Pauline Kael

it's not like she was against discussing a director's career and having favorites

I always forget she's the Tarantino of critics on this board.
Sarris is only good for dotage jokes. 'tis pity.

I was going to add that she did still criticize those guys on occasion, Body Double being a good example. But she loved The Fury to a degree that far exceeds anything else I've ever read on that film, and, skipping forward, there was an interview I read where she praised Snake Eyes and Mission to Mars. Never saw MTM, but I've seen The Fury and Snake Eyes; to me, that's classic auteurist territory.

have you actually read circles and squares? because reading the fact that she liked less popular depalma movies as "classic auteurist territory" suggests you haven't

Are you really asking me that?

(Oops, the ILX stylebook--I need to add an "Um" or an "Uhh" to indicate disbelief.)

Um, are you really asking me that?

fyi sarris' three premises of "auteur theory"

1. that the technical competence of the director is a criterion of value
2. that the distinguishable personality of the director is a criterion
3. the "ultimate glory of cinema" is the "interior meaning" you get from the "tension between a director's personality and his material.

that kael liked movies you haven't seen anyone else like doesn't make the fact that she found the last two pretty absurd ironic at all.

In a nutshell:

1) One of the things she takes Sarris to task for is constructing a theory whereby you end up praising a director for his worst work;
2) She likes Snake Eyes;
3) Snake Eyes is, for me, a piece of junk;
4) Bingo.

Never saw MTM, but I've seen The Fury and Snake Eyes; to me, that's classic auteurist territory.

Unlike Sarris, though, Kael never defended a movie she herself acknowledged was trash simply because a director shows his "stamp."

From what I remember of Sarris' essay he did impressive rhetorical somersaults to defend a shitty Preminger film for nevertheless showing his personality.

also: admiring a director's work /= auteurism

Da Croupier: Before we get into some long-winded back-and-forth, there's a lot of stuff in "Circles and Squares"; you're approaching it from one angle, I'm approaching for another angle. To say that my angle suggests I haven't even read the piece is just...rude! (And so wrong.)

Unlike Sarris, though, Kael never defended a movie she herself acknowledged was trash simply because a director shows his "stamp."

She may not have said it--I wouldn't expect her to say, "Geez, Andy was right after all"--but that doesn't mean that wasn't what was basically behind her fondness for Snake Eyes. And unless you guys have a pipeline into her brain, I guess we'll never know.

Geez--I love Kael...

btw Sarris isn't useless. You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet is a pretty collection of essays about Old Hollywood.

*pretty good

i'm not approaching it from a different angle, clemenza. i'm pointing out that your "irony" is dependent on ignoring what auteurism actually meant when she critiqued it.

But it also meant what I said above--it didn't mean just one thing.

I'm hardly the first person to ever say this of Kael...

well i figured it was second-hand

Jesus...and I thought you were one of the good people around here.

Didn't want to walk downstairs to get my copy, but I made the trip. "It is an insult to an artist to praise his bad work along with the good; it indicates you are incapable of judging either."

If you think Snake Eyes is as bad as I do, then...Oh, I'm sure you can figure out the rest.

sorry, that was mean of me but "i'm not the first person to make this statement you're calling simplistic" is nagl. again, you're ignoring what a parlor game auteurism was at the time (one of the reasons its definition has watered down so much over the decades) to make a cheap "lol she liked crap too" joke.

Saying that she had a streak of auteurism in her really wasn't meant as a joke; it was just acknowledging something that I and many other people (Sarris included; clearly not you) find ironic. It doesn't make her a bad person. It's almost a mirror image of the irony that Sarris began by celebrating the Edgar G. Ulmers and Phil Karlsons of the world, but if you skip ahead to his recent Top 10s, they're heavy with the kind of stodgy quality films that he once despised. Which may just be age; maybe there's no irony there at all.

of course she had a "streak" of auteurism in her, she acknowledges as much as in the same book where she dares to say she enjoyed Snake Eyes. Anyone conscious of a director's presence enough to have favorites has a "streak" of it. Thing is that Sarris had constructed a whole playground of silly rules on top of this investment in movies as art - and that's what she was trying to dismantle.

And dismantle it she did. Remind me again of what we're arguing about.

You go back and re-read your ellipses, I'm bitter.

There's one very dead lady six feet underground somewhere enjoying this immensely. (Unless she's not: "One guy says auteurist, the other guy says not an auteurist, and I'm lying here thinking, 'Why I am listening to these two dumb fucks argue about whether or not I'm an auteurist?'")

B-b-but da croupier is always right!

Clever allusion to one of her Cassavetes reviews.

Raging Bull!

Where could I find her Bostonians piece?

For Keeps.

