Pauline Kael

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"

Walter Hill's spectacle takes its story from Xenophon's Anabasis and its style from the taste of the modern urban dispossessed--in neon signs, graffiti, and the thrill of gaudiness. The film enters into the spirit of urban-male tribalism and the feelings of kids who believe that they own the streets because they keep other kids out of them. In this vision, cops and kids are all there is, and the worst crime is to be chicken. It has--in visual terms--the kind of impact that "Rock Around the Clock" had when it was played behind the titles of BLACKBOARD JUNGLE. It's like visual rock, and it's bursting with energy. The action runs from night until dawn, and most of it is in crisp, bright Day-

Oops:

-Glo colors against the terrifying New York blackness; the figures stand out like a jukebox in a dark bar. There's a night-blooming, psychedelic shine to the whole baroque movie.

I vaguely remember liking The Warriors at the time, but looking at the trailer now it looks bad

saw it for the first time a few months ago: it's good.

will have to see it again

I remember being put off by a scene of an attempted rape in which I felt that the film's sympathies were with the perpetrator, rather than the woman, but I saw the movie long enough ago that I'm fuzzy on the exact details.

Walter Chaw (my fave current film writer) has a book coming out on Hill, so I feel like I'm due for a deep dive into the man's filmography.

The film doesn't dedicate much time to examining the sexual-social elements of its milieu, but it definitely makes clear that womens' safety is precarious.

when I see it again I'm going to ignore the gang names

It's a pretty good, offbeat 'junk' genre film. The Driver is much more my cuppa tea.

(did she review it?)

yes, a capsule review at least, I don't know if there was more. alfred posted it above

The Driver is something I want to see

I was surprised to see that Kael liked Loving (the George Segal/Eva Marie Saint film) so much, as it seemed like exactly the kind of upper-middle-class angsty thing that she routinely dismissed (I'm thinking of her pan of Ordinary People), I just watched it this morning and found it meandering and occasionally interesting: the scene with the divorced older couple was great, but I haven't decided how I feel about the gimmicky conclusion. Kael's point that the film doesn't judge any of the characters is curious: Segal is so repulsive that I found it hard not to see it as taking a stance against him, but I suppose the early 70s might have been more sympathetic towards embodiments of white, male, upper-middle-class privilege.

(did she review it?)

yup, c.1500 words, march 5 1979, collected in when the lights go down

(or did you mean the driver, sorry)

Loving is a bit more atmospheric and offbeat than Ordinary People (tho I agree it has its problems). Plus OP was part of her Redford vendetta; also they were suburban WASPs, and George Segal isn't.

yeah i meant The Driver, mark

http://www.geocities.ws/paulinekaelreviews/#B

Morbs:

This gangster picture, which failed commercially here and is also an aesthetic failure, was Walter Hill's second film as a writer-director. (It was made after HARD TIMES and before THE WARRIORS.) Hill attempted to stylize gangster characters and conventions, and although he succeeded in the action sequences, which have a near-abstract visual power, the stylized characters, with their uninflected personalities, flatten the movie out. In trying to purify the gangster film, he lost the very element that has made gangster movies so enjoyable: the colorful lowlifes and braggarts, with their own slang. (Instead, the characters stare at each other in silence.) And in exalting "professionalism"-in setting forth a neo-Hemingway elitist attitude for judging people on the basis of their grace and courage-Hill shows such a limited perspective that the film is comic-book cops-and-robbers existentialism. Ryan O'Neal, with his soft voice, gives the central role a strange, callow quality that's very effective, but as his adversary in the police department, Bruce Dern is at his mannered worst. As a woman of mystery, Isabelle Adjani drops her voice down to a Dietrich level and never varies it-or her expression: she's as blank-faced as a figure at Mme. Tussaud's. With Ronee Blakley, who looks more vividly alive than anyone else but gets killed off fast, and Joseph Walsh.

xxp

Yeah, I'd forgotten about her Redford thing; just meant that in general she seemed to have an aversion to "whiny white guy" movies (which may have been a more accurate way to put it).

she also recoiled from genre films that aspired to art

ie Goodfellas

but yet loved Mean Streets

Hill shows such a limited perspective that the film is comic-book cops-and-robbers existentialism.

this is what he was after, PK

she pulled the same "Where is Cagney?" thing with Goodfellas.

She's not wrong for disliking Goodfellas but ...

she pulled the same "Where is Cagney?" thing with Goodfellas.

The movie had Joe Pesci.

she loved The Grifters, disliked The Silence of the Lambs.

That Geocities archive is such a nice relic from the old internet.

except i have freq gotten virus warnings from it.

I read and probably linked to this piece at the time (republished yesterday). I think it's excellent--although I continue to be perplexed by the idea that the Brian Kellow book was unsympathetic (and anyway, it's a biography--is it supposed to be sympathetic?).

http://www.vulture.com/2019/06/remembering-pauline-kael-film-critic.html

there's a nice appreciation of Kael by Farran Smith Nehme in the current Sight and Sound followed by an edited Q&A she gave at the NFT in London in 82. If anyone is very keen I do have a pdf of it I could share.

she says this about Lynch:

Eraserhead [1977] has been one of the
most extraordinary films of the last few
years. Can you say something about
American avant-garde film and is it
coming into the major studios?
Eraserhead is an amazing film, because as clearly as you can figure at what you’re seeing – even though the pacing is monstrous and it takes too long – it has a quality I don’t think I’ve ever seen in another film, which was about men’s anxiety states on dating,
and their terrors of their wives, and their children and parents-in-law. I mean, that man is every adolescent boy’s image of himself
on a date. It is a really hair-raisingly scary movie. I quite love it, and I do think David Lynch is a remarkable talent as he showed again with The Elephant Man [1980], because that script was absolutely zilch, and he turned it into something quite marvellous.
There are images in Eraserhead that stay with you the way images from The Blood of the Poet [1932] or Un chien andalou [1929] do. The image of that man and the hooker from across the hall; when they’re on the bed making love, and they deliquesce into the bed itself, and finally you see they disappear except for the woman’s long hair floating on the bed. That is a pretty scary, powerful erotic image. The whole film has a strange erotic feeling to it; you can’t quite put your finger on what’s going on at any given moment that’s holding you there, but you’re being held. Considering that he’s using pasteboard sets, it’s a wonderful piece of work. He’s
a phenomenally gifted filmmaker.

I couldn't be bothered fixing the formatting, sorry.

someone posted her entire pan of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet here

https://letterboxd.com/notpaulinekael/film/romeo-and-juliet-1968/1/

100 today. Wherever she is, complaining about the state of movies.

Sight & Sound centerpiece: https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/pleaures-pauline-kael-film-critic-legacy

happy 100th pauline! even though i'm not sure i'd want to read your pan of a hard day's night.

here's charles taylor's tribute:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/happy-birthday-pauline

Don't think I ever knew that about A Hard Day's Night--where was that published, J.D.?

She didn't like Head either...

uh

nice