Kael

There aren’t many critics who could get away with a statement like that. They generally lack the cachet: criticism isn't held in high esteem because it is seen as a by-product of art, rather than an expressive pursuit in itself. There is some justice in this, as even the best critics are there to serve the appreciation of the medium they are talking about, making it difficult to justify the consideration of their criticism as a piece of creative work with its own worth. As a result, critics are held in contempt by many, and writing about or discussing the quality of a critic’s work in any depth can be seen as a self-defeating exercise. What could be more of a redundant exercise than criticising critics, and thus putting yourself a level even further down in the hierarchy? To the extent they are thought about at all, then, critics tend to be seen as the bottom feeders of the artistic establishment. The general quality of film criticism has done little to change this perception: many media outlets take the view that basically anyone can review a movie, meaning that even the professional film reviewing sector has a very poor base standard. While the public's interest in cinema ensures an audience for film criticism, most readers undoubtedly feel that if they were given the job they could write as good or better reviews themselves, and frequently they would be right. Against such a background, only a very assured and confident film critic could try to argue that criticism is an art in itself, rather than a subsidary pursuit. Yet if anyone could ever make such a claim, it was Pauline Kael.

I first discovered Kael when I picked up several of her anthologies from a second-hand bookstore sometime in my teens. My only real exposure to film criticism was what appeared in the local media, plus much-thumbed copies of Leonard Maltin’s guide and Roger Ebert’s annuals. Against this background, the tatty copies I found of Kael’s collections Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Taking It All In, and State of the Art were a revelation. The first volume caught Kael slightly before her peak, and the other two at the start of a long period of disaffection following the decline of the seventies New Hollywood, but they were still head and shoulders above any criticism I’d read before. Kael’s writing brought the films she discussed alive: in describing events, characters, moods, and performances, her writing was as evocative as that of any writer of fiction I’ve read. While she wasn’t an intellectually rigorous critic (she wrote on instinct and could be grossly unfair), she could turn a movie inside out and make you see it in a whole new way. I devoured those three books, and my whole approach to film changed as I did so.

The difficulty with picking some choice quotes from Kael is not in finding material: witty and illuminating turns of phrase suggest themselves in every review, and when writing about her it is impossible to resist including some. The danger, though, is that doing so misrepresents her writing. Picking short quotes forces the selection of one-liners, which makes her sound like the kind of critic I hate: those who use the film they’re reviewing as the opportunity to show off their own glib wit. This isn’t what Kael did at all, and the real virtues of her writing only become apparent when you read her reviews in full. (Her volume of short reviews, 5001 Nights at the Movies, should be avoided for this reason). For most of her career, she wrote for The New Yorker, a publication that let her write in a long format that would be the envy of most print critics. This wasn’t why she was better than her peers – most reviewers squander even the little space they are given, while Kael could be good in a single paragraph – but it did mean that she could stretch out and really come to terms with a film. The quotable pay-offs are just moments of particular clarity: read in full, it’s clear she wasn’t trying to be smart-arsed. She just wanted to write down what the film stirred in her.

Kael herself admitted this could lead to excess in her writing. In the introduction to her last collection, For Keeps, she acknowledged that "writing very fast and trying to distill my experience of a movie, I often got carried away by words," and admitted that looking back on her writing "the adjectives seem fermented." This was occasionally true, but she was stretching her language for a purpose, and it worked much more often than it didn’t. It meant that she got to things that lesser writers don’t come to grips with: tone, rhythms, subtleties. She was persistently attentive to the performances of actors, a notoriously difficult aspect of cinema to discuss. Moving past finding a performance merely "convincing," or "moving," or (alternately) "bad" requires a grasp of language that is a level above that required to catalogue the mechanics of plot or technique. Most who have those skills are – reasonably enough – choosing to employ them on things other than film criticism. Kael, however, was a rare example of a truly great writer who chose to devote herself exclusively to writing on film. Kael’s friend David Edelstein, critic for New York Magazine and formerly Slate, has said that we should think of Kael as "a great American essayist and humorist, like Mark Twain." I’m not sure we should shy away from arguing about both the strengths and weaknesses of her work when considered on its own terms as film criticism, but certainly Edelstein’s suggestion comes to grips with the larger merits of her writing.

