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Those who follow film will inevitably come across Pauline Kael’s critical writing, since she has — for good or ill — been an influential ‘voice’ (I use this term loosely) in film crit, helping to not only shape abysmal, only-in-it-for-the-controversy poseurs such as Armond White (just check out his fey, insecure manner in this pointless interview), but film-goers, as well, who suddenly had intellectual back-up for their personal like or dislike of now-classic films. She’s trashed Stanley Kubrick, she’s trashed Ingmar Bergman, she’s trashed Federico Fellini, Terrence Malick, John Cassavetes, Michelangelo Antonioni — not out of any real, logical argument, but just ’cause she wanted to, and was able to get away with such. And, predictably, fans of these directors have, not been very happy, but communicated their anger merely by throwing up their hands, or cutting Pauline Kael down a well-placed insult. Sure, she deserves all this (and more!), but just as with the Internet rants directed towards Jonathan Rosenbaum, there’s been few systematic dissections of her work, wherein the reasons for her poorness as a critic are made clear, film by film, and line by line, which is really what her work calls for.
Anger is good, at times, but it needs a real, substantive foundation for it to matter, or else it’ll first be interpreted as having no justification, and then merely dissipate. In the arts, however, things absolutely need a nudge in the right direction, and it is argument (despite what’s commonly thought) that helps clarify and polish up the best art, all the while killing off the worst. For this reason, I wrote a lengthy take-down of Pauline Kael vis-a-vis the work of one film director, so that, in reading her reviews thematically, as well as side-by-side, one sees her flaws quite well, and can therefore extrapolate them to the rest of her work.
The following essay is an excerpt from my book, Woody Allen: Reel To Real. The chapter to which it belongs can be read here.
What’s In A Name? Six Major Critics Of Woody Allen
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Critic #3: Pauline Kael
…If the above three critics are Woody champions, the next three can be thought of as his chief detractors. The first and by far the most influential is Pauline Kael, who, at her peak, was the top film critic at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991, and a well-known writer even before this. She was quite feared for her reviews, much read by the literati, and her mode of attack (often ad hominem, and sometimes explicitly racial) only intensified with time. Yes, Pauline Kael was a celebrity, but unlike, say, Roger Ebert, who’d ultimately champion and supplant her in style and longevity, she was a celebrity for the intelligentsia, and while she has deeply influenced people as diverse as Armond White (in some ways, her successor) and Quentin Tarantino, you’d be hard-pressed to find many young filmgoers who look up to her today, a mere decade and a half after her death. This partly due to The New Yorker’s decision to keep her reviews holed away in a digital archive one must pay to access, while Ebert’s (and others’) are freely available, and partly due to her contrarian views — often without much explication — and dated writing style. No one today, for example, wishes to hear of Woody Allen being a self-loathing Jew, as she’s argued, or read reviews (such as that of De Sica’s Shoeshine) that do not even engage the film in question, but serve as proto-blog posts that merely discuss her own life and feelings. Indeed, for while many of the films she’s eviscerated — La Dolce Vita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Badlands, Dr. Strangelove, Wild Strawberries, Red Desert, Faces, Blow-Up, and others — have gone on to become undisputed classics, current articles about her are full of comments that, while riding the celebrity gravy-train while she was still ‘hip’, have now, quite predictably, taken on a much harsher tone. No doubt there will be many guesses as to why, but just one should suffice: that for all she’s written, and has been written of her, Pauline Kael was not much of a critic, combining the worst flaws of Roger Ebert (over-reliance on emotion) with none of his writing ability, and a pointless viciousness and personal vindictiveness that — had it been well-worded — could have at least been fun. It is not, and as the sudden implosion and inevitable decline of her progeny Armond White shows,[48] it pays more to be right than righteous, a difference few people ever see, and fewer still can ever act on.
Of course, I am not the first to criticize Pauline Kael, for she’s generated quite a few ‘enemies’ throughout her career. In 2004, for instance, Alan Vanneman published a short retrospective of her work[49] that covers her life, her creative troubles from the 50s onward, and her eventual breakthrough as a critic via a published collation of her reviews, which Vanneman quotes quite a bit from without having to offer much in way of explanation. “All her life”, he says, “Kael wrote as a brilliant schoolgirl, straining for ‘insights’ and exulting in ‘nuances’ that no one else noticed (because they weren’t there). She had to be deeper, more profound, and more shocking than anyone else, which led her to the same sort of pretentiousness she ridiculed in others.” Yet in the midst of such straining, she was bound to make mistakes — social transgressions, even — ranging from conflicts of interest, such as her reviewing of films that she’d secretly worked on, to downright severing some professional ties with words she’d plainly call “criticism”, but were mere invective, given how little they had to do with the films in question. Likewise, Renata Adler, a New Yorker colleague, slowly went from being a fan to a detractor upon reading a collection of her reviews.[50] This is because, as Adler argues, what might at first seem ‘interesting’ or ‘quaint’ in Kael’s work soon turns into a system of ad hoc, ad hominem attacks that don’t really tackle the films, themselves, but rather what Kael sees (or thinks she does), as opposed to what’s really on the screen. In short, when she wasn’t busy sexualizing actors, writers, and directors (“Taxi Driver is a movie in heat”), coming up with odd, asymmetrical similes (“Coma is like a prophylactic; it’s so cleanly made, with such an impersonal, detached feeling that it looks untouched by human hands”), word-dumps (“The images are simplified, down to their dramatic components, like the diagrams of great artists’ compositions in painting texts, and this, plus the faintly psychedelic Romanesque color, creates a pungent viselike atmosphere”), and outright bullying, she constructed reviews that were, in effect, “paeans to the favored product, diatribes against all other brands”. Such is not, alas, a review, but a mere statement of preferences, which have little to do with art, and everything to do with one’s personality and leanings. It is unsurprising, then, that Adler’s most famous criticism was that Kael’s work, as a whole, is “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” More telling, however, is Adler’s prescient comment that, despite Kael’s fame, “criticism will get over it”, a fact that’s coming to light only now, as it does for most writers, in time. But while Adler is more praising of Kael’s earlier work, I must disagree with even that. In one of Kael’s more celebrated pre-New Yorker reviews[51], for instance, she bloats a mere two pages on Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine with critical and writerly cliches (“incomprehensible despair”; “lyric study”; “fear the pain of the film”; “painful beauty”; “[a] tragic study of the corruption of innocence [that] is intense, compassionate, and, above all, humane”), and simply says nothing of the film, itself, merely using her already quite-limited space for a kind of autobiography. After having read it, I know of Kael’s “lovers’ quarrel” in 1947, and that she “feels” the film’s feelings, and wishes others could, too, but as to why it is an excellent work of art, re: the acting, scripting, visuals, and music, she is remarkably silent. It seems, then, as early as 1961, Kael had confused the critic’s job description with something more to her own liking. But a critic’s job is not merely to ‘reveal’ oneself (although that can be done well, as Ebert or Dan Schneider often do), but, above all, to explain the thing’s inner workings, and why it works, as art. If such a basic thing is not done, it really can’t be criticism. And if it’s not criticism, what is it, exactly, and what is it doing?
Pauline Kael praises Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine, below, but there are two problems here. First, it’s a good to very good film, but not De Sica’s best. Second, and far more importantly, she gives ZERO information about the film in her ‘review,’ choosing, instead, to write a kind of proto-blog post about things not even tangentially related to the film. This was, of course, her modus operandi for most of her career.
Now, we’ll get to the bottom of these queries — trust you me — but we’ll do it via Woody Allen, who’s had an interesting relationship with Pauline Kael over the years. One could still see videos of them together, in the 1970s, and he seems quite tolerant of her, if not respectful. Sometime after this, however, her reviews took a turn for the nasty, not only calling Allen out for his supposed Jewish self-hatred (which seems to be applied to every Jew who’s doing something a little ‘different’) and loathing of his culture, family, and fans, but — as if needing to one-up all the other misinterpretations of the film — even asked re: Manhattan: “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?”,[52] thus trying to extrapolate the man from the art, and falling into the same critical cliches that abounded then as now. It only got worse with Stardust Memories, which caused a complete break in their relationship for reasons that (as will be shown) went well beyond a mere ‘aesthetic’ disagreement. Yes, one could say she reveals too much of her various political and intellectual axes in her reviews of Allen’s later films, and therefore fails as critic for those biases, but there are issues that appear as early as 1973 with her take on Sleeper[53], a decidedly apolitical work that Kael — believe it or not — assessed more or less correctly. That, of course, is not the concern. It is how she reaches her assessment that is problematic, thus serving as a blueprint for so many of her other reviews.
The first issue (as Renata Adler pointed out) is Pauline Kael’s over-reliance on the words “we” and “us”, both as a means of ‘softening’ her own positions, as well as taking the attention away from her less cogent critiques. For example, just in her review of Sleeper: “we, too, are scared to show how smart we feel”; “we laughed as if he had let out what we couldn’t hold in any longer”; “we enjoy his show of defenselessness, and even the “I-don’t-mean-any-harm ploy, because we see the essential sanity in him”; “we respect that sanity; it’s the base from which he takes flight.” Yes, some of these overly broad musings could have been acceptable (however slightly) if Allen’s early comedies were anything more than films like Take the Money and Run, Sex, or Bananas, but Pauline Kael is trying to ascribe a deep intellectual base to things in a way that’s simply absurd. I mean, who listens to Boris’s monologue on Socrates and homosexuals in Love and Death and thinks of Allen’s “essential sanity”, or laughs at his persona’s failures in Sleeper, then makes Kael’s grand deductions? Beyond this pretentiousness, however, are the odder phrasings and ideas, all hedged by that “we”, that are either too general or quite simply inaccurate for the character in the film (“we, too, are scared…”), or merely reaching (“what we couldn’t hold in any longer”). Yet after this over-long introduction, ‘we’ really don’t know much more of Woody Allen, as artist, and nothing yet of Sleeper, the film purportedly under review. In the next paragraph, she finally tackles the film, correctly says it is the most narrative-driven of his work thus far, pointlessly calls it “surreal” (technically true, but the word as Kael uses it will apply to any dystopia, and any film with slapstick, so why even say it unless one wishes to appear ‘deep’?) and, again correctly, calls it a “small classic” that simply does not reach higher company. She mars her own insight, however, by repeating this same idea in nigh-consecutive lines (“it doesn’t have the loose, manic highs of those others films”; “you come out smiling and happy, but not driven crazy”; “I laughed all the way through, but it wasn’t exhilarating”; “you can be with it all the way, but it doesn’t impose itself on your imagination”; “and yet it’s mild, it doesn’t quite take off”), and by an odd final comment (“Comedy is impossibly mysterious”) that really has no place in a review such as this. In fact, Pauline Kael had already explained both her ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ of the film in fairly straightforward prose, so to ascribe her emotional conflict to comedy’s alleged “mystery” is throwaway, especially since one should then logically make the same deduction about any film one has conflicting views over. I love Total Recall, for instance, but don’t think it is a good movie. Yet to therefore call it “mysterious”? Indeed, something’s quite amiss when one strains to deepen what is already quite obvious to most.
After getting out a cheap shot at Play It Again, Sam, Kael starts making suggestions. “Sleeper could really use a cast”, she argues, but why? Because other comics have had a set cast, while Allen’s “conception of himself keeps him alone”. The smaller error, within, is a further conflation of Allen, the man, and Allen’s on-screen persona. The bigger issue Pauline Kael’s self-contradictions. Yes, she is correct to argue that the film never “quite takes off”, but it’s not due to any casting decisions, but because given the fact that it’s an almost purely slapstick comedy (as she herself points out), it automatically has a ceiling that more ‘serious’ comedies (such as Radio Days or Amarcord) simply lack. This is really in the film’s inner nature, and not a matter of a few tweaks or improvements that would suddenly make it “exhilarating”. Nor is the cast much of an issue, either, for despite Kael’s argument, the Woody Allen/Diane Keaton pairing is one of cinema’s best, of any genre, partly because of their chemistry, on the one hand, and seeming disconnect on the other — Allen as a bumbling ‘nebbish’, and Keaton as a beautiful ‘classy’ woman that has a clear attraction to him, both on and off screen, that is neither forced, nor played merely for comic effect. Keaton is not simply “there to be Woody’s girl”, as is claimed, but gives a very good foretaste of the upper crust he’d go on to skewer in later and deeper films, not only via Luna’s bad poetry, but also her dulled ethical sense (furthering the film’s setting), her refusals of Woody’s overtures (furthering Woody’s comic persona), and her breaking-in of Allen into the story (furthering — nay, allowing — the film’s narrative to actually unfold). To say that Diane Keaton has presence only insofar as Allen is concerned ignores, well, pretty much everything related to the tale, for if Luna were excised, there’d be no real drive, nor any deeper aspirations on Allen’s part.
Yet even more problematic is how Kael, early on, says she won’t reveal much of the film’s narrative in her review, as it’ll “squeeze the freshness out of the jokes”. But one can’t describe slapstick, in the first place, much less ruin it via description, as much of physical comedy eludes words. In fact, Kael’s refusal to even engage the film’s narrative (much less describe it) simply allows her to prattle off some generalities re: the ‘Woody’ persona, with even more overt attempts to psychoanalyze him, via sentences such as: “It’s likely that he sees his function as being all of us, and since he’s all of us, nobody else can be anything.” Yet it is clear, early on, that Allen’s character is pure caricature and comic relief, and while Kael (like Ray Carney after her) is correct in thinking that ‘most’ people are closer to the Woody nebbish than a Charles Bronson, it is a stretch to say that “we” resemble him in any meaningful way. In short, the corrective to one extreme is not yet another extreme, but some sort of middle ground. This is why more people will relate to Alvy Singer (Annie Hall) or an even less glamorous Gabe (Husbands and Wives), rather than to a nebbish or a badass. Yet it’s a stretch Kael hasto make given how she traps herself into filling a review with things extraneous to the film. There is, for instance, a “business-like, nine-to-five look” about Sleeper, “a loss of inspiration”, a missing “wild man’s indifference to everything but the joke” (once again contradicting even earlier points she’s made re: slapstick, and its need to “take off”), and “a metaphysical outrageousness”. Yet where, exactly, is any of this in the film? As with her review of Shoeshine, I still know next to nothing of Sleeper, except the names of the two main characters, and that it’s primarily gag driven — a fact that, in turn, is either a good or a bad thing, depending on what comments of hers I choose to latch on to. There are no scenes to speak of; there is no music to praise or deride (except, of course, the non-evaluative, and non-critical: “How could a man who really trusted the the free and messy take up the clarinet, an instrument that appeals to controlled, precise people?”), no dialogue that stands out as good or bad, no visuals, no poesy or lack thereof — merely a whole lot of Pauline Kael, and what she values. This might mean something, if she’d, in fact, even attempt to tackle the film, present some tangible evidence for her claims, and thus express her values there. Instead, the proverbial ‘we’ returns, and Kael makes yet another suggestion: that Woody Allen learn to think (or un-think) with his “unconscious”. Yet art is, in fact, the product of sheer control, not chaos, as she’s arguing, for even the veneer of ‘effortlessness’ (John Cassavetes; Martin Scorsese) takes much effort and planning. This is as true as of the aforementioned classics as it is of lesser gems like Sleeper, for it is not the “unconscious” that Allen needed, but deeper and more expansive themes for the waking mind to corral.
Just read Kael’s words on Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Tell me, do they AT ALL resemble the film, as shown in a classic scene, below?
