three-hour film doesn't quite compute for me (realizing that you will, as a practical matter, inevitably do the latter)...Anyway, going to watch The Candidate for the 29th time right now, so proceed apace.

2X speed on the PS3 for DVDs/Blu-Ray is a life-changing w/r/t slow cinema.

Search: George Washington
Destroy: In the Mood

Just remembered something of hers that I did really like: her piece on Satyajit Ray's Devi.

shit, she is still this interesting to you ppl, huh

You were the reviver!

well that was more for Mlle Duras' torture of clemenza

Couldn't you have found something to torture da croupier as well?

I don't see why you'd need to watch or even listen to a song more than once, even if you like the song. Its about getting the moments you need from the thing to make your argument?

I don't see why you'd need to read a Pauline Kael review more than once

But she writes with such language and passion!

Don't subsequent viewings of a great film deepen your engagement with it? I almost always notice new stuff the second, third, and forth time around--usually small stuff, but sometimes my whole perception of the film will shift. Admittedly, I take revisiting favorites to a ridiculous extreme, and obviously that's a separate issue if your job is to review new films as they come out.

Forth and long. Positively Forth Street.

Sure it does. I was mostly talking tackling the qn from the standpoint of giving a considered reaction, which you can do from one viewing.

I like watching films I've enjoyed a few years after my first viewing of them.

Let's see how meditative Norte, The End of History feels.

Not the word I'd use!

It's good tho imo. To pointlessly compare it with another long film from this year, the descent into abjection doesn't feel cheap, idiotic and insulting the way it does in nymphomaniac

The funny thing about this thread title (which I realize is just meant to make a point, and isn't based on a direct quote...I don't think) is that I wonder if Kael ever called a film meditative and intended that as praise. Or if it's a word she ever used at all.

yeah i've always hated this thread title, b/c pauline kael was just about the last critic to call something "meditative," let alone as a word of praise. in fact one thing that makes her writing so exasperating is how little patience she has for films that take their time.

I think we end up debating this point every bump.

I don't like the title because I open the thread each revive looking for a slow cinema s/d & four out of five times it's about this writer I haven't read (who already has 3 threads devoted to her)

Apologies if I've posted this link here before:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-really-long-films

(xxpost) I didn't check earlier in the thread--I don't remember the subject coming up, but maybe it has.

A few random threads:
antonioni
michael snow
tarkovsky's stalker

thx! That listicle is kinda weird, are long films that rare that they have to include trilogies & tetralogies?

internet comes through - The Age of Movies, via google books - "What is distinctive in Ray's work (and it may be linked to Bengali traditions in the arts, and perhaps to Sanskrit), is that sense of imminence - the suspension of the images in a larger context. The rhythm of his films seems not slow but, rather, meditative, as if the viewer could see the present as part of the past and could already reflect on what is going on." (page number omitted)

Looking upthread I see this was also cleared up five years ago. It's groundhog day.

meditative thread. interesting use of repetition.

*insert static footage of water flowing over bent reeds and assorted small manmade objects here*

Except for a couple of middling passages when the camera dozes off as the prisoner's family struggles, Norte, the End of History was excellent. The ending moved me -- and this doesn't often happen.

SPRANG BREAAAAAAAAK

I've seen lots of people insult a film by saying they fell asleep to it, even quite a lot on this forum.
I've never fallen asleep because I was bored by a film, I only seem to fall asleep during films I want to see very badly but I'm just too tired to stay awake.

Is this something regular cinema-goers do? Is it like "this film sucks, I'm quite tired so I'll stay and sleep rather than walk out"?

No idea, but your initial statement is completely otm.

I've definitely drifted off during films that bored me, but--seeing as I regularly drift anyway--I'll agree with you, that it has less to do with the film than my own sleep deprivation.

there are any number of films i love that i find deeply soporific... it was kind of a running joke with my friends in high school that I couldn't make it through a full screening of sanjuro
i'm not sure i've seen the end of a weeraseethakul film but i love him as a director
i missed the middle of lang's Man Hunt last night because the pacing was so measured.
the only time it's a dud is when you're in the theater and someone starts snoring. that sucks.

yeah i fall asleep during films i love all the time, i'm just tired sometimes!

bela tarr - didn't see earlier mentions, this dude is one of the modern masters of the long cut. see 'Werckmeister Harmonies' for decent sampling in a film of reasonable length. watch realtime transit of a truck traveling at 2 mph across a scene. bonus points for giant taxidermied whale and for screenplay by laszlo krasznahorkai

tarr and krasznahorkai line up on a few other projects (at least a couple adaptations of LK's novels) including satantango which runs like 8 hrs.

I fall asleep during every Miyazaki movie and I love them! I look forward to falling asleep during them.

platform by jia zhangke. never again.

Pauline Kael on Marguerite Duras’s The Lorry

Contrasts

“Small and bundled up, her throat covered, her unlined moon face serene, half-smiling, Duras reads aloud the script of a film… Hers is the only performance, and there has never been anything like it: controlling the whole movie visibly, from her position on the screen as creator-star, she is so assured that there is no skittish need for makeup, no nerves, quick gestures, tics. The self-image she presents is that of a woman past deception; she has the grandly simple manner of a sage. Unhurriedly, with the trained patience of authority, she tells the story of her movie-to-be about the woman hitchhiker… [The Lorry] is spiritual autobiography, a life’s-journey, end-of-the-world road movie; it’s a summing up, an endgame. The hitchhiker travels in a winter desert; she’s from anywhere and going nowhere; in motion to stay alive. Reading the script, Duras speaks in the perfect conditional tense, beginning “It would have been a film—therefore, it is a film.” And this tense carries a note of regret: it suggests that the script is to be realized only by our listening and imagining…

