Photo from the dust jacket of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang via Wikipedia.
New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael (1919-2001).
I used to follow the New Yorker film critic like a puppy. I loved how Pauline Kael’s reactions to movies were so personal, and how she appreciated movies that were not always high-brow. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) was one such, a film I’ve never stopped relating to real life. I thought I could tell from the way she wrote about a film that I would like it, too.
At the Hedgehog Review, Professor Alan Jacobs of Baylor University shares more thoughts on Pauline Kael.
He writes that there’s a set of film critics he turns to “for the quality of their sensibility, the intelligence and the passionate attention that they bring to — well, first, to watching movies, and only then to writing about them. It doesn’t matter, it never matters, whether I agree with them.
“I have some especially strong disagreements with David Thomson. Some of his judgments are completely alien to my own. … I have a particular love for James Agee and his way of registering complicated responses, mixed feelings. I especially delight in his review of The Best Years of our Lives (1946): “ ‘At its worst,’ he writes, ‘this story is very annoying in its patness, its timidity, its slithering attempts to pretend to face and by that pretense to dodge in the most shameful way possible its own fullest meanings and possibilities. … It would be possible, I don’t doubt, to call the whole picture just one long pious piece of deceit and self-deceit, embarrassed by hot flashes of talent, conscience, truthfulness, and dignity.’
“But then, at the end of the review, he admits that he absolutely adored The Best Years of Our Lives and promises to write his next essay to explain why. That sort of investment of himself in watching movies, paying attention not only to the movies but also to what the movies do to him … is simply extraordinary.
“Indeed, the only writer I find who can outdo Agee in that respect is Pauline Kael. I should add that Kael is completely useless to me as a guide to movies. … I don’t read Pauline Kael to track my sensibility with hers on an aesthetic oscilloscope. I read her because I think she—more than any writer I know, including Agee — brings the whole of herself to writing about movies. And so the best way to think about Kael’s writing is not as movie film criticism; that would be a category error. She wrote in a known genre, but not that genre, whether she knew it or not. …
“[The many] criticisms of her person and her work are true but, I submit, irrelevant. Twenty-five years after her death in 2001, and thirty-five after she retired from writing reviews, it is clear that Kael wasn’t a film critic at all. She didn’t write reviews, or even essays; rather, each of her ‘reviews’ was a chapter in her autobiography — an autobiography written over decades and built not on a narrative arc but rather a long series of occasions.
“For Kael, movies become the occasions for writing the story of one’s life. And as an autobiographer she was a truly major writer, the Karl Ove Knausgård of her time and place — only more expansive and infinitely more interesting. If you were to put her decades of writing about movies between two covers, you’d have something quite a bit larger than Knausgård’s six volumes, and something that could with greater justice be called My Struggle. Her struggle, and also her nation’s, because she was also the chronicler of the several generations of Americans who found themselves, or lost themselves, at the movies.”
Read the whole article at Hedgehog, here. No paywall.