Pauline Kael’s review of Interiors is full of the same holes, but goes a step further in the way it reverts to her classic brand of ad hominem, faulting Woody Allen for his supposed Jewish (or non-Jewish?) undertones in a way that simply has nothing to do with the film, itself. It begins with the typical word-dumps (“Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman”), moves to strain for insight (“has such a super-banal metaphysical theme [of] death versus life”), and rounds things out by trying to make connections to Allen’s earlier films, re: the character of Alvy Singer (“a compulsive, judgmental spoilsport”), who is again conflated with Allen, himself. Kael complains of the lack of ‘eroticism’, but the film that Interiors has been compared most to is Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, a flamboyant little work wherein the sex is full of overt, clunky symbolism, and merely exists as a stylistic device amidst the narrative slack, thus damaging both. The complaint, then, seeks to turn the film into what it’s not, merely for the sake of personal preference, recalling Adler’s comment that Kael’s reviews are “paeans to the favored product, and diatribes against all other brands”. Then, there is the contention that “death versus life” is somehow “super-banal”, when in fact there is no such thing as a banal theme, merely one that is handled in a banal way. I mean, think: how many classic books, plays, and films develop this idea (among others) to great effect? And how many wannabe classics attempt the same, but fail? It is the failure, then, rather than the attempt that’s the issue, a fact that simply eluded Pauline Kael for much of her writing career. Then, the film’s Eve — a profoundly sick, cold, and lifeless woman that slowly destroys everyone around her — is compared to Alvy Singer (Annie Hall), whose worst sin is his utter immaturity. One wonders why such a connection is even made, unless, of course, Kael is merely ‘painting by numbers’ in her reviews, knows that connections between films must be made, for this is how reviews go, and therefore strains to do so, no matter how improbable in the specifics really are. She then ends her de facto introduction with a question that comes literally out of nowhere: “Are we expected to ask ourselves who in the movie is Jewish and who is Gentile?” Well, I don’t know, for almost everyone in the film is a well-sketched WASP, and it’d therefore make about as much sense if Allen were a former Hindu, and the film’s conflict propped up as a matter of Sikh vs. Mohammedan. Yet the fact that Interiors has as little to do with either as it does with the “Jewish” question would, apparently, be just as elusive, and immaterial.
Kael presses on, however, in exactly this direction. The characters are “sterilized of background germs” (Ok, but how? Can we have a scene, a snatch of dialogue for proof? And what import does this have re: cinematic appraisal?), the family’s issues are rooted in their “Jewish fear of poverty and persecution” (in fact, it revolves around an incredibly sick and nutty woman, and three selfish ones with metaphysical, not material, concerns), and that Woody Allen, himself, has no “joy” in cinema, for “as he made clear in Annie Hall, he can’t have that joy” — yet another trite conflation of the persona and the man. Eight paragraphs in, however, Pauline Kael finally starts to discuss the film proper, and she makes a good point re: the film’s symbolism: it can be heavy-handed, at times, to its detriment. Yet this is not seen in the example she herself proffers (that of a broken vase), but earlier on, at the film’s start, wherein the three women are putting their hands on the windows, as if to ‘break free’, sort of like the cage Jack Nicholson looks to be trapped in at the end of Antonioni’s The Passenger. In short, while Kael argues that it seems obvious Pearl will end up breaking a vase, this is not only not obvious, but irrelevant, too, since the arc — predictable or not — is well-done throughout. If anything, it is surprising, even, given that it occurs when Pearl is dancing and having fun, with most watching her with approving smiles — hardly a lead-in to something ‘bad’. Nor does Kael mention the great parallel between Joey’s explosion at Pearl, and Eve’s own explosion at Joey (“Stop breathing so hard!”) when Arthur first announces the separation, probably because there is no opportunity — alas! — to notice such ‘frills’ in Kael’s infamous refusal to watch any film twice. Nor is Eve a symbol of the Jewish mother’s “spiritual perfection”, as she claims, since spirituality implies openness and warmth, but of a contrived, static, and purely aesthetic (not ‘artistic’) one. No, Pauline Kael does not ‘like’ Allen’s symbols, but her solution is to therefore invent a few new ones, not only vis-a-vis the characters, themselves, but even through Allen’s off-screen choices. She notes, for example, that Allen would return the film’s print to be washed after every screening. But what does she make of that? Not much, apparently, for it “makes this the ultimate Jewish movie. Woody Allen does not show you any blood.” The last line, especially, is the kind of non sequitur she was routinely praised for writing, but one that — being a non sequitur, and an offensive one, at that — makes exactly zero sense. Indeed, it is the kind of “surface” Kael accuses Allen of, but one that she, herself, unwittingly flails upon.
Kael ultimately reveals her feelings (and her biases) about the film when she discusses the two mother-figures. She correctly points out that no one would want Eve for a mother, but errs when she throws Pearl into the same category as “an embarrassment of yielding flesh and middle-class worldliness”. But she is “embarrassing” how? That she is not smart enough to pick up on the symbolism of a play, or that she has a fun time dancing when almost everyone approves? (“Yielding flesh” is simply inaccurate, for there is no evidence of such in the film, merely a desire to further bolster Kael’s own argument.) Pearl is a better human being than most here, and is nurturing, supportive, and warm — the very meaning of the word ‘mother’, and a type that most people simply do not have. To suggest otherwise is Kael’s own new-found “worldliness”, as she’s merely butting heads with her past — if I’m allowed to psychoanalyze in the manner of Pauline Kael! — and does not like what she sees. More real-world conflation follows (“If the two [mothers] are warring for control of Woody Allen…”), alongside a howler that shows how much a second viewing would have helped. Although she starts with a good point re: each daughter representing a “side” of Eve’s neurosis, she derails a potentially rich examination by a tangent of her own making: that the “youngest” daughter, Joey, represents Woody Allen, since “in plays, the youngest is generally the one who represents the author”. (Ok, let’s try this: Cordelia is Shakespeare; the childlike Irina is Anton Chekhov; and the rapist Chaerea is…Terence?) Allen, therefore, is a “glumly serious postulant” and “dresses down” to piss people off in the midst of self-expression, just like Joey, herself. Yet what Pauline Kael doesn’t realize is that Joey is the middle sister, NOT the youngest one, which obviates her perceived need for the two whole paragraphs in which she argues exactly that, and shows how willing she is to detour and ‘nose around’ for meanings that aren’t really there, all the while missing what is.
The entire review, in fact, devolves to these sorts of attacks on Woody Allen, the man, even when the evidence is quite lacking. This is because — as with Sleeper and Shoeshine — she refuses to engage any real particulars, except the occasional prosaic line that fills in some plot details, but says nothing of the film qualitatively. Sam Waterston’s role, for example, is “unformed”, but Pauline Kael confuses her pejorative with the word “minor”. In fact, Sam Waterston is pure ‘sanity’, wherein the good-hearted guy is simply unable to deal with Joey’s deeply-rooted immaturity, which is, in turn, all the more fleshed out by his very presence, and Joey’s inability to appreciate it. If anything, he is the film’s least selfish character, and serves as a corrective (albeit an impotent one) to everything around him. Geraldine Page’s performance “seems abhorrent”, but while Kael criticizes the (infrequent) close-ups, did she watch Page’s tics during Arthur’s revelation? Or her sudden, hyper-realistic knocking-over of the candles in the church? Or — perhaps best of all — the nigh-ritualistic manner in which she prepares for a kind of ‘cosmic funeral’, replete with the black and white tape that mirrors her own dress, aesthetician, as she is, all the way to the grave? No? No, as such insights would have inevitably made it into Kael’s review. Her sarcastic attacks on Diane Keaton’s appearance (“She does something very courageous for a rising star…”) are irrelevant and petty, while Allen’s view of Jews — according to the words she puts into Allen’s mouth — is that they are “fundamentally undignified”, “conforming”, as he does, “to the [Gentiles’] idea of what a Jew should be”, even as Kael spends much of her own essay arguing the exact opposite: that Judaism is openness and laughter, and therefore ill-fitting a “Jew” like the one Allen unconsciously depicts. I mean, can one seriously read such horribly dated ‘insights’ today with a straight face? It seems that Kael, by being a Jew, herself, was as ‘free’ to be as tribal and narrow-minded as she damn well pleased, provided, of course, the object of her invective was a Jew, as well. A ‘bad’ Jew, she would argue in self-justification; a Jew that needed to break out his own self-stereotyping, yet when he does exactly that, she pouts, for it is not the way she’d do it, herself.
No, Woody Allen tends to not understand his own films, at times, but he gets Interiors FAR better than Kael ever did:
If Kael’s review of Interiors was poorly thought-out, and downright offensive, at times, what can be said of her take on Stardust Memories? It starts off rather trite: Sandy Bates is conflated with Woody Allen, yet again, and the film derided as a “dupe of a dupe” (that is, of 8½). Kael discusses the magisterial opening, but instead of focusing on some wonderful touches — the suitcase filled with sand, the way the train whistle blows, thus making Sandy’s words irrelevant, the enigmatic ‘pilgrimage’ the passengers must take — she simply makes the expected comparison to Fellini. As her essay goes on, the Allen/Bates conflation is only deepened, as Allen merely “degrades the people who respond to his work and presents himself as their victim.” Now, I’ve already gone over this in explicit detail, in three separate essays within this book, alone, and won’t spend too much time on it now. Suffice to say that Sandy is not Allen, and the closest characters to Allen are the over-voice represented by the extraterrestrials (similar, in many ways, to the conversation between Mickey Sachs and his parents inHannah), and Sandy Bates as he appears in the film’s last few shots, as the ‘inner’ film closes, and the characters and “grotesques” (to use Kael’s word) are given a very different sort of meaning. She then tackles the murals that appear on Sandy’s wall, wondering if they are “evidence of his morbidity”, or mere “proof” that “he’s politically and socially with it?” Well, the answer’s neither, as Kael’s own words indicate that the murals are like “mood music” that changes according not only to Sandy’s feelings, but the film’s narrative points, as well, such as when there are newspaper clippings of a child molestation after Dorrie accuses Bates of “flirting” with her kid cousin. Kael’s rhetorical question is thus irrelevant, as she already knew what’s what, but played dumb, anyway, as it didn’t quite fit her argument. But while Allen keeps on getting criticized for being ‘bad’ towards his fans, what is ultimately missed is how badly Bates, himself, gets skewered, not only in the extraterrestrial scene, but in the way he treats his own persona. “Woody Allen has often been cruel to himself in physical terms,” she quips. “Now he’s doing it to his fans.” Ok, but what of the way Sandy Bates is turned into a kind of Frankenstein, in one scene, building the ‘perfect woman’ who, in fact, merely recapitulates his own flaws? Or the way that Tony Roberts, a supposedly ‘vapid’ playboy Sandy makes fun of, nonetheless knows Sandy’s issues all too well, and therefore avoids them in his own life? Or the way that Sandy ignores what’s right for himself by following a few ridiculous passions? Not a peep on this, for Kael either does not see this — after all, she only needs to watch a film once to “get everything” — or refuses to, given how she already had a pre-cut argument, and only needed to find a way to stick to it. Indeed, for the film to work, Sandy “would have to be the butt of the comedy”, she writes. But he is precisely that — or rather, he is enough of such to help the film pour over into the realm of drama, as Stardust Memories is not, as Kael seems to think, merely a series of gags and making-fun, but multi-layered, and exploratory.
Kael’s review once again takes a turn for the offensive when Allen’s Judaism is brought back into the picture. After going on about Allen’s “hostility” towards his ‘tribe’, family, and fans, she claims that he is “trying to stake out his claim to be an artist like Fellini or Bergman” (100% true, by the way, as allartists of some talent should at least make the attempt), but goes on to write that, in his desire to be a “Gentile”, “he sees his public as Jews trying to shove him back back into the Jewish clowns’ club.” If one ever doubted Kael’s nastiness, not only as a writer, but a human being, as well, here is the evidence — replete with the intolerance and tribalism that made her see the world in black-and-white, thus resuscitating the stereotypes she only pretends to wish to combat. “Great artists’ admirers are supposed to keep their distance”, she presses on, putting words in Allen’s mouth without evidence. “His admirers feel they know him and can approach him; they feel he belongs to them…” But is the next sentence a poetic inversion? A logical corollary? A ‘key’ to everything that’s been writ and disemboweled? No: “And he sees them as his murderers.” This is yet another non sequitur, and although she has the chance to redeem herself, she does not take it, for one can’t merely ‘turn around’ — no matter how untenable the positions have become — after going so far in. In fact, she needs to go further, and quite often does. Scenes, for example, are “opaque”, such as when a former actress (after much cosmetic surgery) from Sandy’s films introduces herself as his mother. But while this is merely “cruel”, in Kael’s eyes, and nothing more, it obviously has a purpose. She enters the scene almost as an apparition (Kael’s word is “silhouette”), and given that we don’t know whether or not his mother is alive, but get comic glimpses of her before and after this scene, the effect — after Sandy’s near-breakdown — is that of yet another being clawing from his past. Yet it is more poetic than the “grotesques”, and has multiple layers of meaning and emotion that play upon the viewer, and thus engage him in a way that the simpler and more comic images do not.
But much of Kael’s argument devolves to precisely this: that the film is full of “grotesques”, and that this is both unfunny, and “trivializing”. Yet grotesques (as I mention elsewhere) make up a fairly small part of the film, given the number of extremely well-wrought and hyper-realistic characters, and while Kael complains of Allen’s “trivializing” their “ugliness”, what does this accusation even mean? Ugliness merely is, and while beauty is certainly better, in one sense, it is generally meaningless by itself — a fact that Kael ought to know quite well, given her petty attacks on Keaton’s hairstyle, skin tone, and overall appearance in Interiors. It is also irrelevant what Allen’s intentions were in Stardust, and whether or not he loathes these people, as is claimed, or is merely a fearful Jew (as is also claimed). The characters are what they are, regardless, and fulfill a function that eludes Kael, for while she complains that the images have no “power”, one must ask: power over what? To think that the film’s lighter parts must be privileged over its much deeper examinations is ridiculous, but Kael spends more than half of her essay unwittingly arguing exactly that. There is a reference to the “grotesques” and “Judaism” in nearly every paragraph, but little else is ever said, as if that’s all that matters. Nor do her attempts to ‘go beyond’ get very far. Writing of the film’s three women, for instance, she claims that “they don’t have enough independent existence for us to be sure what they’re supposed to represent”, but this is only true insofar as they are not mere symbols, and therefore cannot represent ‘one’ thing. In fact, their “independent existence” is brought out in their utterly human and believable behaviors: Dorrie’s jealousy, breakdown, and possible sex abuse as a child (never dwelled upon, by the way), Daisy’s downward spiral into drugs (also touched upon, rather than made predictable and trite), and Isobel’s far better nature, which is ignored in favor of the others’ abusiveness due to Sandy’s own immaturity. And the women have plenty of ‘tics’ and mannerisms that mark them as real, whether it is Dorrie’s fractionation at the mental ward, or Isobel’s silly ‘exercises’ in the midst of Sandy’s marriage proposal. In short, this is how people behave in real life, and why the film — despite being so fantasy-driven, in parts — is a simulacrum of the real, rather than weirdness for weirdness sake. Thus, Dorrie is not “merely used for her physiognomy”, as Kael argues, but because her various psychoses are what attract Sandy to her in the first place, and make him stay when they finally start to peak. It is also telling that, despite not being a “grotesque”, but beautiful, she is likely the film’s most cancerous being — even if she cannot quite help it. The same can be said for Daisy re: Sandy’s attraction, and is also the reason why he rejects Isobel. In fact, had Kael seen the movie more than once, she would have actually noticed the scene where Bates attempts to create the “perfect woman”, and fails because the beautiful one does not have the bitchy, self-destructive personality he so craves. This characterizes not only the women, but Sandy, as well, and belies the claim that the three don’t have a life of their own.
The REAL Stardust Memories, which is full of great writing, poetic visuals, characters that are NOT Woody, but an over-voice (and implicit narrative) that is. Again, would Kael ever get this, even if she’d condescended to watch a single film twice?