Kael was a critic for her time, and she became part of the story of the New Hollywood cinema of the seventies. She famously championed the early works of directors such as Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Robert Altman, and some of her raves (notably those for Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris) were instrumental in making the reputations of the films involved. The American cinema of the period matched Kael’s preferences: she liked her films raw, vital, and unpretentious. It would be overstating it to say that she shaped the taste of the era, paving the way for the New Hollywood, but certainly she was an influential critical voice of encouragement. Discussion of the New Hollywood often talks of the sudden discovery by studios of the youth audience post-Easy Rider, and the influence on Hollywood of cinema movements such as the French New Wave, but the audience had to meet Hollywood half-way by discovering a taste for this kind of filmmaking. Kael was a voice for the emerging film-literate culture: she spoke for an audience that was hungry for more. And if her influence on film history is an open question, her influence on criticism is indisputable. The nickname "Paulette" was coined to describe her imitators, admirers and associates, and she entered into debates that had an influence that is difficult to imagine in today’s much more fragmented film culture. These could be over individual films (her views on Bonnie & Clyde were in competition with those of Bosley Crowther, who hated it), but there were wider debates too. Her influence on so-called "auteur theory," for example, was profound and lasting: she was one of the early voices of scepticism, noting the limitations of the overly schematic and director-centric approach taken by her long-time rival Andrew Sarris. (Auteurism didn't go away because of Kael, but it got a lot more sensible.) Perhaps more importantly, though, she helped to break down the influence of a previous generation of critics who were almost disdainful of the medium, and liked it when it was staid, respectable... and uncinematic.

Kael’s love of the cinema was evident in every word, but it was not without its qualifications and complexities. Her embrace of the immediacy and visceral pleasures of movies meant that she was suspicious of attempts to over-intellectualise them, or recast them as high art (she often mocked academic writing on film). This lead to a tension in her writing, as she negotiated the fine balance between honestly recognising simple pleasures, and settling for the shallow and dumb. This problem became particularly apparent as she entered the 1980s, and the flame of the New Hollywood burnt out, but she had tackled the problem head-on much earlier, in her 1969 essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies." It is a complex, hard-to-distil wrestle with the notion of artistry in a medium that has been built on a tradition of flashy showmanship. "We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art," she argued. For her, the art of movies was a different kind of pleasure to that favoured by traditional genteel notions of what was culturally valuable: "movie art is not the opposite of what we have always enjoyed in movies… it is what we have always found good in movies only more so." Yet she was also fretful about the prospects for traditional media, and decried the dumbing-down of culture. McLuhanism and the media, she wrote in 1971, have "freed people from the shame of not reading. They’ve rationalized becoming stupid and watching television." Of course, one of the best counters to being made stupider by the movies is quality criticism that engages the mind and prevents cinema’s easy confection from passing by without reflection. This is what Kael provided.

A startling number of Kael’s essays remain vital reading for film buffs. In addition to "Trash, Art and The Movies," there are her assessments of the state of the movie industry, "On the Future of the Movies" and "Why are the Movies so Bad: Or the Numbers," from 1974 and 1980, respectively. Both are astute assessments of the state of the industry at the time she wrote (and, in retrospect, a healthy reminder that people are always arguing that movies are in decline). "Circles and Squares," from 1963, remains historically important for its role in the auteurism debate. "Raising Kane," from 1971, continues that argument with its revisionist assessment of Citizen Kane, inflating the contribution of co-screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz at the expense of Orson Welles. It set off a furious storm of rebuttal, and while many of her points about Mankiewicz’s contribution have been questioned, it remains an essential contribution both to the literature on Kane and to wider arguments about the roles of screenwriters generally. Other pieces were less noted at the time, but seem even more pertinent in retrospect, such as her 1967 reflection "Movies on Television." It touches on all sorts of aspects of the home viewing experience, but what really strikes me re-reading it is her attention to the way television presents films "all jumbled together, out of historical sequence." Two decades later, this kind of historical mishmash would be bundled up as a defining trait of postmodern culture, and written about at great length by a whole sub-genre of academics: Kael was astute, matter of fact, and succinctly covered the most important implications of such an observation in 1967.