4 used from £53.95

clemenza, you should have been at Lincoln Center about 15 years ago when Sarris, Paul Schrader and some others were looking back on the auteur theory debate (Pauline couldn't make it as she was ill). Schrader said "I defy you to watch the output of any one of those golden years!" and "Who are the auteurs of today? Laverne, Opie and Meathead!"

Which I interpreted as him being a world-weary, aging and embittered auteurist rather than a turncoat.

btw Sarris isn't useless.

Missed that earlier. I hope I haven't given that impression; Sarris had a big effect on me too (not as big as Kael), and he's basic reading. My biggest problem with Sarris is simply that I don't think he writes as well as Kael (or Kauffmann, or Simon).

James: That sounds like a great evening. (Also: much appreciated.)

One reason discussions of Kael tend to cheese me off is, here's this person who wrote really long, thoughtful reviews - ones that go over films in so much detail that whether or not I share the same opinion of the film's quality is mostly irrelevant, and people tend to just point out which ones she gave a "thumbs up" to that they'd give a "thumbs down."

And one complaint I do have about her work (which I may have mentioned in another thread): she had a real tendency to use the second person to falsely universalize what were obvious her most personal of opinions. I don't know whether it was a house style or hers, but I prefer "Gunga Din moved me" to "Gunga Din moved you."

Maybe it seemed like that in the context of this discussion, but believe me, I would never reduce Kael to a checklist of what she liked and what she didn't. I've probably read her Raging Bull review a dozen times, and I couldn't disagree with her more about a film.

I should have said "the same opinion of the film's personal value" rather than "quality" - Kael was pretty terrific at accurately predicting the audience for a type of movie and acknowledging what others could get out of it, even if she had no time for it herself.

kael said in an interview that she used 'you' because she thought it sounded less pretentious than 'one.' i think she meant it to be taken in a very super-casual sense, like she was telling you an anecdote over lunch ("you can't believe this shit you're watching!").

not that it really worked all the time -- half the time i want to go "the end of paths of glory didn't make me uncomfortable, dammit!"

Whoa, I should sell my copy of For Keeps on eBay!

Yup--she loved Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, just like (from all reports) she openly campaigned for Driving Miss Daisy over Do the Right Thing for the New York awards that year. When it came to race, either she was pure id or she loved to provoke; she was worlds away from the oncoming political-correctness freight train.

― clemenza, Friday, 17 December 2010 22:34 (Yesterday)

Gotta say I agree with her on DMD.

Eric, THANK YOU for that audio link! I've never heard Simon's voice before, much less in the same room with Kael. Makes me wish I'd seen any of these movies.

Xpost: DMD got a bad rap. Wrong film for the time.

103 New Answers for Pauline Kael? Was she really rough on Tron 2 or something?

finding this to be a pretty compelling thread considering i have never read any film criticism in my life, except for reviews in magazines and things dr. morbius writes about. also lol her name is kinda like a leafy green.

Ha ha. By the way, I really didn't mean to sound so confrontational seven years ago.

Just got the part of the audio where Simon says that from the point of view of a bird, The Birds might be a great film.

I've never heard Simon's voice before

not in his guest shot on The Odd Couple?

'circles and squares' is an incredible essay, in large part because she holds back on the put-downs and concentrates on argument.

See, this baffles me because I think it's shoddily argued. Like much of her work. For me, she's like Lester Bangs - undeniably brilliant writer but wrong wrong bullheadedly WRONG (although Bangs' praise for Metal Box's death disco suggests he might have reversed his rockism had he lived throughout the 1980s...he was listening to The Human League's Dare when he died - did it kill him or was he resurrected as John Leland?)! So wrong, in fact, that the use value of her writing pales in comparison to Sarris'.

Take, for instance, this passage from "Circles and Squares" which has always bugged the shit outta me:

"Movie-going kids are, I think, much more reliable guides to this kind of movie than the auteur critics: every kid I've talked to knows that Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska was a surprisingly funny, entertaining movie and Hatari! (classified as a "masterpiece" by half the Cahiers Conseil des Dix, Peter Bogdanovich, and others) was a terrible bore" (15).

Ok fine and zingy and well-written. But well-argued? "uhhh" where's the argument? As a unrepentant lover of Xanadu, I'm all for (occasionally) paying serious attention to the opinions of movie-going kids. And as a lover of both North to Alaska and Hatari!, I'm more than receptive to hearing about the merits of the former over the latter. But WHY is North to Alaska entertaining (and hence better?)? She doesn't let us know. And ironically, it's the word "knows" that gives it away - North to Alaska just IS more entertaining; Hatari! just IS a terrible bore. That's not an argument; that's merely ILX-style crankiness.