If that wasn’t enough for Kael, she writes of how Woody Allen displays his Jewish “self-hatred” in Stardust Memories, but that at least in other films, these “betrayals” were more subdued. Kael points out, for example, that his romantic rival in Annie Hall was the tiny Paul Simon, and the comical Wallace Shawn in Manhattan. This, to her, is evidence of the fact that he simply loathes his appearance (and therefore himself), and tries to force his rivals to be even lesser men that he could actually handle. Yet she never stops to ask the far more obvious question as to whether Allen is merely being realistic about himself, with no hang-ups whatsoever. Indeed, for while Allen has been called a “creep”, “narcissistic”, and “misogynistic” for casting himself alongside a Diane Keaton or Mariel Hemingway, he has in fact dated both ‘types’ (and Keaton, herself) in real life, as the bigger issues of one’s existence are not, as Kael would have it, merely skin-deep, or related to one’s height. Despite this, however, he is now to be derided for making fun of this asymmetry, as he is no longer a “creep” or a “narcissist”, but a self-loathing Jew too aware of his own shortcomings. Nor does it help that, despite Kael manipulatively positing Wallace Shawn as Isaac’s “rival”, this literally spans a few seconds in the film, and is never touched upon again. Far more ‘dangerous’ to Isaac is Yale Pollack (Michael Murphy), who is taller and far more handsome, and plays a major character whom Kael simply ignores. But why? Isn’t he the more obvious rival, who actually takes Isaac’s girl away from him? Shouldn’t he, therefore, have been Kael’s focus? Yet such evidence simply does not fit the argument, and is thus never considered. Then, just as quickly, Kael goes on to write that while Allen tended to shy away from the camera, at first, using his face as a “caricature” in his early works, this film looks at it quite closely, and without too many frills — hardly the behavior of someone who is self-loathing, or wishes to hide from the Gentile gaze. Yet Kael is strangely unaware of how deeply such words obviate her earlier comments. In fact, she goes from being absolutely sure of this, to not, and back to certainty at essay’s end (nay, the same paragraph, even) — the pendulum, no doubt, of a critic that cannot stick to her own positions. And yet, Allen still gets flak: “What’s apparent in all his movies is that for him Jewishness means his own schlumpiness, awkwardness, hesitancy. For Woody Allen, being Jewish is like being a fish on a hook.” But could it be that Allen is merely playing the ‘nebbish’, who just happens to be a Jew? Or does the tribe always come first in Kael’s self-limiting universe? “[In Annie Hall,] his own family quarrels and shouts hysterically,” since “as almost everywhere else in Woody Allen’s films, Jews have no dignity.” Could it be that he’s merely showing what so many families are like — my own included? Or do only flattering depictions of Jews (or anyone else, for that matter) imply reality? On Manhattan: “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” Could it be that those values were simply false, which Pauline Kael at once admits, then suddenly denies when her original point no longer fits a new ‘insight’? Or must a film — all evidence be damned! — be taken at face value? Perhaps it is the latter for Kael, for while she goes off on a number of hateful, downright racist detours, she returns full circle to her original conflations: “If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away, this picture should help him stop worrying.” And yet, the public has not gone away, and Allen — paradoxically — worries even less. Why is that? Probably because he had few worries in the first place, and which had nothing to do with Kael’s own posits. I mean, Allen is a great artist. Allen knew this. Kael did not. Allen has only gained in stature. Kael, by contrast, has dwindled, and her progeny — i.e., Armond White — is on the same self-destructive binge. Again, why is that? I don’t know, but the deeper point is that fewer still even care.
I’ve now covered three film reviews (four if you count Shoeshine), and of these three, I still don’t see how my knowledge of film art has expanded. If anything, it’s been confused, because — as Renata Adler argues — Pauline Kael brings in a number of irrelevant issues, tangents, and arcs that do little but make trouble. Yet these three films were big, and covered big, complex themes. What of Allen’s smaller works, and Kael’s responses to those? First up is Broadway Danny Rose, and just as before, Kael begins with allusions to Woody Allen’s “sexual insecurities”, among other things, and notes how there’s been an influx of Allen-like entertainers who might overtake his popularity in the 1980s. Yet it’s interesting to see how utterly dated Pauline Kael’s predictions were a mere decade later, and even less relevant now. For instance, she names John Belushi, Richard Pryor, Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, and Tom Cruise as possible contenders to Allen’s ‘throne’, but besides one or two of those names, who’s gone on to do anything of lasting note — especially of their own accord? Yes, Tom Cruise will be forever remembered as ‘the lead’ in Eyes Wide Shut, but that is mostly through Kubrick’s great writing and directing, and while the other names (especially Pryor) have been responsible for some laughs, it is odd to compare them to a director like Allen, who is interested in far more expansive work, and was already quite ubiquitous by the time Danny Rose hit theaters. No, the name-dropping isn’t as bad as with Jonathan Rosenbaum (upcoming), but it is yet another foible within Pauline Kael’s writing, especially since it takes her two paragraphs of such before she even attempts to tackle the film.
Kael’s first complaint is that Allen’s Danny Rose is busy “condemning what he views as the scurviness of our time”, all the while “spinning a tale without having any particular involvement with it”. Two issues are immediately obvious here. The first is that the film has little to do with “our time”, especially re: ‘moral’ questions, and everything to do with a lost milieu. This is why the film begins with a gathering of comedians who are forced into reminiscence about the good ol’ days, as things have clearly changed for them, and people, after twenty-plus years, are no longer laughing at their jokes. For this reason, to call this of “our time” is merely an attempt to sound relevant, which is doubly strange, as the way the film tackles loss is timeless, and therefore always relevant, without the need for the stretches and props that Kael so desperately seeks. The second issue is that Danny is very much part of the film precisely for the reasons Kael herself states: the whole tale is engendered by others’ reminiscence, Danny’s function is that of the milieu’s ‘heart’ (no matter how silly and idealistic), and the comedic side to things revolves around his own lacks. As Kael writes, “Danny Rose is nobody in show business” — a fact that helps him be the center of the tale as a ‘legend’ on the periphery, rather than hindering him in this regard. A better review than her last few, for it skimps on the Judaism, tribalism, and most of the personal attacks, Kael goes on to detail the characters, themselves, as well as their world, and even (correctly) dissents from the popular view that Tina is a great character. She is not, for a “ruthless tough dame who chews gum with a vengeance, talks with a nasal Brooklyn accent, and has a teased-stiff mop of curls” is not so much a character, but a mere stylization, no matter how well-sketched. Yet this is not exactly what Kael argues, as she believes that Tina doesn’t do much for the film. This is untrue, however, as the stylization in fact helps establish a milieu that never really was — from the archetypes, like Tina or Lou Canova, to the guys who open and close the film, bullshitting in a way that is both untrue, yet necessary to their sense of things, and of themselves. And this is really where the film’s ‘magic’ (however limited) comes in. It is not because the tale is “satirical” (as Kael argues), or that Danny Rose is a mere “larva” of a character (likewise), but in the disconnect between what is and what isn’t, that really drives the film. As Kael writes, while “Woody Allen knows how repulsive Lou Canova’s act is, Danny Rose doesn’t” — a reality that applies to everything from Manhattan to Stardust Memories, yet an insight that Kael not only misses in those other films, but ill applies here, faulting Danny Rose for not knowing better, while missing the fact that it is more important what the viewer knows about the character, rather than the other way around.
The last review is that of The Purple Rose of Cairo, which is interesting to look at because while I very much agree with Pauline Kael’s assessment of the film’s good qualities, the reasons she gives — as with Sleeper — are quite odd, at times. Yes, as with Danny Rose, it is a much better review than her other ones, for it jumps right into the film and stays there, but her line of argument derails early on and never gets quite on track again. For instance, she calls it Allen’s “fullest expression yet of his style of humor”, but while most (excluding Woody Allen, himself) would take issue with Kael’s calling it his best movie thus far, it clearly isn’t in the vein of his other films, but rather a bit of a detour. In short, Allen typically does gags, skewers the upper crust, skewers Brooklyn (not merely “Jewish”) families, and has fun at the expense of his own illusions. This, by contrast, is a “charming” (Kael’s word) tale that leaves most of these elements out, save for the only one that matters: the quality of the writing, visuals, music, and acting, rather than their specifics, which follows him in films as diverse as Sleeper, Interiors, Sweet and Lowdown, and Match Point. This may seem like a minor point, but it’s merely the tip of the iceberg, as Kael goes on to make a large number of other misreadings, and even interprets Woody’s ‘admission’ that he’d like to be Gigi (from the 1958 musical) “with two ribbons dangling quite mischievously past my bangs” quite seriously, as somehow integral to his art, rather than an attempt to be silly, as most of his gags are. Cecilia, to Kael, “isn’t very vivid”, yet her only evidence for such is that she is plain-dressing and looks, talks, and acts like a “mouse”. This may be true on a purely literal level, as far as how other characters might interpret her, but as with my comment re: Danny Rose, it’s far more important to consider how the viewer sees things, as he, by definition, not only knows much more, but is privy to the fact that art itself is a charade. Thus, the viewer watches Cecilia’s reveries get interrupted by the sound of a crashing object; sees her all-too-serious gossip; sees her various ‘tics’ as she reacts to Monk, especially her great confidence, near the end, despite our knowledge that the film’sde facto villain is absolutely right about her illusions; and sees her almost imperceptible turn to wisdom as she cries over her losses, and considers what to do next. Yes, Kael praises Cecilia’s lacks as important to the film, and while I agree in terms of others’ perceptions building much of the narrative, the character, itself, is in fact one of the more “vivid” female leads in all of cinema.
The excellent ending of The Purple Rose Of Cairo, wherein the two leads are implicitly shot across from each other, despite being in different locations, and a look on Mia Farrow’s face that suggests — if not outright shows — that her life will no longer be the abuse that she’s used to. Yet Mia Farrow’s Cecilia somehow isn’t ‘vivid’ enough for Kael? Again, where’s the evidence, and why is it so actively ignored?
Kael goes on to make a good point about it being unclear “how consciously manipulative Gil is”, as this lends complexity to what might otherwise be a one-note character, but hinders its further development by merely calling the effect “a sense of dislocation”. In short, she is correct in her impressions, but not her reasoning, as it is not “dislocation” (that is, our reaction) that matters, which may or may not affect a viewer, but a complexity of motives (especially obvious when Gil is on the flight back), which is immanent to the character, and quite independent of our personal reaction. She then goes on to write that Gordon Willis’s cinematography is “too rich and shadowed for comedy”, since “The Depression thirties was the era of Deco dishware in cheap and cheerful primary colors, of yellow oilcloth on kitchen tables, and red-and-white plaids and checkerboard patterns wherever you looked.” Perhaps, but so what? Kael is in fact contradicting herself again, for she (correctly) opens her review by stating that “Cecilia and her Depression town are not quite real”, which is at first praise, a la the film’s own subterfuge, but now turns into criticism. In fact, what is implicit in Kael’s earlier comment is that Purple Rose is not even supposed to depict ‘the’ Depression, as it truly was, but the Depression of the popular imagination, which thus turns into a symbol for Allen to play with. And although she critiques the film’s “browns”, it is undeniable that such drabness is precisely what’s come to be associated with the time period. This is sort of like criticizing The Odyssey for its incorrect depictions of maritime life (it’s been done!) while missing the tale, itself, and thus mixing up the truthand reality. In short, art is the province not of facts (truth), but of reality, wherein deeper things emerge of life, minutia be damned — especially if (as with Kael’s “primary colors”) they’ve already been quite forgotten, and replaced by a wholly new mythos for art to parallax. To demand that one must resuscitate them is nitpicky, and belongs more in a curiosity shop than an expansive work of art, as this film is.
Monk (Danny Aiello) is criticized, as well, as he is “too heavy and loutish”, and this is really where her essay finally comes off its wheels. Yes, Monk is quite dislikable, and Kael admits she “dreaded” his scenes, but again: so what? What Kael misses is the fact that Monk, despite being the film’s villain, is the one that sees reality most clearly, and is — unlike Cecilia — completely OK with it. Thus, despite Kael’s argument, this in fact makes him a much more interesting character than he first seems. When he shouts, “It ain’t like the movies!” at Cecilia, the irony is that he’s absolutely right, and the film’s do-gooder is wrong. This lends Monk if not outright credibility, then at least something for the film to play off of. She then writes that “the film’s resolution” makes Monk’s depiction “cruelly harsh”, yet all this proves is that Kael had not really seen the film’s ending, and the way it ultimately depicts Cecilia. Yes, Cecilia is disillusioned, and loses her ‘easy’ ticket out of a bad life, but we also see her go back to the movie theater at which she cries, and then — as if something had finally ‘clicked’ in her brain — smiles. It is, moreover, a smile that is sustained, and has little to do with what she sees, and everything to do with some new realization. Does she return to Monk? One can’t say, but it is clear that, whatever might happen between the two, her marriage can no longer be the same. As Dan Schneider writes, “even if it all was a dream you sense Cecilia — despite her heartbreak — has had 1 of those Rilkean ‘You must change your life.’ moments.”[54] This is, in fact, much more in tune with the evidence, and a likelier outcome when one considers Kael’s own words: that there is a sense of strength and “independence” underneath Cecilia’s weak veneer. Indeed, for while she faults the film’s ending for being “tidy”, and that Allen needed to “pull something magical out of a hat”, the irony is that Allen has done precisely that. Yet, as with any good sleight-of-hand, it simply isn’t noticed — not even by the ‘professionals’ in the room, who should at least have come to expect it.
Readers have praised how “unpredictable”[55] Pauline Kael’s reviews were, but how could that ever be a good thing? It simply means that she had no consistent way of looking at art, and was therefore perpetually lost, deriding a cliche in one film, then praising it in another, all the while constructing reviews that — if not merely full of invective — were either non-topical, or full of holes and contradictions. In short, it didn’t matter whether Kael wrote a non-topical, blog-like memoir (Shoeshine), a review-cum-biography (Sleeper), racial invective (Interiors), amateur psychoanalysis (Stardust Memories), or straight reviews (Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo), for they are filled with the same cliches, misreadings, vindictiveness, and abuses of evidence and logic that cohere her work under one umbrella, but do little to further one’s understanding of art. Nor does it truly matter whether she was right or wrong, but how she got there, for unlike, say, Roger Ebert on Stardust Memories, or James Berardinelli on Celebrity, she preferred to fill with reviews with mere personal attacks, not dialectic, as things like evidence are quite tame — boring, even! — compared to ‘insights’ about Allen’s sexuality, or his Jewish self-loathing. Yet if my overview of James Berardinelli vis-a-vis Pauline Kael shows anything, it is that tameness and sound argumentation are far preferable to screeching. It is not, after all, merely about being right, but being right-minded. One could be wrong with all the right evidence. And one can be right with NO idea as to why. But a person who has an expansive and unbiased way of engaging art — that is, unclouded by emotion or aesthetics — will at least know what the hell he’s looking at. That won’t make one a great critic, but at least the art can penetrate. At least one can be better. At least there is the art.
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Pauline Kael typified The New Yorker’s middle-brow style of the 60s and 70s (in the 80s she was anachronistic): regurgitating the conventional wisdom on taste and style to NY intellectuals who looked to other venues, forums and publications for accomplished critical insight into their particular field of specialty or interest. She indeed used the language that many of them used and cut the same attitude. (No doubt why her writing seems so dated.)
She did have a vast knowledge about film and was enthusiastic about the medium. But she seemed unaware that part of the critic’s job is to impart understanding so she made little if any effort to hone here own powers of perception or the analytical content of her reviews.
Her reviews gives one the impression of a web of adjectives, themes and personal names only nominally connected to the specific film being writing about.
Yeah, the key word is “taste”: if the film did not fit her preferences, which were always changing, anyway, it was trashed. The opposite was true, as well. The language is both dated and just so straining, always looking for that witty put-down which, lacking any judgment behind it, would merely fall flat.
I am still shocked that her review of “Shoeshine” was considered a classic for so long, given how little she actually discusses the film.
I read her review of 2001. I’m not in love with it either. But her words are absurd, and have little to do with the film. They sound more like barroom ravings and prejudices with an intellectual sheen. Your description of her seems accurate. Thank you.
I’d say that’s her biggest problem: she veers WAY off into her own world of irrelevant opinion, and has nothing of substance to say about most films. Look at all the comments under this post, everybody wants to defend Pauline Kael about this or that, but no one has been able to defend the reviews this essay critiques. I hope people understand that, by going through almost everything she’s written on Woody Allen, and exposing it, it’s no longer a critique limited to just those reviews. She is *systematically* wrong and *systematically* bad.
Thanks for reading.
What a load of nonsense. Even her most vehement detractors acknowledge that she was an exceptional writer. I suspect that your diatribe is a consequence of your disagreement with her temperament, or sexism, or perhaps both. She was undoubtably THE most influential, knowledgeable, fascinating and stimulating cultural critic of the 20th Century, not to mention a priceless wit, and by all accounts a beloved figure by many important contemporaries and colleagues who knew her.
