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Pauline Kael was before my time, really. I haven't read much of her stuff, but she was a major, and very influential film critic/writer. I don't know if I'm just being lazy, but when David Thomson can say it, I let him: She lost it at the movies As it happens, I did sit next to Pauline once in that dark. - - - - - - - - -
- - - Sept. 5, 2001 | Pauline Kael had a very good line about how one of the things movie criticism taught you was the way some relationships split apart, finally, when the two of you go to a movie and discover how different you are. Somewhere or other, she said she didn't think she could love anyone who didn't love "McCabe & Mrs. Miller." Well, you may change the name of the movie, but I think we all know what she meant. Except that I wouldn't have given anyone a romantic chance in hell with Pauline at the movies. Nor, for that matter, would I advise ever having a date with a film critic -- not if it meant sitting in the dark side by side. As it happens, I did sit next to Pauline once in that dark. It was in a Manhattan screening room, and the occasion was Brian De Palma's "The Fury," a picture starring Kirk Douglas, Amy Irving and John Cassavetes. It exists, trust me. The seat beside me was occupied only at the last moment, after the lights had gone down, by a diminutive woman who made some fuss getting settled and finding her notebook. Well, 15 or so minutes later, I was nudged out of De Palma's film (this was not too difficult) by a sound coming from somewhere next to me. It was scratchy and raspy, but there were little sighs and moans accompanying it. You may find this allusion fanciful, but it was rather like sitting next to Beatrix Potter's Mrs. Tiggywinkle as she beat the little garments of her laundry. Pauline (for it was she) was writing up a storm in the dark, with a sharp pencil on the notebook pages. That was the rasping. I watched in wonder as her head bobbed up from the page to the screen, and back again, too intent to miss anything, and apparently writing down not just the dialogue but a kind of running shooting script. And the noises she was making -- the tiny hedgehog squeaks and raptures -- were part of a nearly writhing rapport with the film up there on the screen. She was in love with it. She was, nearly, making love to it. You may have heard that Ms. Kael had the policy of seeing a film once only. She reckoned that it was an art founded in first impressions, and -- at its best -- a kind of ecstatic participation in and with the film. (You can see how holding hands with that dame was only going to get in the way.) Maybe she sneaked back occasionally, if she really loved a picture. On the whole, however, I think she was as good as her strict word. That she could then write in fine detail about the picture was a tribute to how open her senses were and how rapacious her note taking. But most people who've tried will tell you that taking notes on a movie is a very good way of losing contact with it. Pauline's great affair was with the movies. She had tried men, many times, and found them wanting. But I think she came into her own when she developed the ability to feel and convey the erotic pulse of a movie -- and not just movies like "Barbarella," about "sexy" things. For Pauline, sitting in the dark and letting the furnace light fall on you was sexy. She was turned on. She needed to be to write well. It was a kind of controlled drunkenness, and in the late '60s and '70s, at least, she found enough readers who felt the same passion. That's why her books (the collections of reviews) had sexual titles: "I Lost It at the Movies," "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang" and so on. That's what I loved most about her. But our relationship didn't click. I thought "The Fury" was spectacular nonsense. History may be on my side, but that doesn't really matter. Pauline was putting out for De Palma because she believed in him. Still, as the lights came up, I couldn't resist saying, "I can't wait to read your review." "Didn't you like it?" she asked, less in dismay than incredulity. I admitted not (I felt like a father telling his daughter the guy's a jerk), and our friendship died there. But I kept her example in my head, and I've never forgotten the sound of that sharp pencil slashing at paper. For me, that was The Fury. - - - - - - - - -
- - - ... And there's the obits: Film Reviewer