The reviews, however, remained the main game. She was still a tremendous reviewer throughout the 1980s, but dipping in and out of her later reviews, you can feel that she and the movies were parting ways. When she was reviewing Blow Up and Bonnie and Clyde and Mean Streets and McCabe and Mrs Miller the movie culture was her culture; reading her review of Rambo: First Blood Part II you can’t help but feel disappointed for her, even when she could nail it so perfectly. (It "explodes your previous conception of ‘overwrought’ – it’s like a tank sitting on your lap firing at you.") Poor health started to catch up with her in these years, and she finally retired in 1991. Her absence was felt keenly by her fans, and I can’t think of any other critic whose views were so sought out after their retirement. In 1995, she did a short interview for Premiere, and the excitement of the interviewer in finding out what she thought of various post-1991 releases was palpable. What did Kael make of Pulp Fiction? Schindler’s List? Unforgiven?* (I wouldn’t have been brave enough to ask about the latter: Kael always hated Clint Eastwood). Francis Davis' book Afterglow, an interview published after she died in 2001, at age 82, continued this pattern, focussing overwhelmingly on eliciting her views on new movies. Fifteen years after her retirement, Kael’s readers still wish they could experience the movies alongside her.

Kael was talking about the young Bernardo Bertolucci, but the quote is strikingly applicable to Kael herself. Her own approach appalled many, and she was (and is) frequently condemned for the excesses of her style. There are legitimate criticisms to be made of Kael, but it is also the case that many others have seen attacking Kael as a chance to establish their own superior judgement. For example, it is difficult to ascribe any other motivation to a rejection as comprehensive as Renata Adler’s, who wrote of Kael’s 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down that it was "piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." The irony of such an over-the-top condemnation is that the most justifiable criticism made of Kael is her weakness for hyperbole: by overstating her case, Adler ceded her strongest ground. Kael’s undeniable tendency to find films either terrific or terrible was reflected in the polarised reception to her work. As Louis Menand noted in a generally negative review of her definitive collection For Keeps, "Kael's manner of overpraising and overdamning has itself been so overpraised and overdamned that rereading her reviews is a little like rereading Hemingway after listening to too many parodies: Why can't she stop trying to sound so much like Pauline Kael?" As much as I can recognise the validity of such an observation, Kael’s writing still wins me over whenever I return to it. Perhaps it is that Kael is the rare critic who retained such enthusiasm, rather than being washed out into fatigue by the sheer averageness of most of what they have to review. Kael might have been too eager find extremes of quality, but that did at least mean she was alert to the truly exceptional things that she did see.

It’s perhaps easier to appreciate Kael now that she’s gone, and fifteen years have passed since her retirement with nobody of her stature emerging in the field since. Critics have only become more devalued in the interim. Kael’s 1963 suggestion that there were "so few critics, so many poets" seems a little quaint now: in the age of the internet, anyone can be a critic, and there sometimes seem to be more people offering reviews than there are readers for them. And while some of this writing is very good – the internet allows long-form and niche writing that for the most part can’t be achieved in traditional media – the landscape of criticism is so fractured that no voice can gain the kind of cultural purchase Kael achieved. Such diversity of opinion is generally a good thing, but what film criticism as a field has lost in this process is a universally recognised beacon of excellence. The defining critic of the last decade is probably Harry Knowles, from the website Ain’t It Cool, who became the heavy hitter of a generation of self-taught internet critics and whose style (a combination of incoherency and sheer geekish mania) has unfortunately become the defining model for internet criticism. Voices such as Knowles have their place, but if criticism is to be seen as playing a vital role in film culture, both critics and their readers need to demand a higher standard: "real bursting creativity" rather than mediocrity. This requires an appreciation for the defining figures in the field, and Kael – for all her infuriating flaws - remains the gold standard against whom other critics should be judged.

* She quite liked Pulp Fiction, but didn’t think much of the other two.


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© 2006 by Stephen Rowley