And the directors and critics she lampooned deserved it. Kubrick was a HORRIBLE director after Lolita, a film which she respected because he wasn’t being so insufferably pretentious in his early years. Most of Bergman is laughable in retrospect (ever see SCTV’s hilarious parody of Persona)? Woody Allen’s “serious” films like Interiors and September were atrocious. Cassavetes was a complete, unfettered fraudulent hack–and his films WERE insensitive and amateurish, as she rightly alleged. Fellini, Renais, and Antonioni (after l’Avventura) were all overrated, pseudo intellectual poseurs. Stanley Kramer and Sidney Lumet were completely overrated amateurs. Candice Bergen and Ali MacGraw COULDN’T act to save their lives during their youth. And who could possibly argue with her calling BS on Andrew Sarris, or Peter Bogdanovich, or John Milius, or Sterling Silliphant, or Michael Cimino?
Do you disagree with her about West Side Story, or the Sound of Music? And her “review” of Shoeshine wasn’t a review; it was a recollection written many years after she saw the film, as a tribute to De Sica’s brilliance and his emotional affect on her–as well as a lament for the limited minds in the audience who couldn’t surrender to its artistry.
She was absolutely prescient and spot-on about Spielberg, Coppola, De Palma, Altman, Scorsese, Demme, Lynch, Mazursky, Philip Kaufman, and Bertolucci–and I will stand beside her view on Clint Eastwood until my dying day–he was, is, and shall ever remain wooden, talentless, and fascist.
I’ve read every single one of her books and interviews countless times, and never tire of them. From your essay, I don’t see any evidence of any exhaustive research into her work–I see the typical East Coast academic pedantry common to everyone who has tried to diminish her. The fact that you have taken the time to rant at such length about a movie critic is testament to her importance–what other critic, save perhaps Shaw or maybe Agee, has generated even a smidgen of analysis of their body of work as Kael has? What other critic has had a posthumous biography written about them? Or has generated such academic interest? No one.
You can take your stand along side Renata Adler and Sarris as the sour grapes philistines who will be forgotten, while Kael’s legacy will live on.
Alan: I really wonder if you’re putting me on. Regardless, note the differences between my essay and your pointless comment: mine is detailed, cross-referenced, argues specifics, while you speak in generalities and ignore the evidence that’s already been presented merely because it savages one of your idols. Why have you not addressed the specific claims? Do you somehow feel yourself above the grunt-work?
Even her most vehement detractors acknowledge that she was an exceptional writer. I suspect that your diatribe is a consequence of your disagreement with her temperament, or sexism, or perhaps both. She was undoubtably THE most influential, knowledgeable, fascinating and stimulating cultural critic of the 20th Century, not to mention a priceless wit, and by all accounts a beloved figure by many important contemporaries and colleagues who knew her.
Pauline Kael sucks, bro. I don’t give a shit about who acknowledges what. I am dealing with reality as is, not anyone else’s filter. Do you NOT understand the point of critical thought? I could say more, but I’ve already said it, and you’ve apparently not read it. Seriously, why are you second-guessing the reason behind my “diatribe,” when I’ve in fact went into detail WHY she’s a bad writer, beyond any disagreement I might have with her? Read my essay on Ebert. His judgments were often poor (though not as consistently bad as Kael’s), but he was at his best a great writer. Kael was always a wannabe and dart-tosser.
Kubrick was a HORRIBLE director after Lolita…
Lolita was one of his lesser films. Note that, like Kael, you never get specific. If you would, I suspect that, like Kael, you would be wrong, presenting evidence that contradicts your own conclusions.
Most of Bergman is laughable in retrospect…
Specifics…?
Woody Allen’s “serious” films like Interiors and September were atrocious…
Specifics…?
Cassavetes was a complete, unfettered fraudulent hack–and his films WERE insensitive and amateurish, as she rightly alleged..
Specifics…?
No?
Then why engage in a conversation when you refuse to make a single point?
You can take your stand along side Renata Adler and Sarris as the sour grapes philistines who will be forgotten, while Kael’s legacy will live on.
Re-read the essay, then your comment. Surely, if I were as bad as you say I am, you’d have some arguments to counter mine? I mean, go ahead, Alan. Pull up ANY of her essays that I’ve referenced, and tell me, specifically, where I’m wrong, and defend her claims against mine. All I hear is, she’s wonderful, I’ve read every article, interview, smelled every fart, etc., whereas I went through her work, paragraph by paragraph, and actually, ya know, ENGAGED the writing you so claim to love, but can’t even be bothered to properly defend?
Seriously. Grow up.
Accusations of sexism sans any actual substantive elaboration (not even possible in this case, since Sheremet’s denunciations are specific and relate directly to the text he’s quoting, with not even the faintest whiff of sexism) are the fastest ticket to intellectual irrelevance. Not that your ridiculous and irrelevant claims re: the pseudointellectualism of the great artists you chastise don’t amply demonstrate that fact even in the absence of that asinine accusation.
Alan Roberts is a true genius. What a wonderful take down of this article.
You sir are a jackass. I’ve loved Kael for decades, but your justification of her worst tendencies and intolerance of the likes of Kubrick, Cassevetes and Bergman is abhorrent and objectively false.
You can love her writing and still acknowledge her blind spots and clear biases.
What a hopeless mess of a film buff you are,
Keep brushing up. You need a tune up.
This post failed the Turing Test, but nice try.
Dude – you have clearly never made a film. you sound like a hack the way you write. regardless of who you are, you have to have quite a chip on your shoulder to call some of the greatest contributors to the medium “amateurs” or whatever else you wrote. and even if Clint Eastwood feels like a “fascist” or if he is undoubtedly conservative politically and in his personal life, he is one of the few if only white men who actually presents even, sensitive and extremely accurate illustrations of real Americana over the last half century. You have “read every single on of [Pauline Kael’s] books”… what a waste of time. Perhaps you’re unable to come up with your own opinions or you like Kael suffer from such a deep white-guilt that you end up sounding like an privileged, negative, anxiety written freshman. Watch the movie, if you don’t like it, just turn it off. If you have something better to say, put it on the screen. Otherwise you just kind of need to shut up. I don’t necessarily agree with this also very pretentious and overwritten article but the core is true: Kael was a starfucker hack who wanted so badly to be a filmmaker that she failed as a real critic. She was a shock jock who wanted to get into parties and every attempt she made at having a hand in picture that might make it to screen was atrocious. Ebert, for all his flaws, was a critic. Kael was just another Hollywood groupie too ugly to be in the movies, too talentless to make a real picture, and too up her own ass to serve the medium.
So, what it comes down to is, you don’t like her because she doesn’t like the things you do (and tossing in examples where she comes to the “right” conclusion the “wrong” way doesn’t change that) And what is one to think of a critic of a critic who thinks Roger Ebert was a better writer than Pauline Kael? I have had the same reservations about her “emotionalism” that you describe; her tendency to go off on swirly, rhapsodic/ecstatic tangents that didn’t seem to have much to do with what was actually there on the screen—I recall being utterly baffled by her exposed nerve response to “Casualties of War”, which I found gimcracky and unmoving—and yes, Ebert did the same thing; but he was more squirmy, mawkish and embarrassing; and more to the point, Kael was an entertaining wordsmith, and entertaining is one thing Ebert never managed.
So yes, she could be obscuring instead of illuminating, but she could also pierce brutally/casually through the bull with a laser spotlight; her throwaway, “Do men in the movies still have to burn the dinner so the audience will know they’re straight?” is both funny and a funny-nasty and exactly right exposure of the clichés we all sluggishly accept to the point of not even noticing them anymore (and in my last reference to Ebert, he never noticed them either, and that was his job)
A an almost inevitable problem with critiquing a critic who wrote for so long and who not only covered The Current Cinema but the whole history of film is that to make your point you have to be selective. Understandably, you focus on the film s of your contemporary experience, and—as I indicated at the start—your own “emotional” connection to them inevitably guides your conclusions. But—to be totally random, and whether you liked the films or not—do you really have any problem with her saying of “Diabolique”, that the “Grand Guignol techniques are so calculatedly grisly that they seem silly, yet they succeed in making one feel queasy and sordid and scared.” That’s exactly what I saw and heard when I watched it, and the quoted sentence is economical, direct and well-constructed, it seems to me. Or “The Women”: “It confirms rich men’s worst suspicions and fantasies of what women want (money) and what they’re like when they’re together (clawing beasties).” I like the flick and she didn’t, but again, that’s exactly what’s up there, isn’t it? And of course I could go on and on. But to no purpose, because, again, these oldies aren’t what you’re looking at; it’s the same critic, but she’s not going after your vitals with those, and you can’t let her tough, direct and intelligent reviews of those films “matter”, because even if you liked them, they don’t “matter” to you the way a (*sigh*) Woody Allen film does.
But since you’re so into “logic” (a curious requirement for a critic of the arts) and her lack of it, let’s turn the scalpel around on just one of your rebuttals, for Kael’s review of “Interiors” (which has apparently become a revered classic without anyone noticing) So…how does “Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman” qualify as a “word-dump”, when, with some factual data, it could serve as a cleanly-written, direct, spot-on and stand-alone capsule review? Giving in again to randomness, you’re baffled by her references to the “Jewish undertones” of the film, and the contrast with Gentile gentility? I have to accept that you saw the film, but did you read ANY of the other reviews? Her slam about the “death versus life” theme being “super-banal” is taken, to put it mildly, much too literally by you; there is nothing to suggest that she thinks the theme could not be or hasn’t been handled brilliantly; she is clearly saying that it is handled banally HERE. And it may be minor—and then again, I have a feeling it isn’t—that you regard Kael’s reference to Keaton’s deliberate lack of glamorous vitality as being a “sarcastic…irrelevant and petty” attack on the actress, but–sorry, this is beyond both debate and belief; Kael is—clearly to anyone not rooting around for ammunition—being straightforwardly admiring and respectful, without the slightest hint of any underlying, contrary meaning or intent.
Whew! That was fun. Anyway, you are of course both right and wrong, for the reasons just stated. You’re just too focused on the films and filmmakers that matter (maybe too much?) to you, and those trees and keeping you out of a forest that, I think, you would enjoy and even be enriched by if you ever chance to take a stroll therein.
Booker,
So, what it comes down to is, you don’t like her because she doesn’t like the things you do…
Barring her despicable racial pandering, the essay, above, clearly has nothing to do with what I personally like or dislike: especially since I tend to dislike the bulk of Antonioni’s films, many of Kubrick’s, etc., even though they’re brilliant filmmakers with masterpieces to their names. The point is that I have not used my tastes as an excuse to grind some ax. Instead, I tend to leave myself at the door. It is a good way to let reality filter in. This is something that Kael was simply incapable of, hence this essay.
and tossing in examples where she comes to the “right” conclusion the “wrong” way doesn’t change that…
Note how you leave this statement in a mere parenthetical, as if it somehow doesn’t matter.
No, seriously, consider this awhile, then ask yourself why a good critic would not merely gloss over it like you do. It is a clue to your very thoughts’ undoing.
And what is one to think of a critic of a critic who thinks Roger Ebert was a better writer than Pauline Kael?
Roger Ebert made lots of terrible judgments, but at his best had great judgments AND great writing. His best reviews are economical, filled with strong images, and memorable lines. Just look at his take on Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” and compare it to anything that Kael wrote. In just a few short sentences, Ebert’s first paragraph gets into Bickle’s psychology as well as the tenor of the film’s tricks, while the ending is a great poetic take on both viewer and film, without the need to preen (a la Kael) nor strain for insights that are never really there (a la, well, Kael).
Sure, it is not an analytical review that can truly get into the ‘why’ of the film’s machinations, but is among the very best as far as pop reviews go. The fact that Kael by contrast goes on for thousands of words about X, Y, or Z might give her an analytical gleam, but there is a difference between a gleam and a reflection. For she reflects nothing but her own limits.
A an almost inevitable problem with critiquing a critic who wrote for so long and who not only covered The Current Cinema but the whole history of film is that to make your point you have to be selective…
But you are wrong. I specifically point out, above, that I did not cherry-pick, but swept through many reviews (praising, critical, or somewhere down the middle) of Woody’s films ranging from the early comedies to the later works, from a period in Kael’s writing that is widely considered to be her ‘mature’ period. Could I have focused on something other than Woody’s stuff? Sure, but my book is a book on Woody, first, and — even more importantly — if you tend to fuck up all 7 or 8 reviews of the same director so badly over a 15 year period, the likelihood is that you’re a fuck-up, period! (Hehe.) And that’s the point: even in reviews that are complimentary (such as her take on “Purple Rose”), Kael reaches her judgments in illogical ways. Really, she is like an alchemist who ‘discovers’ the cure for cancer, then goes on to kill a hundred other patients when she treats them for warts and pellagra. Your accidental judgments mean nothing if you cannot replicate them in a logical, sustainable manner. Even Donald Trump has had some sensible things to say. So what?
Understandably, you focus on the film s of your contemporary experience, and—as I indicated at the start—your own “emotional” connection to them inevitably guides your conclusions.
I focus on the films relevant to a book on Woody Allen. I merely touch upon her other, ridiculous reviews out of necessity. Unless you wish to argue that she was right about so much *except* Woody (a convenient blind spot, huh?), then this is irrelevant. Woody was not a blind spot, but the symptom of a far wider deficiency.
And feel free to point out which of my emotional connections guide my judgments. I don’t know if you have actually read my book, but I explicitly state, for instance, that “Interiors” and “Hannah And Her Sisters” are among my least favorite films, but argue that they are masterpieces nonetheless. By contrast, “Annie Hall” is one of my 5 or 6 favorite films of all time, but wouldn’t even break a top 40 or 50 on objective merits.
I’ve not seen “The Women” nor “Diabolique” so cannot comment, but your conclusion “I like the flick and she didn’t, but again, that’s exactly what’s up there, isn’t it?” is EXACTLY what I’m arguing against. Funny how, despite not even seeing the thing under question, I can tell your tack — one that propels ‘taste’ and personal likes/dislikes as some sort of arbiter — is still completely wrong. I don’t mean this in a snarky way, but it is almost like coming across some teenaged adept proselytizing about yet another cult. I don’t need to know a thing about ‘the Thing’ to know the thing’s wrong, for the pattern has been borrowed from quite elsewhere and is open for all to see. Same goes for you. Forget what you or Kael feel about these films. Are your thoughts and judgments consistent with what’s on screen? All else is futility.
But since you’re so into “logic” (a curious requirement for a critic of the arts)
It is not ‘curious’ if you in fact understand how art functions. It is not cut off from the real world. It is not apart from the laws of reality. It is not woven from some exotic fabric that is beyond the brain, matter, or human understanding, which is why you can come here and write what you write. That it is more subtle says little more than that it is more subtle, which is not the same thing as ‘impenetrable’. Had you in fact truly believed in it being so ‘curious,’ then you’d realize, implicitly or no, that my claims would be both valid and invalid, and your response to such would be the same, and you’d not even have a reason to bother with me. Yet you did, and you’ve not truly asked yourself why.
So…how does “Interiors is a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however the eroticism of Bergman” qualify as a “word-dump”, when, with some factual data, it could serve as a cleanly-written, direct, spot-on and stand-alone capsule review?
You mean beyond the fact that “Interiors” is not really a “puzzle movie” (at least not any more than literally any other well-made drama), that virtually any realistic, ‘serious’ drama can be described as a “well-made play from the American past,” and the utter pointlessness in comparing it to Bergman’s visuals (an aesthetic, which is by definition neither good nor bad) then adding, in a silly aside, that is lacks Bergman’s “eroticism” (which is not a judgmental at all and completely immaterial to the film– as are her pointless fixations on the characters’ supposed Jewish identities)?
It is in fact a word-dump: a string of shit that doesn’t mean much except the most obvious shit. It is fluff. And it is NOT a “capsule review” AT ALL, for it avoids all judgments all the while pretending to make them (e.g., ‘constructed like’ is not the same thing as ‘is,’ as is evident from Kael’s negative take on the film despite this initial phrasing). It is the exemplar of a bad capsule/book blurb, and you likely don’t see it because you’ve seen it so much already and have therefore been de-sensitized to it. Seriously, the above is like a precursor to burbling-blurbings much in the same way that some of Kael’s early reviews (such as of De Sica’s “Shoeshine”) are precursors to blog-posts-cum-journal-entries that masquerade as film criticism today.