Pauline Kael Dies GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. (AP) - Movie critic Pauline Kael, a brash, witty champion of artistic quality who thrashed both facile commercialism and self-indulgent pretense from her lofty perch at The New Yorker, has died. She was 82. Kael, a resident of Great Barrington, suffered from Parkinson's disease. Perri Dorset, a spokeswoman for the magazine, said Kael died Monday at her home. David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said that Kael broke down barriers between low and high cinema in her reviews, delighting in both the sublime and the profane. "She shaped American film criticism for generations to come and, more important, the national understanding of the movies,'' Remnick said. She turned "The Current Cinema'' into a leading fixture in The New Yorker, one of the most influential magazines among the nation's cultural elite. Physically petite but headstrong in her opinions, she became one of the 20th century's most important and recognizable film critics. She called the movies "our national theater'' and helped establish the reputations of such filmmakers as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg. Her 1969 essay "Trash, Art and the Movies,'' written for Harper's magazine, was named in 1999 as No. 42 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century. She wrote her first review in 1953 for a San Francisco magazine, panning Charlie Chaplin's "Limelight'' as "Slimelight.'' Over the years, her work appeared in Film Quarterly, Mademoiselle, Vogue, the New Republic, and McCall's. She began writing her punchy, conversational, sometimes slangy prose for The New Yorker in 1967. Larry McMurtry deemed her the "Edmund Wilson of film reviewers.'' Writer Martin Knelman once said she packed such diverse personal, social, commercial and artistic insights into her writings that they were often more entertaining than the movies she reviewed. She was endowed with a prodigious memory and knowledge of cinema, able to accurately report plot and dialogue despite not taking notes during screenings. Her views often defied popular taste. She left McCall's after sounding off about "The Sound of Music'' in an article headlined "The Sound of Money.'' She thought "Rain Man'' a "wet piece of kitsch.'' She dismissed "Dances With Wolves'' as a "nature-boy movie'' and famously mocked director-star Kevin Costner as "having feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.'' But she equally disdained what she saw as pretension masquerading as high art. She had contempt for movies like "Last Year at Marienbad'' and "Blow-Up.'' Of the latter, she wrote that director Michelangelo Antonioni "loads his atmosphere with so much confused symbolism and such a heavy sense of importance that the viewers use the movie as a Disposall for intellectual refuse.'' A tireless polemicist, she did not shy from flogging people or ideas that she found foolish. She tore into the trendy "auteur'' theory of film that exalted a director's stylistic and thematic fixations, instead of plot or a movie's individuality. Her attacks led to an often bitter feud with fellow critic Andrew Sarris. "What she loved ... is an appeal of motion pictures that is ultimately a primitive one ... that goes back to the role of motion pictures as sheer entertainment. She did not subscribe to the notion that movies had to be good for you,'' said Annette Insdorf, a film professor at Columbia University. Ms. Kael deeply admired films such as "Bonnie and Clyde,'' "Weekend,'' "The Godfather,'' "MASH,'' "The Garden of the Finzi Continis,'' and "Mean Streets.'' She likened "Last Tango in Paris'' to "Rite of Spring,'' calling it "a departure from everything we've come to expect at the movies. ... the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made.'' She also loved older films such as Jean Renoir's "La Grande Illusion,'' D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance,'' Preston Sturges' "Unfaithfully Yours'' and the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup.'' Although she ridiculed the auteur theory, she was a longtime admirer of many directors, including Renoir, Orson Welles, Robert Altman, Jean-Luc Godard and Satyajit Ray. Marlon Brando, James Mason, Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda were among her favorite actors. Consistently, she defended artistic creativity, subtlety and refined craftsmanship. In an Associated Press interview in 1989, she lamented, ``You can't get college kids interested in going to any sort of daring movie now. They're perfectly willing to sit through the same old crap, a larger version of what they've seen on television all their lives. They may even resent it if they go to a film that has subtitles, or that has any kind of complexity.'' She also wrote more than 10 books, including her breakthrough 1965 work of collected reviews, "I Lost It at the Movies,'' and "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.'' Her "Deeper Into Movies'' won a National Book Award in 1974. In 2000, she received a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle. Born in Petaluma, Calif., she lived on a farm during her early years. Her father was a movie fan, and she developed into an avid reader and movie enthusiast. She studied at the University of California at Berkeley from 1936 to 1940, majoring in philosophy. She did not earn her degree at the time but later in life was granted an honorary doctorate. For a time, she tried experimental film-making, writing plays and managing film houses. She sometimes did odd jobs to survive. During Ms. Kael's career, her personal life sometimes suffered. She had multiple marriages and divorces. She retired from The New Yorker in 1991 and had returned to her rural roots at a home in Great Barrington, a Berkshire Mountain resort town.
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Pauline
Kael, June 19, 1919 - September 3, 2001