…The stillness provides resonance for her lingering words—those drifting thoughts that sound elegant, fated—and for the music, and for her cinematographer Bruno Nuytten’s love-hate vistas of bareness and waste, like the New Jersey Turnpike in pastels. The foreboding melancholy soaks so deep into our consciousness that when the director yanks us back to the room, you may hear yourself gasp at the effrontery of this stoic, contained little woman with her mild, Chairman Mao deadpan…

…When [The Lorry] opens at the New York Film Festival this week, there’s likely to be a repetition of the scene in May at Cannes. After the showing, Marguerite Duras stood at the head of the stairs in the Palais des Festivals facing the crowd in evening clothes, which was yelling insults up at her. People who had walked out were milling around; they’d waited to bait her. It might have been a horrifying exhibition, except that the jeering was an inverted tribute—conceivably, a fulfillment. She was shaken: one could see it in the muscles of her face. But Robespierre himself couldn’t have looked them straighter in the eye. There can’t be much doubt that she enjoys antagonizing the audience, and there is a chicness in earning the public’s hatred. [The Lorry] is a class-act monkeyshine made with absolutely confident artistry. She knows how easy it would be to give people the simple pleasures that they want. Her pride in not making concessions is heroic; it shows in that gleam of placid perversity which makes her such a commanding camera presence.”

New Yorker, September 26 1977

Paul Schrader ponders slow cinema:

Everyone is different, but they all circle around the same techniques and the same concept of time, of duration. What happens when you don’t cut? When you just wait, and the viewer becomes aware that his experience of watching is part of the experience of the film? Your self-awareness of that time, the endurance of that time, becomes part of the experience. Normally films never work like that because they’re trying to convince you of the opposite.

There are still bits of transcendental style. It was a precursor to slow cinema, but it’s not really that slow. A terrific film like Silent Light is closer to transcendental style than slow cinema, but they lump it in with slow cinema now. I just finished directing a film [First Reformed] that I’m trying to do as a quiet film. The film that I last did [Dog Eat Dog] was extremely aggressive and profane. The motto was: Let’s never be boring. Now I’m editing and the mantra is: How can we use boredom to the best effect?

Malick is part of that universe. But you can see Malick running out of gas as his car goes down the road. I don’t think this kind of slow cinema is a cinema with a great future. The more extreme it becomes, the closer it gets to being a dead-end.

https://nowtoronto.com/movies/features/paul-schrader-slow-cinema-is-dying-a-slow-death/

This review of hers, on 2001, is like Manna from heaven for me.

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/pauline-kael-on-2001-a-space-odyssey/

Per the thread title, it's weird how often ppl assume she was some sort of artsy elitist when so many of her most famous pieces are about puncturing arthouse pretension, rightly or wrongly.

"...it’s fun to think about Kubrick really doing every dumb thing he wanted to do, building enormous science fiction sets and equipment, never even bothering to figure out what he was going to do with them."

I was going to say "meet Wes Anderson," but of course she did.

Lav Diaz to thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lav_Diaz#Feature_film

Around 30 films directed to date with an average length of approximately 4 hours. I saw Norte, the End of History (250 minutes) once. It was certainly slow.

One of the best films of the 2010s.

yes! It's on kanopy. I also loved The Woman Who Left from 2016

Please don't talk about Lav Diaz on the Pauline Kael thread.

(I'm making fun of myself here. I've hauled in Pauline Kael on 137 different director threads that have zero to do with her.)

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/12/11/the-current-cinema/

Been reading Avid Reader by Robert Gottlieb, Kael's editor at the New Yorker from 1987 to her retirement. Most definitely wasn't a fan of hers (more the person than her writing; he doesn't say much about the latter). Also gives a short but harrowing account of an intervention he staged for Penelope Gilliat, Kael's (grudging) partner who split "The Current Cinema" with her.

the Erector Set approach to movie-making

irl lol

i do find her central point (the apes to angels thing) incredibly satisfying and otm

i have trouble with the suggestion that the only meaningful difference between Kubrick and Belson is the spectacle of money tho. the relationship is obvious but the equivalence is too reductive imo, scale is an important piece of how we experience art, and so is narrative

Sitting on one of those nice lounge chairs in the Stratford Mall drinking coffee, and a guy around 65 or 70 notices my Going Steady T-shirt, knew it was a Kael book, and we ended up talking about her for 15-20 minutes. For me, that's about as gratifying a No to, I don't know, the direction of the world or something as there could be.

It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway. There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab. Drop up.

i'm sure kael's cali friends were tiresome but this is almost a 180-degree misread. 2001 says that in order to take just one single step on the stairway to wherever the stairway goes to you will first have to escape being murdered by the implacable slasher golem you built out of your own nationalist ape paranoia by slowly strangling it to death while it begs to be allowed to help you. meanwhile everyone who actually does put faith in intelligence and sleep thru the trip is killed.

yeah. i can't imagine 2001 having some kind of message and the message being 'drop up'. i remember hearing that interpretation as part of the mythos of the movie and then when i actually saw it it didn't make any sense. at the very least it's .. full of mixed feelings about 'progress' lol.

I realize now this is not a Kael thread...my last couple of posts should have been elsewhere.

Even this one?

I've hauled in Pauline Kael on 137 different director threads that have zero to do with her.

I don't think I've yet brought her up on 1) any of the yearly Blue Jay threads; 2) the thread I started for diabetes; or 3) the Canadian politics thread. Past that, you never know.