Could I have expanded upon this in the essay? Sure, but I’d hope the obvious is obvious, as I hate to condescend and spoon-feed and turn a (now) 180,000 word book into something twice the size of Moby-Dick. Seriously, re-read the ‘capsule,’ and ask yourself what the hell it even means, and why it was necessary.
I have to accept that you saw the film, but did you read ANY of the other reviews? Her slam about the “death versus life” theme being “super-banal” is taken, to put it mildly, much too literally by you; there is nothing to suggest that she thinks the theme could not be or hasn’t been handled brilliantly; she is clearly saying that it is handled banally HERE.
Except, of course, that if you read Kael’s review *as written,* there is nothing to suggest that the theme can be done ‘better’ anywhere at all — since the review, itself, gives exactly zero evidence for her judgment that *this* handling is in fact bad.
Re: my confusion about her use of Gentile/Jew dichotomies: they are in fact pointless. There is zero reason to bring this into “Interiors”. Her insistence on such is either an intellectual lack (meaning, she’s straining for effect), or an emotional need to imbue racial nonsense into what is in fact a great poke at upper class WASP existence. This is where she could have learned from Ebert. Ebert might go off on the deep end frequently enough, but he never does it to pad out an already terrible article for the hell of it.
And it may be minor—and then again, I have a feeling it isn’t—that you regard Kael’s reference to Keaton’s deliberate lack of glamorous vitality as being a “sarcastic…irrelevant and petty” attack on the actress, but–sorry, this is beyond both debate and belief; Kael is—clearly to anyone not rooting around for ammunition—being straightforwardly admiring and respectful, without the slightest hint of any underlying, contrary meaning or intent…
So poking fun at an actress’s disheveled look and passing it off as a critical judgment is “straightforwardly admiring and respectful, without the slightest hint of any underlying, contrary meaning or intent”? How? Can you provide a good reason to bring this up, especially in connection with Kael’s over-arching claims about the film?
Whew! That was fun. Anyway, you are of course both right and wrong, for the reasons just stated. You’re just too focused on the films and filmmakers that matter (maybe too much?) to you, and those trees and keeping you out of a forest that, I think, you would enjoy and even be enriched by if you ever chance to take a stroll therein.
Just look at how much you assume about what does or does not matter to me on an emotional level — likely because you treat your emotional connections as all-important, and therefore pass your own solipsism unto me.
It isn’t fair, of course, but the real damage is in fact being done to you: particularly since you do not seem to understand what you’re doing. By contrast, I see what you’re doing because I have done it before and tend to attract people who come to me with your same assumptions and mistakes. Really, just take a look at some of the other comments on this site (particularly on my Neon Genesis Evangelion piece). There is no “forest” that I’m missing (at least not the one from your vantage; I concede there are other perspectives both of us will miss), for you don’t even know where I’m standing… much less yourself. How can you then invite me for a stroll? One of us would, ahem, have to hold the other’s hand. 😉
Kael once said that she didn’t believe there were any objective measurements in any of the arts (in a discussion with Godard). What you need to analyze as a movie critic is your own response/experience, in reference to the work, suggesting what about the film made you react this way. But of course another person who had a different response to the film, will never accept this as evidence. Two people who have opposite reactions to a movie will seldom be able to change the other person’s opinion, because we find rational arguments to fit our gut-reactions and emotions.
I think Kael often had fun using movies as taking-off place, to discuss topics and themes, both personal and non-personal. Obviously, she also had one foot in literature, and tried to put “distill the experience” into words, thus sometimes sounding more poetic than analytic (even though i think it is possible to be both). E.g. she wote about “Dressed to Kill”, that the “the pleasure of the suspence is aphrodisical”.
Anyway, i love film, and i love Pauline Kael, so those to things are not mutually exlusive 🙂
That’s not really a universally true principle, though. I could probably name a dozen movies off the top of my head where my gut-level, emotional reaction totally contradicts the intelligent one, and when that happens, I go with the head, because the head is a better appreciator of movies. I think “Last Year at Marienbad” is dreadfully boring, but I can objectively appreciate it as a nigh-perfect evocation of perception, and how it shapes memory and experience, and how those two latter things play upon each other. I probably enjoy Cassavetes’ “A Woman Under the Influence” more than any of his other movies, because of how hard it hit me when I first saw it, but I can take a step back and see that he has at least three movies better than it, perhaps more (I’ve not seen Love Streams and a few others). The mark of a good critic is not erecting a highfalutin post hoc rationalization of your biases, it’s being aware of and accounting for them as you attempt to reckon with what really is on the screen (or the page, or what have you) in front of you, and adjudicate whether you think it’s worth others’ time and effort to experience. The idea that all experience of art is just totally subjective (and not, as most things, a mixture of objectivity and subjectivity) is solipsistic nonsense. And, to be blunt, Kael wasn’t even a GOOD “poetic” appreciator of the arts. Her turns-of-phrase were almost always tortured, or obvious and banal (see: the quote you include in your post), or just bizarre and jarring (and not in a positive way).
In response to your reply:
Sometimes most people agree that a movie is “great”, but that doesn’t make it “objectively great”. That is more like intersubjectivity. You can’t dismiss the reaction of people who didn’t like a film, and say that they are “objectively wrong”, even though they might be in minority. The moviemaker is a person who is expressing something in a particular way, which might connect with some people, but not with others. For example, I think the movie “Halloween” is a really bad movie, but it is regarded as a horror classic. That doesn’t change my opinion of the movie at all.
When I seek out critics I start reading those who I connect to in some way, either in taste, or writing style, personality, etc. It’s the same as with other art forms.
I realize there are different philosophical schools. I’m in the firm belief that you have to analyze your own experience, but in REFERENCE TO the work. I guess at some level you found “Last Year…” intellectually stimulating, even if you were also “dreadfully bored”. That doesn’t mean you “take a step back” from yourself. It means you can experience or enjoy a movie in different ways. (Or did you try to imagine what other people might like when you saw the movie?)
Of course it can be an advantage to be conscious of your biases, to the extent that it might modify your response (during or after a movie), but it is still YOUR experience.
It seems strange to write a review of a movie reaching for “objective truth” or “what is really on the screen” as you put it.
Kael was controversial, loved and hated. And our different opinions of Kael illustrates this very thing, doesn’t it? I seriously doubt anything you write will change my opinion of Kael as a great critic, and I suspect nothing I write will change your opinion of her as the “worst and mot ridiculous” critic.
Or as Kael put it, “we reed critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn’t fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves”.
Hi Lasse,
Keith made some good points back to you, but: I think the confusion is in the very terms you’re using. I do not deny that people might have very different emotional “reactions” to a work of art, but that’s not what I’m talking about. There’s a HUGE difference between films qualitatively, despite some being more difficult to judge than others. In my article, as well as the comments here, I keep trying to get away from the phrases ‘like/dislike’ but you pile them on regardless, for this is how you — and most people, really — see art: as an extension of themselves, that is, solipsistically, a phenomenon that the greatest art tends to destroy rather than nurture. Thus, while something might not “connect” with a viewer on some level, the critic’s job is to see whether the connections, THEMSELVES, actually exist. That’s a very different question, one that, unfortunately, people don’t seem to care about.
Just look at what you write re: critics. You seek to “connect” with them based on some pre-conceived bias you ALREADY have. Want to know what I look for in a critic, or any intellectual, really? Someone who could challenge my ideas, change my mind on things, or reinforce views in new, unprecedented ways. If this is NOT happening, what is literature then — your personal echo chamber? Yes, like you, I have my own aesthetic preferences (for example, I enjoy rhyming poetry, some bad b films, shit like “Total Recall”), but they don’t override deeper questions of good/bad, meaning, and purpose. Simply because bias is a human inclination doesn’t mean the inclination ought to be given into uncritically, as Kael had done over and over again. And while everything is definitely “MY” experience (as opposed to anyone else’s), true, meaningful, and GOOD subjectivity comes from the *portions* of objective ‘things’ that a person might highlight and articulate — meaning, here’s an essay deriding Kael for X, Y, Z, using the examples that are best for me at the exclusion of others. Yet the crux of the argument (assuming it’s competent and honest) won’t change, even as it’s squeezed to other directions. You are, at any rate, over-stating human differences. There is a reason why we developed certain languages but not others, specific cultures, societies…our details might be different, but the RANGE of what we *can* respond to is pretty fixed.
And one last thing… Notice how much, and how specifically, I’ve written of Kael, picking apart the reviews themselves. Yet you respond to nothing, as if you are somehow ‘above’ the argument, and just say ‘You won’t change my mind.’ Indeed, look at all the comments under this article and notice how poor the actual rebuttals are… if in fact they exist at all. I guess it doesn’t REALLY matter in the scheme of things, but don’t waff on *honestly* responding to what I’m saying, then feign parity with an offhand, ‘Oh, we’re just different!’ cop-out.
The point of art is communication, and the quality of a work is directly related to the artist’s ability to convey ideas of depth, specificity, and import in a manner tangibly evincing skill. “Last Year at Marienbad” is a film with an aesthetic I don’t particularly care for, and were I a filmmaker, I would likely represent perception differently. But I am versed in human psychology, and art, and how people have described these things and how they have historically been depicted in various media, and I can discern, intellectually, that the movie is skillfully depicting what it’s depicting in a way that channels common human experience. That it doesn’t resonate with me, on a personal level, because my own perception of perception differs, slightly, from the filmmaker’s, or because the aesthetic is unappealing to me, or because the characters are vapid people that I don’t enjoy spending time with, or whatever, does not really matter, because a work that is skillfully wrought and has something to offer in terms of what and how it engages with reality likely WILL resonate with others, and is deserving of recognition and praise, regardless. There is obviously some wiggle room on these things, which is why I’d never argue for some artistic Great Chain of Being, but at the same time, there are also seismic qualitative gulfs that cannot be argued away. Maya Angelou wrote Hallmark-level verse that contains banalities, pat sentiments, and melodrama in nearly every line, while, say, Wallace Stevens wrote verse that is largely shorn of cliches, avoids melodrama (or, where appropriate, deploys it subversively, to comment implicitly on the poem or its subject), uses the English language in a musically complex way (in ways overt and subtle), avoids telegraphing obvious ideas or sentiments, and conveys an interpretation of reality that is singular to that poet, and yet immanently relatable to a great many people. There is NO way to argue Angelou as a greater artist, even if, subjectively, something about her work appeals to you more, and you get more enjoyment out of it. To do so would be the height of solipsism, and art is, at its highest and best, the refutation of solipsism, not a caulk to render the self even more airtight.
Hi Alex,
Unforuntaley I have a hard time discussing this in english, because the language is becoming quite sophisiticated, but I’ll try anyway, because I find the discussion interesting (and pardon my typing errors). I have responded to some of your comments below,, and sometimes I’ve just asked questions to check if I understand you correctly:
“I keep trying to get away from the phrases ‘like/dislike’ but you pile them on regardless, for this is how you — and most people, really — see art: as an extension of themselves, that is, solipsistically, a phenomenon that the greatest art tends to destroy rather than nurture. Thus, while something might not “connect” with a viewer on some level, the critic’s job is to see whether the connections, THEMSELVES, actually exist. That’s a very different question, one that, unfortunately, people don’t seem to care about.”
But how to measure what is great art (objectively)? And how can you determine that? You might TRY to find the connections in themselves, but i question if that is impossible. Do you mean that you try to be analytical without being emotional?
For me, “like/dislike”, involves all of you reacting at the same time, also you intellectual faculty.
“Want to know what I look for in a critic, or any intellectual, really? Someone who could challenge my ideas, change my mind on things, or reinforce views in new, unprecedented ways. If this is NOT happening, what is literature then — your personal echo chamber?”
Sure. But I think you probably would then have to go back and see the movie again (after having a debate), and then see it/experience it, in a new way. I seriously doubt that a pure verbal/analytical discussion would change your full experience of seeing the movie, which has a greater sensory and emotional aspect, not working only at an intellectual level.
“Simply because bias is a human inclination doesn’t mean the inclination ought to be given into uncritically, as Kael had done over and over again.”
Of course you can try to say whether a movie is representing something new, whether it is technically innovating, whether it has convincing speical effects, e.g., but what are those elements worth in themseleves – because they are means to an end, which is the effect the movie has a total experience.
Remember Kael had watched a lot of movies over a very long period of time, so her “inclininations” were the results of a lot of experience watching movies. She used her own response as a yardstick, as a starting poin to analyze the movie., that is true, but on those terms she was quit analytic in her approach.
“And while everything is definitely “MY” experience (as opposed to anyone else’s), true, meaningful, and GOOD subjectivity comes from the *portions* of objective ‘things’ that a person might highlight and articulate”
Wouldn’t it be more correct to say intersubjective? Wouldn’t it then be better to have criticism written by committes, rather than individuals?
“You are, at any rate, over-stating human differences. There is a reason why we developed certain languages but not others, specific cultures, societies…our details might be different, but the RANGE of what we *can* respond to is pretty fixed.”
So you try to identify/separate this common range vs what is only your own individual response when you see a movie, is this correct?
“And one last thing… Notice how much, and how specifically, I’ve written of Kael, picking apart the reviews themselves. Yet you respond to nothing, as if you are somehow ‘above’ the argument”
I think it’s ok to keep the argument at this philosophical level, otherwise we are just going to talk past each other anway. The discussion has gone past Pauline Kael, don’t you think? I’m fascinated by the fact that we can have such strong different opinions about her, though, and I’m trying to find out what exactly this is about.
I wanted to ask why you consider White’s criticism to be abysmal.
In short, he is inconsistent (save for moral outrage, which has little to do with art) and provides no real reasons for panning or praising a film. He is a contrarian in the sense that he will go out of his way to attack something popular just because, and give props to an unpopular piece of shit, again, just because. Obviously, there is a correlation between new/new-ish popular works of arts and the extent to which something truly ground-breaking can be popular (meaning, it usually can’t), but it does not apply in all cases, and the reverse – unpopular == good – is just as untrue, and often more so.
It’s important to take principled stances but his principles are based on self-serving ideas that get him attention, nothing more. He capped off his histrionics some years ago by making a racial attack on Steve McQueen, a great director who does not delimit himself according to White’s needs and was thus White’s target.
Kael is a better writer. Ebert is a better critic.
Having recently exposed to some of her writings, I found myself surprised that this is one of the most revered voices in film criticism.
One just needs to read her rant Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; Or, Are Movies Going to Pieces? to find out what an insufferable, narrow minded and deliberately confrontational film critic she was.
I disagree that Kael is a better writer. She has some “zingers” and stuff like that, but they’re often too dumb to even be put in the category of ‘thought’, which good writing is at a minimum. Her essays have always gone on WAY too long given that they’re pretty much about nothing and say nothing, which is another obstacle. By contrast, Roger Ebert had, at his best, truly pithy, classic essays that, while often not ‘real’ criticism in the sense that he doesn’t properly deal with the good/bad of a film, nonetheless capture a mood, a reaction, or resonate some other way.
I’ll quote his review of “Taxi Driver” here in full. Look at how much he says in just a sentence or two, or how nicely the paragraphs weave in and out of each other. Can you honestly say you’ve read anything of Kael’s that could touch Ebert’s writing here?
“The numerous rapes and beatings have no ferocity and no sensuality…” (A Clockwork Orange). If a man had written this line he would have been eviscerated.
You say that Kael did not use logic in her critical assessments, but (as was one of the central theme of her fascinating essay, “Trash, Art and the Movies”) Kael believed that it was impossible (as well as essentially useless) to critique a piece without considering one’s emotional responses. And you say that art is not separate from reality, but, if I am to understanding what you’re getting at, I think you couldn’t be more wrong: art absolutely IS separate from real life. When a movie or a song or a book deeply moves us, it is something closer to magic, and it would be infuriating to think that one needed to be logical about this kind of magical experience.
I agree with you that she could be inconsistent, and this could be seen as a flaw for a critic. And half the time, I didn’t even agree with Kael’s reviews. But none of this seemed to hardly matter. More than any other critic I know of, Kael was intensely human. (And you should know exactly what I mean when I use that word) Maybe it was her transparent biases that infuriated some of her detractors, but for me, this is one of the qualities I find most appealing about Kael. You could always trust that Kael was writing from a place of utmost integrity; she didn’t seem to me to have any other agenda. She came across as very honest, sometimes most ingenious. Maybe there is some kind of envy or resentment coming off her detractors here, that she could allow herself to be so guilelessly honest and authentic.