And that's not the only instance of this non-arguing in the essay. Check this out from the very same page:

"When Preminger makes an expert, entertaining whodunit like Laura, we don't look for his personality (it has become part of the texture of the film); when he makes an atrocity like Whirlpool, there's plenty of time to look for his "personality" - if that's your idea of a good time" (15).

Again, Whirlpool is an atrocity; it just is. Duh, everyone KNOWS that! And on and on with Renoir, Lang, etc. substitutions later on. It's as if "entertainment" were somehow self-evident, a quality all people recognize and desire. She claims the auteurists possess a "truly astonishing inability to exercise taste and judgment within their area of preference" (15). But where's the judgment in her essay? Also, this characterization of auteurists is flat-out incorrect. Sarris, for one, was very much able to make value judgments within an auteur's oeuvre, e.g., see his Ford entry in The American Cinema for his take downs of When Willie Comes Marching Home, The Fugitive, Cheyenne Autumn, etc.

Moreover, I suspect Kael's (and supposedly the world's) hatred for Hatari! stems from a rather bourgeois overvaluation of tight narratives, the three-act structure, three-dimensional characters, realistic dialogue, etc. In this, she's hardly less a philistine than the myriad Hollywood moguls who mangled countless films, say, Darryl F. Zanuck who always got nervous when Ford went off the narrative path with his genius diversions. What makes Hatari! such a stone cold masterpiece is precisely its dismantling of the frequently moribund conventions outlined above which, by the way, is extraordinarily "entertaining" (amongst sooo many other things) to some people. As with Ford at his best, Hawks here is less concerned with uncovering an enigma or racing towards a conclusion than with delineating a community. He doesn't say "let me tell you a story;" he says "let me show you how this community works." Forward narrative pull is simply not on the menu so you need another lens through which to grasp it. (No doubt this is why Dave Kehr called Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon "the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition.")

In fact, Dave Kehr is a perfect example of an auteurist critic who does an excellent job of explaining the value of a Ford or Hawks while being perfectly capable of recognizing when the masters fumble. And ultimately, Kehr and Sarris (and Rosenbaum and Hoberman and Fred Camper and Adrian Martin and...) provide me with more value than Kael because they speak to me as a cinephile. As with sooooo many ilxors, Kael evinces more joy in writing (or do I mean arguing?) than in cinema/[music].

And there IS value in that. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that she'd take the preceding paragraph as a compliment because part of her, shall we say, authorial voice inheres in a populism that takes aim at the pretensions of urbane, world-weary bohemia/intelligentsia, a category which subsumes cinephiles (although how she felt she escaped this milieu is beyond me, esp. given her notorious comments on Nixon voters). And I'll buy a ticket for that (not many boho types out there pumping Xanadu). But at the end of the day, I just wanna see lots and lots of movies! And auteurism and top ten lists, which Kael apparently never did (true?), give me the tools with which to do so (amongst other things, of course).

she was better pre-new yorker imo

― indian food 3: electric tandoori (history mayne), Saturday, December 18, 2010 12:36 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You mean the radio stuff, and the notes she wrote for her rep theatre...Interesting; I don't think I've heard anyone make that argument....

"Circles and Squares" is a masterpiece--so devastating, that I kind of understand why Sarris still couldn't bring himself to let it go in his obituary for Kael.

Agree totally with you about her one-viewing-only credo.

― clemenza, Saturday, December 18, 2010 2:52 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah... 'circles and squares' is pre-new yorker

and if it's flawed ok, but it punches the crap out of sarris, who i think improved, but don't get much out of

think dwight macdonald also gave AS '63 a good drubbing that is worth reading

(im coming from the angle of not have a whole lot of time for ford, preminger, hawks, etc -- schrader otm)

Even speaking as a Kael acolyte, KJB's refudiation is great. (You've got to change your initials, though; I feel like I'm talking about John Malkovich with a bizarre Russian accent.)

That line about every-kid-I've-talked-to always bugged me, too, but not for cinematic reasons; it's more that I think she's just making that up for effect. Did she really go around surveying kids on what they thought of North to Alaska? Or, even weirder, did they start talking about other things--how's school, any plans for the summer, what do you want to be when you grow up, etc.--and the conversation always somehow ended up back at North to Alaska? My guess is that one kid was transformed into many kids. That's fine, writer's license--it does make me roll my eyes, though.

One really funny thing is Macdonald's review of Kael's first book. He starts out by praising her, realizes as he goes along how tough she's been on him in the past, and ends by basically saying, "Oh, hell--maybe I don't like her that much after all."

KJB, you take some of her asides too seriously. I don't expect a critic to always explain why a movie sucks.

Also: she loved Rio Bravo and lots of Hawks' more discursive films. If she disliked Hatari!, I'm not inclined to blame her "rather bourgeois overvaluation of tight narratives," but credit her for thinking this time Hawks went too far.