Pauline Kael

She'd send kids home crying.

Whether the documentary is good, bad, or mediocre, there'll be a bunch of people who knew her ripping it to shreds within a day. (Unless, I suppose, they were interviewed for it.)

episode one: a kid says his favorite drink is apple juice, pauline responds "oh, try it again. you won't like it."

"There's no ambiguity in apple juice."

pauline's personal hell would be having to watch the same episode of Mr. Rogers or Barney over and over again

I guess "What She Said" is the filmmakers attempt at a "I Lost It At The Movies" Kaelian double entendre?

thought this was a v charming story about meeting pauline back in the 90s:

http://sessumsmagazine.com/2019/02/02/pauline-at-the-buggy-whip-factory-our-day-with-pauline-kael/

That was an entertaining read.

The "disappointment" question Bram raises at the end reminds me of Woody Allen in a '77 interview with Dick Cavett, where they both talked about getting to know elderly Groucho Marx, and Woody says he "just seemed like a funny Jewish uncle."

I thought the funniest line in there was her reaction to the Pee-Wee Herman scandal: “He was visiting his family. Oh fuck. Who hasn’t done something stupid when they were visiting their family?”

i don't think i've ever seen the words "charming" and "pauline kael" in the same sentence before

I saw the documentary yesterday afternoon. I was entertained, and it was nice to see Paul Schrader and vintage clips of Woody Allen, De Palma, Altman, etc reminisce about running to newstands to buy The New Yorker to read what "Pauline" had to say.

However, like the MJ documentary, the absence of any dissenting voices made for a tedious experience no matter how entertaining the result. The director was taking questions and ran out of time; otherwise I would've asked why he thought Kael had no interest in Akerman, Fassbinder, and the other great '70s directors (I have my reasons, but I wanted to hear it from him).

What are your reasons?

She disliked (a) what she considered schlock taken seriously (b) narrative film that abjured sensation.

What about that “sick soul of Europe” business?

Just came across this with respect to that:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/cteq/la-notte/

narrative film that abjured sensation

eg, Celine & Julie Go Boating walkout ("I'm going to the movies!")

NYC centennial retro

I'd forgotten she was crazy about Re-Animator

https://quadcinema.com/program/losing-it-at-the-movies-pauline-kael-at-100/

Wait -- she didn't much like Hannah and Her Sisters. Was it included to Stir Debate?

The writer/director’s biggest success of the 1980s took a melancholy yet surprisingly upbeat and even joyful look at love via the familial and romantic ties of three NYC sisters; it won Oscars for Best Original Screenplay and for Best Supporting Actor and Actress (Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest). Amidst rapturous critical acclaim, Kael pumped the brakes: “It’s likable…[Allen has] made the picture halfway human…[but] the wilted sterility of his style is terrifying to think about.”

a melancholy yet surprisingly upbeat and even joyful look at love

imagine telling someone that the wilted sterility of their style is terrifying to think about. pretty harsh

Wilt the Sterilt

imagine telling someone that the wilted sterility of their style is terrifying to think about. pretty harsh

― flopson, Monday, May 13, 2019 7:59 PM

He never spoke to me again iirc

lol

"You're likable enough, Woody."

If you notice the landing page says they included both raves and dismissals... but this one isn't quite either.

Only a couple selections look like they go under dismissals. The Gauntlet the most obvious one. But kudos to them for not just programming the obvious choices like Clockwork Orange and West Side Story.

Best, most Kael-like choices: Blume in Love, the Fury, Loving, The Warriors (films she liked much more than most people).

iirc, she called Love in the Afternoon "perfect" but didn't seem to particularly like it.

This movie is, in its way, just about perfect, but it's minor, and so polished that it practically evaporates a half hour after it's over.

and she hated the other Love in the Afternoon too (and no wonder)

xps I was under the impression that people generally loved The Warriors?

w/out looking i expect it didn't go over well with stodgy mainstreamers

Who are the reason a Pauline Kael had to happen, frankly.

wondering if i want to live another 9 years for a Sarris centennial retro

you may make it to the Peter Travers symposium.