I was also very surprised to read your words about her strained writing. To me, her writing (when she was at her best in the kate 60s/early 70s) flows beautifully. You asked another poster if there was anything Kael had ever written that was as good as Ebert’s review of “Taxi Driver”. Well, for me, this would be every single review that can be found in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”, “Going Steady” and “Deeper into Movies”. What else can I say? I read and re-read these collections the same way I would re-read a beloved book. Because they’re so damned entertaining and witty. And I can’t be compelled to provide reasons as to why I find her so entertaining and witty and sharp and oftentimes laugh out loud funny. No moreso than a person who says they find Lucille Ball to be hilarious. It is a specious argument, anyway.
If there was any legitimat, valid point that Kael was lacking as a critic, it was film critic Andrew Sarris’ insight that Kael never subjugated herself to the film she was writing about, that she didn’t approach film criticism with any proper sense of humility or critical perspective. In other words, she was always bigger than the film itself. I think is largely accurate and honest, but it is a l so this same critical vice that makes her so compelling and fascinating for her fans. With Kael, I got a slew of fascinating perceptions and insight that I would say couldn’t be had from a psychology-oriented textbook. As a matter of fact, one of the most observant, insightful things I’ve ever read about Pauline Kael was that she was less of a film critic and more of a pop psychologist.
If you do want an example of this, then you should really read “Trash, Art and the Movies” (it can be found in its entirety on the Internet, just Google it). Or, I could also suggest her review of the 1972 “X, Y and Zee” – my favorite review of Kael’s – where she focuses on the zest and with and intelligence of the screenplay, but more especially, Elizabeth Taylor. In what may seem like a terribly unimportant film review, Kael fashions what I find time be a profoundly fascinating dissection of one of the most famous and celebrated movie stars of the 20th century. She hits the nail on the head fifteen times in a row in this one. And, incidentally (or perhaps not), I could not have agreed with Kael any more when she stated that Taylor’s performance in “X, Y and Zee” was infinitely superior to her overrated, Oscar-winning performance in “Who’s Afraid of virginia woolf?” And I suspect that the fact that she would prefer a movie like “X, Y and Zee” to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is a perfect example of why some people are predisposed to not liking her. And I will turn it to you and request that you read either of the suggested reviews and tell me how you could not find her to be an EXCELLENT writer.
One more thing I noticed in your post was you mentioned how Kael attacked and ridiculed Diane Keaton’s appearance in “Interiors”, even when another poster pointed out that Kael was, in fact, admiring and complimentary here. Yet, you didn’t, or perhaps couldn’t see it. Well, maybe we are all blind to our own judgments and this is just our human-ness. But I challenge you to read Kael’s review of “Shoot the Moon”, where she once again brings up Keaton’s appearance in the exact same tone as she had done in “Interiors”, only moreso, and she is clearly and abudantly in total awestruck admiration for Keaton.
Hi Todd,
If Kael really said that you cannot critically evaluate a film (or any work of art, really) without emotion, then she was absolutely wrong. There are plenty of great films that I subjectively hate, but would still be fair to them, and could still give them their fair, critical due without injecting my personal biases into it. This is hard, at first, but gets a lot easier when you recognize it brings much more of the world into your own world. As I’ve written elsewhere on this site, I give you Confucius: “Rare is the man who loves and sees the defects, or hates but sees the excellence of an object.” This was written 2500 years ago, but is a timeless ideal all people should aspire to.
And you say that art is not separate from reality, but, if I am to understanding what you’re getting at, I think you couldn’t be more wrong: art absolutely IS separate from real life. When a movie or a song or a book deeply moves us, it is something closer to magic, and it would be infuriating to think that one needed to be logical about this kind of magical experience.
No- that is not what I’m saying. Only the first part of your claim is correct. Art is not separate from REALITY, but is very much separate from REAL LIFE (at least in the sense of our typical, un-ordered moment-to-moment experiences). The two are wholly separate claims, and conflating them is an elementary mistake when discussing aesthetics.
Art is in fact woven from the fabric of reality. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is almost too obvious- if art does not come from reality, then where does it come from? Yet I don’t think you intend to make such a sloppy error. The second has to do with the nature of reality itself. In short, reality is the UNDERPINNING of “real life”, but is not that, and art thus can never be “real life”- it does not represent our day to day experiential reality, even as it borrows its chassis and rules and undercarriage and relationships.
An example will make this easier to see. Say you want to make a film. Say that, in order to make this film, you merely set up a camera to shoot 8 hours of footage in your home. You might get a bit of conversation into the footage. You might get a shot of a cat walking by, or someone lying down for a nap. Yet it is not art because it has no narrative- no beginning, middle, or end, but is simply a random, unfiltered collection of ‘moments’ of some arbitrarily selected interval of time. It may be a good visual representation of life’s comport, but only poorly gets at reality since it necessarily gives you almost nothing of the deeper relations, and does so without purpose. Yet the representation of reality- the province of art- is in fact the highest of purposes, and looks very different.
Now let’s go further. Think of all the thousands (millions, perhaps) non-fiction books written of slavery, childhood, 1800s America, and so on- all themes covered in, say, “Huckleberry Finn”. You can read, literally, tens of thousands of pages of this info, yet would come away with a poorer understanding of what all of it MEANS than you would reading Huck Finn’s mere ~100,000 words. That’s because, unlike those texts, it in fact orders the experience in a meaningful way. You actually SEE how real human beings behave; how shame works; what children value, and what children think, and how they develop both a moral compass as well as a sense of self. In other words, it gives you a deep and enduring sense of and for REALITY, even as it tells you absolutely nothing of real life- how could it? Its events never happened! But the point is that they could have, and if its events were real, they would look just like that- no, not in the details, perhaps, but in the details’ patterns. This is what separates art from all other endeavors, and the difference between real life and reality.
Nor does any of this even have to imply ‘logic’ in the Aristotelian sense, although art does need to use it. There is also the ‘logic’ of Keatsian Negative Capability, which calls forth a series of implicit relations- what Hart Crane invoked as the ‘logic of metaphor’, thus recycling Keats and not knowing it. This too plays a major role in great art, even though Aristotelian logic is still there to ensure it doesn’t go off the deep end. That’s just too easy to do.
I agree with you that she could be inconsistent, and this could be seen as a flaw for a critic. And half the time, I didn’t even agree with Kael’s reviews. But none of this seemed to hardly matter. More than any other critic I know of, Kael was intensely human. (And you should know exactly what I mean when I use that word) Maybe it was her transparent biases that infuriated some of her detractors, but for me, this is one of the qualities I find most appealing about Kael. You could always trust that Kael was writing from a place of utmost integrity; she didn’t seem to me to have any other agenda. She came across as very honest, sometimes most ingenious. Maybe there is some kind of envy or resentment coming off her detractors here, that she could allow herself to be so guilelessly honest and authentic.
But all this shows is how dangerous it is to champion flaws as good qualities. You call her “intensely human”, but I don’t see that at all. I merely see preening and the string of “look-at-me!”‘isms that Kael was so guilty of. You cannot say she has “transparent biases” (i.e., things that keep you from an authentic glimpse at reality) in one breath then call her a good critic in the other- the two are literally antithetical. Further, you call her “honest”, but Occam’s Razor says the following: 1) she was famous and much-read; 2) she enjoyed the attention; 3) her moronic leaps of logic and straining for seeing what was not there were a function of #2 rather than any noble aspirations. She reminds me a lot of juvenile novelists and wannabe poets and philosophers in that way, and it would not surprise me if she in fact wanted to be an artist, once, failed miserably at it, then went on to forge a niche for herself in a world that’s far easier to conquer. After all, we’ve had many great artists over the years, but almost no great critics. As a critic, you can say whatever the hell you want, and as long as you have a bit of charisma, people will trust and believe you. Her ‘insights’ are just so childish most of the time.
You seem to not understand what a writer’s agenda is. It is, at bottom, a selfish expression of ego, which in a writer of talent and maturity happens to also be a selfless act in the sense that it confers a net benefit to the world. As the writer matures, ego may still be there, but it is whipped and disciplined into continuously providing something of value to the cosmos rather than purely for itself. Ego is still the impetus, and Kael had a shitload of it. Too bad that she neither had the talent nor maturity for it to matter.
I was also very surprised to read your words about her strained writing. To me, her writing (when she was at her best in the kate 60s/early 70s) flows beautifully. You asked another poster if there was anything Kael had ever written that was as good as Ebert’s review of “Taxi Driver”. Well, for me, this would be every single review that can be found in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”, “Going Steady” and “Deeper into Movies”. What else can I say? I read and re-read these collections the same way I would re-read a beloved book. Because they’re so damned entertaining and witty. And I can’t be compelled to provide reasons as to why I find her so entertaining and witty and sharp and oftentimes laugh out loud funny. No moreso than a person who says they find Lucille Ball to be hilarious. It is a specious argument, anyway.
I do not deny that she might have had some average or even better pieces over the course of hundreds (or thousands) of reviews throughout her life. That’s not very impressive, in the same way that cracking a password via brute-force isn’t impressive. I am saying she has a PATTERN of badness, as exemplified by the essays I’ve dissected. I did not cherry-pick her. I went, specifically, after all her reviews of the filmmaker under question, as well as a number of others that had been championed by other critics and readers as ‘classics’ of her oeuvre. And I found exactly what I argued- that even if you were to discount her silly positions and poor dialectical skills, the writing itself is nothing compounded unto nothing. She often dawdles for paragraphs that go nowhere, digressing, in the most uninteresting ways, on topics only tangentially related to the film at hand, strains for poesy, and often ends up with something that says NOTHING of what’s really being discussed. Just look at her review of “Shoeshine”. That is, literally, a diary entry masquerading as a review, brimming with cliches and leaves the reader with no understanding of the film at all. So, bad writing, no insights, a pompous style that is annoying precisely because it is backed up by nothing tangible- I’d go with her being a bad writer.
I just tried reading “Trash, Art, and the Movies” and I mean- Jesus. Do you really wish to argue this is better than Ebert’s review of “Taxi Driver”? I need to use 2 hands to count the number of writerly cliches in just the introduction alone, and her prose is so over-modified and the modifiers themselves so meandering and inexact that it’s painful to read. Combine this with her idiotic comments on “2001” and “Blow-Up” and you just get the same ol’ Kael, and the excuse-making she still apparently enjoys.
Nor do I mean to be condescending here. Re-read Ebert’s critique- look at how terse it is, how observations flow from one into the other, the muted yet powerful connections between paragraphs, and that highly memorable ending which recapitulates not only the review, but the film itself, both in narrative and mood while turning one’s eyes to something else entirely. To say that Kael ever had anything like this is just laughable.
Thanks for reading.
I think some of the issue here is in the way Kael writes, because she is both impressionistic and analytical at the same time, and those two things often ring untrue for a lot of people. I can give a couple of examples, from one of my favourite sequences of all time, the museum sequence in Brian De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” (1980):
“Without almost no words, this loveplay, edged by the mans contemptous assurance, goes through so many permutations that it suggests a speeded-up seduction out of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” – a hundred pages turned into a visual scherzo”
In my opinion, noone has ever catched the greatness of that sequence better in a single sentence.
“The gliding glazed-fruit cinemateography is intoxicating, but there’s an underlay of dread, and there is something excessive in the music that is swooshing up your emotions. You know you are being toyed with. The apprehensive moods are stretched out – voluptously, satirically (…)”.
This is exactly the way I experience the movie. As a horror comedy, and where the moviemaking itself is part of what is exhilarating. Instead of just writing what I just did, Kael wants to convey how the movie feels and looks and makes her react. Her popularity is probably a lot due to how precisely she could describe what is difficult to describe (impresions of actors, moods, styles, etc.), and how many people recognized their own reactions in hers. This can be compared to the way great literature can affect us.
However, despite this, I find Kael to be among the most analytical of critics. For example, later in the review of “Dressed to Kill”, she goes on to analyse the visual style of De Palma:
“De Palma doesn’t use art for voyeuristisc purposes; he uses voyeurism as a strategy and a theme – to fuel his satiric art. He underlines the fact that voyeurism is integral to the nature of movies.”
I think it is this combination of being both analytical and poetic that is one of the most important explanations of why she was such a unique critic, and what made her so exciting to read. That, and in combination with a very personal, colloquial voice that gave the reader a feeling of knowing her.
But I think Kael is difficult to define. She managed to combine something that is very rare: criticism and artistry. Those who admire her often experience that the reviews have life on their own.
I should also mention that I also experience her as being a bit smart-alecky and ( and a few times mean-spirited), especially earlier in her career, when she was trying to establish herself as a critic and trying to get noticed. Maybe it was also as a result of her trying to find her style and writing freely and without inhibitions. That said, I think she grew to become a more mature critic as time progressed and she got the job at the New Yorker.
Hey Lasse – what do you think of the following sentences?
“Kubrick doesn’t use art for voyeuristic purposes; he uses voyeurism as a strategy and a theme – to fuel his satiric art. He underlines the fact that voyeurism is integral to the nature of movies.”
“Cassavetes doesn’t use art for voyeuristic purposes; he uses voyeurism as a strategy and a theme – to fuel his satiric art. He underlines the fact that voyeurism is integral to the nature of movies”
“Woody Allen doesn’t use art for voyeuristic purposes; he uses voyeurism as a strategy and a theme – to fuel his satiric art. He underlines the fact that voyeurism is integral to the nature of movies”
“The gliding glazed-fruit cinematography of the Black Swan is intoxicating, but there’s an underlay of dread, and there is something excessive in the music that is swooshing up your emotions. You know you are being toyed with. The apprehensive moods are stretched out – voluptously, satirically”
“The gliding glazed-fruit cinematography of Guillermo del Toro films is intoxicating, but there’s an underlay of dread, and there is something excessive in the music that is swooshing up your emotions. You know you are being toyed with. The apprehensive moods are stretched out – voluptously, satirically”
“The gliding glazed-fruit cinematography of Transformers by Michael Bay is intoxicating, but there’s an underlay of dread, and there is something excessive in the music that is swooshing up your emotions. You know you are being toyed with. The apprehensive moods are stretched out – voluptously, satirically”
“The gliding glazed-fruit cinematography of 21st century music videos is intoxicating, but there’s an underlay of dread, and there is something excessive in the music that is swooshing up your emotions. You know you are being toyed with. The apprehensive moods are stretched out – voluptously, satirically”
Don’t you think that the latter description, for example, is so ambiguous that you could attach it to any film with fancy (‘sensual’) cinematography and booming music?
Also, compare with critic Dan Schneider’s review of Ozu’s Tokyo Story:
“What is so striking about Ozu’s style in this and other of his films is how he mutes melodrama by having classically melodramatic scenes occur offstage, which only makes the charges of melodrama or soap opera all the more absurd. Another thing he is famed for is his static camera movements. There are only a few pans in the whole film, and most shots are from a low angle, so that the characters fill up the whole screen and many shots are as elegantly composed as paintings”
If I used Woody Allen, Kubrick, Cassavetes, Guillermo del Toro, or Michael Bay, in place of Ozu – do you think the paragraph would still hold up?
You can be impressionistic and analytical at the same time without issue. It is more so that her analytical abilities are nothing, and her impressionistic skills are nothing. Again, I am NOT cherry-picking her. I went through (I think) all the Woody reviews I could find, and a random selection from her fan favorites. The issues were the same across the board. You can easily find good lines (or perhaps good paragraphs) in most ‘name’ critics, but if you take her work in sum, all this stuff is nestled in bloated passages, fake poesy, fake analysis, and so on. I’ve given countless examples of such in the article and so won’t rehash them here.
Re: The New Yorker- all of these reviews were taken from New Yorker except for the early ones I mentioned. Unless she had a peculiar weakness/incompetence with Woody, I am left to assume this is merely a pattern. Since I’ve not read most of these other reviews, though, how would you respond to my critiques, specifically, of her Woody material?
Single sentences taken out of their context can often be used in other contexts. (E.g. a lot of directors use “static camera set ups”, a lot of directors “mutes melodrama”, and a lot of directors use a lot of “low angles”. )
That said, I think Kael captures the “feel” and “mood” of the film perfectly in her review, and I wouldn’t attach exactly those descriptions to any other film. However, I don’t require you to feel the same way. Especially if you don’t like DTK.
To elaborate: The way De Palma prolonges his sequences, and the way he bases his style on imagery and music, is (in my opinion) quite unique. He is a visual storyteller. Donaggios music is very passionate and also very integral to the meaning and effect. The “underlay of dread” is of course there because of the scary prologue that still lingers in the mind, and because of visual hints along the way that not everything might be as it seems. Few directors make the camera “glide” as much as De Palma, and in DTK he is more obviously artificial than ever, using a lot sensual movements and fog filters and lighting (blinking door knobs, etc.), to make the imagery “jewelled” or to convey the effect of a dream. I think Kael catches this erotic aspect of his style. And she also catches that De Palma is a manipulator having a good time toying with us. Kael used to say that his early suspense movies were like “erotic reveries, that kept being broken into by scary jokes” and that he was “bulding our apprehensions languorously, softening us for the kill”. She considers it important to describe De Palma’s style and the effect its has on her as a viewer. Maybe like Hitchcock then, “playing the audience like a piano”, just using different words?
Regarding the other paragraph (about “voyeurism”) Kael goes on to describe this in more specific detail. She mentions for instance that there is very little dialogue in the film altogether. She discusses the visual humour of the film. She describes among other things how we catch “glimpses of figures slipping in and out of the edges of the frame”, and how there are “almost subliminal images”, that we are “playing hide and seek along with Kate and her pickup.” In the subway scene she writes, “In this paranoid urbane nightmare of a sequence, it is once again now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, as hidden figures scurry by”. She goes on to discuss DePalma’s use of split screen, etc.
Much of great literature is impressionistic in its nature. When it comes to catching a mood, describing a phenomenon, etc.? What is wrong with that if it is good writing that a lot of people relate to and find meaningful and valuable? Kael has another way of writing about movies than most other critics. It puts a lot of people off, because they prefer a critic to write in neutral, plain language.
In general I agree with you, because there are so many bad opiniated critics. This way, Kael might have had a bad influence. I’m not sure there will ever be someone quite like her again.
I guess you could make an argument of the ethics though, of combining criticism and artistry. They can be in conflict. I think sometimes Kael’s dedication to her own art (and the freedom of expression) makes her some times come off as maybe insensitive to the effect of her words. E.g. if she felt that a movie had a certain subtext she might be frank about that, even if might be “delicate”. But you could also count on her to state her opinion, and not be corrupted by anything!
I searched youtube, and found this collage of excerpts from interviews of Kael during the years. It tells quite a bit about her philosophy on movies and criticism in general. Maybe better to hear it from herself?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REarWn1Inhg
Yet, those descriptors are all concrete things. To have melodramatic scenes occur offstage, static camera movements, and low-angle shots are things that you can say are done within Ozu. The only hazy descriptor is “elegantly composed as paintings”, but this makes sense when you link it up with the previous descriptors. Of course, things can be taken out of context, but look at your comment. You had to fill in the blanks for most of what Kael meant. I do not think that’s a sign of a good description.
Honestly, De Palma’s style isn’t very unique if you’ve watched other Giallo thrillers. Tons of them have ‘gliding’ cinematography and the mixture of sex & death and crazy overblown soundtracks and surreal comic touches at times. And it’s a genre that relishes in style without substance.
If someone wants to be an artist, they should make art. If they want to be a critic, they should just describe as much of the thing in question in as concrete a manner as possible. Do both, and you get criticisms that are larded with ambiguous modifiers in an attempt to be artistic. It fulfils the function of neither one nor the other.
Is Kael’s work or De Palma’s film really “meaningful and valuable” to you? When you go about in your day to day life, do you think about De Palma’s sexy kills, or Kael’s analyses? Do you see glimpses of a De Palma character in the people you meet, much like how Bergman’s squabbling couples seem to embody a large number of real broken marriages?
Czach,
I have seen many giallos and I like some of them but De Palma is much more satirical than they are. The way he seems to both skewer and idolize the film masters of his past and present never fails to keep me entertained. He is also hilarious—for instance, Dressed to Kill has some of th funniest scenes and dialogue that I have ever seen in a movie. I can’t see I’ve ever seen a giallo film that made me laugh. The acting in his movies is far above that which is present in the movies of Dario Argenti. And I for one do think about De Palma’s movies a lot. De palma’s movies don’t have characters, they have figures. They aren’t meant to be seen in the same way as Bergman’s squabbling couples. His movie Femme Fatale is probably the best demonstration of what he has been trying to do since his career began.
When I was young, I read her encapsulated New Yorker review of Kazan’s “East of Eden” in which she essentially implied that James Dean was a talentless and irritating actor, “whose agonies are lovingly dwelt upon by the camera” for absolutely no good reason.
That’s all it ever took for me to dismiss anything else she ever wrote about anyone, good or bad, witty or not. And there is personal experience, as well:
She was effusive in her praise of a classic motion picture that I myself starred in, and there was not one iota of her review that was unique or insightful about what I or anyone else involved in it’s creation had intended, other than being sexually excited by the most superficial elements of it’s genre.
“She reminds me a lot of juvenile novelists and wannabe poets and philosophers in that way, and it would not surprise me if she in fact wanted to be an artist, once, failed miserably at it, then went on to forge a niche for herself in a world that’s far easier to conquer. After all, we’ve had many great artists over the years, but almost no great critics. As a critic, you can say whatever the hell you want, and as long as you have a bit of charisma, people will trust and believe you. Her ‘insights’ are just so childish most of the time.”
Hasn’t it been ever thus?
Pauline Kael has been on the outs ever since her death. Her reputation is not growing, and more and more people are coming around to the facts for reasons both you and I have laid out.
I challenge any nay-sayer to link to even ONE well-written, cogent review from Kael, that actually 1) addresses the film, with any depth, 2) addresses what makes art ‘art’- character, narrative arcs, the relationship of style to substance, etc. 3) provides EVIDENCE for these judgments, 4) does so in an adult way, rather than over-writing like a child.
I guess the reason why I posted in this forum in the first place was that I was a little provoked by your all-out condemnation of her work. I thought for a while whether I should try write at some length and to go through one of Kael’s review in the same fashion as you did, but I came to the conclusion that I won’t. It’s too much work, especially writing in a different language that makes it difficult to express myself.
Also, the fact is that you have made up your mind about Kael, and nothing I (or anybody else) might give as reasons for enjoying her writing will be accepted by you. (That is probably vise versa too). I don’t think you are open to any real discussions about the quality of her work. You are not curious at all about what have made so many people love and enjoy her work with such great intensity.
But that’s ok. It’s your site, your forum. You didn’t invite us, we chose to write here. I mean, what can we except?
You have a different approach to what criticism should be (e.g. objective). But part of the irony here is that your analysis of Kael’s work is as about as objective as one of Kael’s own reviews. It merely reveals your obsession with her and your view of what art is, and that you are an articulate man, etc. I disagree with practically every statement you give, so where to begin our discussion then?
I could try to give some reasons why I love Kael’s work: The ability to describe actor styles, visual styles, to use humour and wit, to relate a movie to cultural context and movie history. The conversational, spontaneous language, which is part of her style as a writer. The tendency to link movies to her own personal experience.
The philosophical foundation is different from yours. As Kael put it herself, one of the greatest part of criticism is to discover new things about yourself. You highlight what is great about the work, but always in the relation to yourself. That is why all criticism is a kind of social constructive discourse, that tells us as much about the eyes of the beholder/interpretator, why he/she thinks this is a great/bad work. Knowledge and experience can of course give you a greater range of reference and response range, but no more objectivity. That is an illusion.
Kael is loved and respected by a huge amount of people, directors, actors, critics. Roger Ebert, which you refer to, was a huge fan of Kael. I wonder what basis you have for your claim that she is on “the outs” or that her reputation is going downhill.
My all-out condemnation on her work has to do with the fact that she consistently produced terrible essays on a random major filmmaker of my own choosing (Woody Allen), routinely got so much else wrong (2001, etc.), and was bad even in the individual essays I’ve often heard being championed by fans.
But I want to disabuse you of something:
Also, the fact is that you have made up your mind about Kael, and nothing I (or anybody else) might give as reasons for enjoying her writing will be accepted by you.
Do you not see the problem with that statement? My stomach turned at the phrase “enjoying her writing”- as if my essay had anything at all to do with whether or not I’ve gotten ‘pleasure’ out of her work. It’s not about pleasure, it’s not about enjoyment, it’s not about what I may or may not get out of it, on a personal level. I am only concerned with her writing ability and her faculties of judgment, and she is lacking in both.
I don’t think you are open to any real discussions about the quality of her work.
On the contrary, I don’t think YOU are open to the judgments I’ve presented. Look at what EVERY nay-sayer did in this comment thread. I wrote an essay, specifically, about her critical abuse of Woody Allen, and I’ve laid out very specific claims, on specific films, going almost paragraph by paragraph with her articles. Not ONCE did ANYONE even pretend to respond to my objections- not even you, despite accusing *me* of being closed to discussion. Really- if you want to have a productive conversation, as you claim, why not begin with something that I’ve actually argued, instead of getting pissed at the fact that I dismissed your favorite critic? Pick a Woody film, and let’s discuss her critique, unless you are trying to make the claim that she was so good and writerly and insightful about every other filmmaker, EXCEPT Woody Allen?
You are not curious at all about what have made so many people love and enjoy her work with such great intensity.
Look- enough wishy-washy bullshit. I was more than fair. I had a few “favorite reviews” suggested to me, and I looked at them. Garbage. I selected a great filmmaker, and looked at 7 or 8 of her essays on him- garbage. Not one dissenter, here, wants to discuss those specific films, or those specific articles.
You have a different approach to what criticism should be (e.g. objective). But part of the irony here is that your analysis of Kael’s work is as about as objective as one of Kael’s own reviews. It merely reveals your obsession with her and your view of what art is, and that you are an articulate man, etc. I disagree with practically every statement you give, so where to begin our discussion then?
It’s not ‘different’. Kael WANTS to be objective, but only PRETENDS to be objective- that’s the difference. She makes a claim, and gathers evidence in favor of her claim. That is an ‘objective’ approach. The problem is that her evidence does not match the claim, not that she is trying to do something ‘different’. Even your own list of favorite things about Kael points to objective methods- she is ‘able to describe actor styles,’ she can ‘relate a movie to cultural contexts’ and so on. This all requires a synthesis of evidence, and following a trail, methodically, where such evidence leads.
The philosophical foundation is different from yours. As Kael put it herself, one of the greatest part of criticism is to discover new things about yourself. You highlight what is great about the work, but always in the relation to yourself. That is why all criticism is a kind of social constructive discourse, that tells us as much about the eyes of the beholder/interpretator, why he/she thinks this is a great/bad work. Knowledge and experience can of course give you a greater range of reference and response range, but no more objectivity. That is an illusion.
More generalities, more claims without evidence. Do you NOT see a pattern at this point?
Kael is loved and respected by a huge amount of people, directors, actors, critics. Roger Ebert, which you refer to, was a huge fan of Kael. I wonder what basis you have for your claim that she is on “the outs” or that her reputation is going downhill.
Except Ebert is dead and her biggest readers are now old. I can imagine Ebert still being read to some degree a few decades from now, but Kael will become a curio, and, later, an example of precisely what NOT to do.
I think this review meets all your criteria If you don’t agree then I guess you don’t
It is Kael’s review of David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man”. You can find it here:
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/12/13/the-elephant-man-1980-review-by-pauline-kael/
I’ve not seen the film, but-
1) Her review begins, literally, with an expression of personal bias and a cliche.
2) Her second sentence uses a writerly and critical cliche, literally, as its fulcrum.
3) Her third sentence includes a redundancy for no other reason than alliteration, and does nothing but allows her to slide into non-specific, unverifiable claims using words (‘good taste,’ ‘grace’, etc’) that mean a million things to a million different people, and are critical cliches in and of themselves.
And so on.
Why don’t you talk about the films brought up in this essay? I wrote ABOUT Woody Allen, and ABOUT Kael’s abuse of Woody Allen. Let’s not dance around the subject, or pretend that we must discuss anything and everything EXCEPT that.
Look at how much effort I’ve expended to deal with your claims fairly and comprehensively. Do you feel that you’ve reciprocated? You’ve not addressed a single part of my essay, except for the summative claim (“Kael is a bad critic”) without addressing the evidence I use to reach to it.
We can actually talk about all this, if you’d like, but right now, you strike me like a guy who feels hurt by something he’s read, as opposed to a guy who wants to discuss the substance of what he’s read.
“I challenge any nay-sayer to link to even ONE well-written, cogent review from Kael, that actually 1) addresses the film, with any depth, 2) addresses what makes art ‘art’- character, narrative arcs, the relationship of style to substance, etc. 3) provides EVIDENCE for these judgments, 4) does so in an adult way, rather than over-writing like a child.”
I think this review meets all your criteria If you don’t agree then I guess you don’t 🙂
It is Kael’s review of David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man”. You can find it here:
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/12/13/the-elephant-man-1980-review-by-pauline-kael/
Kael praised a lot of Lynch’s work by the way, as well as the work of Bertoclucci, Altman, Godard, Taviana brothers, Coppola, Scorsese, and many others.
“My all-out condemnation on her work has to do with the fact that she consistently produced terrible essays on a random major filmmaker of my own choosing (Woody Allen), routinely got so much else wrong (2001, etc.), and was bad even in the individual essays I’ve often heard being championed by fans.”
I disagree. I think she produced consistenly brilliant essays. Also, do you really think a critic’s job is get to things right?
“It’s not about pleasure, it’s not about enjoyment, it’s not about what I may or may not get out of it, on a personal level. I am only concerned with her writing ability and her faculties of judgment, and she is lacking in both.”
I disagree. I think she was a brilliant writer. When it comes to judgment, I sometimes agreed and sometimes disagreed with her, but that – for me, is besides the point. For example, I think Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” is a great movie, but I still really admire her essay, even if she picks it apart in her review. It made me think, though, about why I still enjoyed the movie so much. If It made me argue with her in my own head – which I think is partly a sign of a great critic (to be able to stimulate critical thinking). This is I think is much more imporant than “being right”, which I think it closely tied to the false notion of objective judgment in the arts.
“I wrote an essay, specifically, about her critical abuse of Woody Allen, and I’ve laid out very specific claims, on specific films, going almost paragraph by paragraph with her articles (…).Really- if you want to have a productive conversation, as you claim, why not begin with something that I’ve actually argued, instead of getting pissed at the fact that I dismissed your favorite critic?”
This is why it was probably a mistake to post here, and my mistake, because I’m not too familiar with the work of Woody Allen. I was reacting more towards your all-out condemnation of Kael, not just of her reviews of Allen’s work. I have seen
“Purple Rose” and “Interiors”, but it is many years ago. I probably would have to see them again to be able to discuss them in detail. I might do just that, for the sake of the discussion. Not that I think it would lead anywhere, except that we would have to agree to disagree. Never the less, I think my arguments would be the same, because Kael’s style of writing is the same
.
By the way, I have nothing against you, except intellectual curiosity 🙂
“Kael WANTS to be objective, but only PRETENDS to be objective- that’s the difference. She makes a claim, and gathers evidence in favor of her claim. That is an ‘objective’ approach. The problem is that her evidence does not match the claim, not that she is trying to do something ‘different’. Even your own list of favorite things about Kael points to objective methods- she is ‘able to describe actor styles,’ she can ‘relate a movie to cultural contexts’ and so on. This all requires a synthesis of evidence, and following a trail, methodically, where such evidence leads.”
As I said, I don’t think objective criticism exists or is possible. Your claim that Kael wants to be objective I suspect is a result of her tone of voice being quite persuasive/opininated. But if you knew the first thing about Kael, you would know that she was the first person to dismiss the notion of “objective criticism”. All I can say is that I think she made consistenly brilliant descriptions – brilliant in the sense that I recognized my own experience in her description. Obviously you don’t agree, because you didn’t recognize the same thing. Rather you think the “evidence does not match the claim”.
” I can imagine Ebert still being read to some degree a few decades from now, but Kael will become a curio, and, later, an example of precisely what NOT to do.”