I understand James Berardinelli has a lemonade stand set up outside where he dares you to change his mind.

btw John Simon turned 94 this week

only the good die young

John Simon spotted at symposium

https://cdn.empireonline.com/jpg/70/0/0/640/480/aspectfit/0/0/0/0/0/0/c/articles/5cb5b9fb133d503e3a48e86f/star-wars-palpatine.jpg

When Kael joined The New Yorker in 1968, she soon became the most influential voice on an exploding art form, staking a position that often privileged “trash” over “art” and dismissed the auteur theory (although she could be as auteurist as they come).

Does this just mean that she loved directors? I take her argument in "Circles and Squares" to be that there are at least two version of the auteur theory, one of which makes strong theoretical claims and the other of which is trivial. i.e. If what the theory says is that directors can be great artists and that it's possible to follow a director's work like that of an author, then this is hardly a theory.

I haven't read "Circles and Squares" in many years, but to me the argument felt more like American auteurists were basically being dumb boys about the whole thing.

In that recording of the 1963 symposium with her, Simon and Dwight MacDonald, she comes pretty unambiguously in defense of using auteurism to study directors' overall body of work, in the face of MacDonald's wholesale dismissal of Sarris and auteurism (he says ideally a critic would watch a movie without any foreknowledge of who made it, avoiding credits and such).

(An experiment M'DA tried at Cannes and it was dumb then too.)

"American men being literalists" was my takeaway.

I agree that Sarris, who isn't as memorable a spinner of phrases as Kael but is her equal as a critic, didn't deserve the pillorying. Yet what better way to introduce yourself as a new voice than to attack? We've all done it.

In that recording of the 1963 symposium with her, Simon and Dwight MacDonald, she comes pretty unambiguously in defense of using auteurism to study directors' overall body of work,

In "Circles and Square" she acknowledges that of course she and her friends knew that if they saw, say, Howard Hawks' name on a picture it would almsost certainly be a great time

(not for you, dear)

So long as it's Only Angels Have Wings or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

I'd have to go back and check on The Warriors, but I think the reaction overall was middling--a few good reviews, either ignored or dismissed as another action film elsewhere. (Not that big on it myself.)

I had to look up The Warriors Wikipedia page - does seem as if Kael's rave ("The Warriors is a real moviemaker's movie: it has in visual terms the kind of impact that 'Rock Around the Clock' did behind the titles of Blackboard Jungle. The Warriors is like visual rock.") was def a minority view among mainstream American movie critics, though the film was a hit.

The Warriors was also a massive early home video hit, in the UK anyway, and the film - which I have always adored - is mixed up in my mind with things like Zombie Flesheaters, or even Cruising - movies first seen on video tape, with bright unstable colours, lots of shadows and darkness in the imagery, pumping rock-synthy soundtracks.

Kael clearly had a taste for this kind of stuff - eg her love of DePalma (Dressed to Kill especially is v similar to something like Argento's Tenebrae in style and intent)

I had to watch it about 50 times working as an usher in 1979. That didn't help.

I always felt alienated by the whole Kael vs. Sarris thing, since I was never crazy about either's prose style or critical tastes, and both seemed largely irrelevant to the greater film discourse (whatever that is) by the 1980s. Farber would be my pick from that 60s-70s "golden age of film criticism", although if I was to choose a favorite from that era who actually wrote on a more regular basis, it would be Roger Greenspun, who was just as much the auteurist as Sarris but more eclectic in his enthusiasms and incredibly even more of a horndog. I mean, guy actually got turned on by a Straub-Huillet film, which has to be some kind of accomplishment.

I eventually gained an appreciation for Sarris' 1960s columns, where he was restrained from his worst impulses by limited space and the fact that it was pretty much just Mekas and him covering *everything*. The piece he did on watching Madame X as an in-flight movies is one of the more affecting pieces of film criticism I've read.

And one of the aspects of Sarris' writing that always irritated me - his inability to get over Kael's criticisms in Circles and Squares long after Kael had moved on - made a bit of sense when I realized he was getting bashed in print not just by her, but Macdonald, Simon, even Farber, all around the same time (didn't make his obsession with it any less tiresome though).

I will never understand Kael's whole "only see a film once" thing. Felt happy to learn that at least she played her favorite records many times.

suspect that position made more sense as an expression of populism back when the average filmgoer was defined by their lack of access to movie history rather than by their star wars blurays

embracing movies as essentially ephemeral being part of embracing them as "trash"