I think Ebert is mostly known from this tv-shows and tv-personality (thumbs up/down). He was a kind of celebrity. Criticism is something that is very tied up to the moment anyway(current movies). Kael seldom participated in television. It was the writing part (and using her mind) that gave her the most pleasure/motivation.
“I’ve not seen the film, but- 1) Her review begins, literally, with an expression of personal bias and a cliche.”
Kael writes: “The Elephant Man” is a very pleasurable surprise.”
I disagree about this being a cliché. She reacts as an individual person, she expresses her emotions and surprise, she want to share this with the reader. I would not want her to hide it either. Her spontaneous reaction is important to convey the reaction to the movie.
“ 2) Her second sentence uses a writerly and critical cliche, literally, as its fulcrum.”
Kael writes: “ Though I had seen Eraserhead, which is the only other feature directed by David Lynch, and had thought him a true original, I wasn’t prepared for the strength he would bring out of understatement.”
Can you explain to me what is clichéd about this statement?
3) Her third sentence includes a redundancy for no other reason than alliteration, and does nothing but allows her to slide into non-specific, unverifiable claims using words (‘good taste,’ ‘grace’, etc’) that mean a million things to a million different people, and are critical cliches in and of themselves.
Kael writes: “It might be expected that the material—the life of John Merrick, the grievously eminent Victorian who is sometimes said to have been the ugliest man who ever lived—would push Lynch into the kind of morbid masochism that was displayed in the various versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. But this young director (he’s thirty-four) has extraordinary taste; it’s not the kind of taste that enervates artists—it’s closer to grace.”
To me, she is mainly trying to give a description of the sensibility of the Movie and of the director. She is comparing it to the tone and sensibility of the movies of the past. I agree that she is at somewhat abstract territory here, but language is of course always partly equivocal..I think I understand the meaning of the word “grace”, and it has some resonance for me. I think her references are relevant, and I think her claims are as sound and coherent as any other. But they are critical (and subjective) evidence, not objective of course.
Lastly: Maybe you could give me an example of what is your idea of a perfect rewiew (or a very good one). Written by yourself or another critic of your liking maybe?. This way it would be easier to know what is your idea of the ideal?
By the way, you have to excuse my English, which is probably clumsy. The words don’t come to me as easily, and I spend quite a lot of time writing these answers
I disagree. I think she produced consistenly brilliant essays. Also, do you really think a critic’s job is get to things right?
A critic’s job is LARGELY to critique things accurately and fairly, yes.
I think she was a brilliant writer.
Great. But I showed dozens of reasons in this essay why she wasn’t, and you’ve barely responded to those criticisms. Is your belief a religious belief, or are you willing to examine it?
As I said, I don’t think objective criticism exists or is possible. Your claim that Kael wants to be objective I suspect is a result of her tone of voice being quite persuasive/opininated.
But that’s wrong. If someone were to press her: “Kael, do you *really* believe this, and why?”, she’d no doubt answer Yes, then explain- by offering REASON, even if poorly used- for her belief. In fact, she does exactly this in her essays, again and again and again, and all I did was to point out the disconnect between the belief and the reason she supplies. I take on Kael as Kael believes herself to be. You tackle Kael by positing a personal belief that has nothing to do with Kael (“art is subjective”) in order to protect her from any criticisms I might throw her way.
I disagree about this being a cliché. She reacts as an individual person, she expresses her emotions and surprise, she want to share this with the reader. I would not want her to hide it either. Her spontaneous reaction is important to convey the reaction to the movie.
If you disagree that a slight variation on an idiomatic English phrase used thousands of times before in art criticism is in fact a cliche, then you need to think about what the term means. To judge whether something is or isn’t a cliche is perhaps the easiest thing for 2 people to agree on in the arts- it is, quite literally, an issue of pure numbers, and is as close to a mathematical proof as we can get in this arena.
Can you explain to me what is clichéd about this statement?
What happens when you Google “true original”? Now, narrow down your search to artists of various stripes- how often is an artist or an art-work called that?
The rest of your comment is mere rationalization. You tell me, look, here’s a GOOD essay by Kael. I find you multiple cliches in the first paragraph, as well as silly critical terms that mean absolutely nothing, and you come back with “well, to me…”?
Look- I’ve said this before. You commented on an article dealing with Woody Allen. You’re not very interested in Woody Allen. You and I can’t discuss the substance of this article, and how my judgments have come based on movies you yourself admit you’ve never seen.
Your lone counter-example- that of Elephant Man- was badly chosen, because it simply reiterates everything this essay argues.
If you’d like to get off the subject of Kael, we can do so, and perhaps discuss objectivity in the arts or some other topic you might be interested in. This present discussion just isn’t going anywhere.
By the way, you have to excuse my English, which is probably clumsy. The words don’t come to me as easily, and I spend quite a lot of time writing these answers
Don’t worry about it.
“A critic’s job is LARGELY to critique things accurately and fairly, yes.”
The key word here is “accurate”. You believe that there is one accurate way to describe a movie or any other work of art (e.g. objectively.) You use terms as “describing its inner working”, and “unclouded by emotion”. I do not agree with that approach. The beauty is in the perception, not in the stimulus itself. Art has to be experienced. Movies (and art in general) is part of our socially constructed world, and not part of mere physical reality that can be measured or weighed. There are so many different ways a movie can influence people in different ways that there is not one single accurate way of describing it, rather multiple ways.
“You tackle Kael by positing a personal belief that has nothing to do with Kael (“art is subjective”) in order to protect her from any criticisms I might throw her way.”
Your condemnation of Kael is largely based on her phiolosophy/approach to movies and movie criticism.
“To judge whether something is or isn’t a cliche is perhaps the easiest thing for 2 people to agree on in the arts- it is, quite literally, an issue of pure numbers, and is as close to a mathematical proof as we can get in this arena.”
No, I think that is too simplistic a statement. A common or general word is not necesassarily a cliche. You have to look at the context in which it is used. Kael wants to express how Lynch is a one-of-a-kind director, different, or “a true original”. What is more important is whether Kael gives her reasons for finding him an original, and I think she does – for the rest of her review.
So I guess then, in your reviews, you will never find words like “original”, “beautiful”, “funny”, or other broad terms/adjectives?
“You tell me, look, here’s a GOOD essay by Kael. I find you multiple cliches in the first paragraph, as well as silly critical terms that mean absolutely nothing, and you come back with “well, to me…”?”
You found what you wanted to find, and your findings are subjective, even if you pretend otherwise.
“You and I can’t discuss the substance of this article, and how my judgments have come based on movies you yourself admit you’ve never seen.”
If you are interested I could look at “Interiors” again, and then we could discuss Kael’s review of that movie..
“The key word here is ‘accurate’. You believe that there is one accurate way to describe a movie or any other work of art (e.g. objectively.) You use terms as ‘describing its inner working’, and ‘unclouded by emotion’. I do not agree with that approach. The beauty is in the perception, not in the stimulus itself. Art has to be experienced. Movies (and art in general) is part of our socially constructed world, and not part of mere physical reality that can be measured or weighed. There are so many different ways a movie can influence people in different ways that there is not one single accurate way of describing it, rather multiple ways.”
While this is perhaps a start to a discussion, asking the question of whether art is or isn’t objective is going to require than a paragraph/theory to answer.
“No, I think that is too simplistic a statement. A common or general word is not necesassarily a cliche. You have to look at the context in which it is used. Kael wants to express how Lynch is a one-of-a-kind director, different, or ‘a true original’. What is more important is whether Kael gives her reasons for finding him an original, and I think she does – for the rest of her review.”
While I think Alex would agree with the second and third sentences, the rest is going back to square one – talk, with no persuasion/proof.
“So I guess then, in your reviews, you will never find words like ‘original’, ‘beautiful’, ‘funny’, or other broad terms/adjectives?”
A cliché isn’t merely a common word since as you said, it can vary on context and other things, though I don’t see where he said that clichés are common adjectives.
—
Lasse, you need to ask yourself, two years after your first comment, what you’re here for. You’re saying art is subjective, but try to convince Alex that Kael was a good writer; you say art is subjective, that he doesn’t REALLY believe art is objective, “pretending”, but you won’t put in the effort to discuss it with him. That art is subjective is the basis of your entire argument. In your own words: “I should try write at some length and to go through one of Kael’s review in the same fashion as you did, but I came to the conclusion that I won’t. It’s too much work”. You are talking to Alex, but not TO Alex. He isn’t going to discuss this forever, so you should decide whether you’re ready to take this seriously, otherwise it’s not only a waste of his time, but your time.
Please take the time to consider this honestly. Hopefully it helps.
I will take the work, even if it will take alot of time being in a fulltime job i like the challeng. Im away on holiday at the moment, but when i get back i will spend some time to think and reflect and write up something that is more specifically based on Kaels writing. I find the general philosophical discussion interesting too, but i agree that it doesnt seem to lead anywhere at the moment. I hope we can continue the discussion, though . I know i have been on and off posting here on this forum, which has been unfortunate – making the discussion seem repetitive and maybe somewhat discontinuos.. Im not sure why Im here either. (Sneeking into the lions cave… ) but I hope to find out. Maybe we should all get together one day for a cup of coffee
Ok, so now I have rewatched the film (“Interiors”) and I have reread Kael’s review. I will share some of my thoughts about this.
Kael obviously didn’t like the film, but I find her review very well written and interesting. She gives her general reasons why she doesn’t like the film (e.g. “it’s deep on the surface”, “a handbook of art-film mannerisms”, “everything is spelled out”, etc.)
Also her review is full of very interesting perceptions (to “me”), about style, form, characters, performances, themes and meanings, etc. I can not possible go into detail about all this, as it needs probably the length of a book. However, I will comment on what you refer to as her being “explicitly racial” and/or “ad hominem attack.”
Obviously, Kael clearly interpreted Allen’s jewish background as essential to the attitudes and themes that she saw in the film. She writes: “Certainly it’s not the culture in general that imposes these humanly impossible standards of acheivement – they’re a result of the jewish fear of poverty and persecution and reverence for learning”. Her observations are not objective evidence of course, but is critical evidence – based on her reaction to what she saw. (Which you don’t regard as evidence). For Kael her reaction is “the sum total of all her experience and knowledge reacting together”. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to like it, or to consider it “ethical” to make conncetions to Woody Allen – the man. But certainly it’s a legitimate interpretation; I mean religious and cultural forces are among the strongest in our socially constructed worlds, and I think Kael was sincere about it and true to what she saw. I mean, if you didn’t share her point of view at this point, you would probably never accept any evidence she might give for it either.
However, the “ethical” argument is a valid one. As a critic and journalist Kael was writing with freedom and with total commitment to what she was doing, and this could make her insensitive to the effect of her words. Yet you were never in doubt she was being personal about it (e.g. subjective). If you doubt that you should listen to her interviews, and her quotes about “saphead objectivity”, and so on. She said, among other things: “What else does a critic work with but his own response? The other thing is academic opinion or consensus opinion. Which means letting other people tell what you think, which means you’re a damn fool and serve no purpose whatsoever. ” So, Kael took her risk and said what she wanted to say, and in that way put herself on the line as well. She was a strong, personal voice, independent, non-conforming – which is part of the reasons why many people liked her writing so much.
Furthermore, regarding Kael’s review of “Interiors”: I find her description of characters is very sharp and accurate. For example the way she describes the Geraldine Page character (“The problem for the family is the towering figure of the disciplined, manipulative, inner-directed mother. She is such a perfectionist that she cannot enjoy anything, and the standards of taste and achievement that she imposes on her three daughters tie them in such knots that they all consider themselves failures (…) She wears icy grays and lives among beiges and sand tones; (…) She is a nightmare of sexual austerity, (…) She represents the death of the instincts, but she also represents art, or at least cultivation and pseudo-art.” etc.)
Similarly, I find her discussion of the actors/performances very percepetive and interesting, particularly her discussion of Keaton’s performane (“Diane Keaton does something very courageous for a rising star. She appears here with the dead-looking hair of someone who’s too distracted to do anything with it but get a permanent, and her skin looks dry and pasty. There’s discontent right in the flesh, (…)This physical transformation is the key to Keaton’s thoughtful performance: she plays an unlikable woman — a woman who dodges issues whenever she can, who may become almost as remote as her mother.” etc.)
Kael’s writing style I find modern, jazzy,, colloquial. Not dated or cliched at all. Her long sentences, with commas, dashes, parentheses, I find very jazzy, , going on a riff, etc. Her use of “we” and “you”, I find unpretensious and loose, a way of making her talk more directly to the reader. I find your definintion of cliches, as I mentioned before, to be simplistic, because you look only at the word in isolation, not in its context. In your own review of “Interiors” for example, you use a lot more “cliches” (in your words) than in any Kael review (“complex”, “great”, “interesting” occuring in the first paragraph). Kael always took great pride in her writing. Even Woody Allen himself aknowledged her qualities as a writer, even if he disagrees with her regarding a lot of films (“She has everything that a great critic needs except judgment. And I don’t mean that facetiously. She has great passion, terrific wit, wonderful writing style, huge knowledge of film history”).
I don’t see any “word-dumps”. Rather I see a remarkable ability to describe something very complex with simple words – like a writer/poet. E.g. One of my favourties lines from any review is in “Dressed to Kill”, where she writes: “De Palma presents extreme fantasies, and he pulls the audience into them with such apparent ease, that the pleasure of the suspense becomes aphrodisiacal”. I LOVE that sentence, because it captures exactly the atmosphere/senisibility of the whole movie in just one sentence. Of course, you think DTK is a bad movie, so for you this is just a laughable word-dump. I think – your loss, but please – don’t deny me the right to have my own experience and to love that sentence. I think that is the problem with you – you fail to see that there is no objective evidence, only evidence filtered through your point of view.
So, again, I guess whether you accept some of these specifics as evidence is based on whether you agree, which of course you don’t.
I could go on, but what is the point? To argue with “the enemy” is maybe the greateste challenge, but still – maybe not so fruitful, beause we are both too commited to our points-of-view. You think we are getting anywhere?
Obviously I don’t expect anything other than you trying to pick my sentences apart, which you are very good at (that is actually a compliment). So maybe we should just stop here, or else I have nothing else to do in my future spear time except searching for the right way to write this in english? (You have no idea how much time it takes me). I also have a book I want to write, and also several other creative projects going on, like yourself. But if you respond, though, I – of course, might be tempted to answer (I probably couldn’t resist).
Kael obviously didn’t like the film, but I find her review very well written and interesting. She gives her general reasons why she doesn’t like the film (e.g. “it’s deep on the surface”, “a handbook of art-film mannerisms”, “everything is spelled out”, etc.)
Stop talking about like and dislike for a second. She gave ‘reasons’ for why it’s a bad film, and those reasons are poorly supported, or not reasons to begin with.
Obviously, Kael clearly interpreted Allen’s jewish background as essential to the attitudes and themes that she saw in the film. She writes: “Certainly it’s not the culture in general that imposes these humanly impossible standards of acheivement – they’re a result of the jewish fear of poverty and persecution and reverence for learning”. Her observations are not objective evidence of course, but is critical evidence – based on her reaction to what she saw. (Which you don’t regard as evidence). For Kael her reaction is “the sum total of all her experience and knowledge reacting together”. Of course, that doesn’t mean you have to like it, or to consider it “ethical” to make conncetions to Woody Allen – the man. But certainly it’s a legitimate interpretation; I mean religious and cultural forces are among the strongest in our socially constructed worlds, and I think Kael was sincere about it and true to what she saw. I mean, if you didn’t share her point of view at this point, you would probably never accept any evidence she might give for it either.
What does ANY of this have to do with the film? Let’s concede, for the sake of argument, all those tangents are in fact interesting points of view. How is it in any way a comment on the merits or de-merits of what we see on screen?
However, the “ethical” argument is a valid one. As a critic and journalist Kael was writing with freedom and with total commitment to what she was doing, and this could make her insensitive to the effect of her words. Yet you were never in doubt she was being personal about it (e.g. subjective). If you doubt that you should listen to her interviews, and her quotes about “saphead objectivity”, and so on. She said, among other things: “What else does a critic work with but his own response? The other thing is academic opinion or consensus opinion. Which means letting other people tell what you think, which means you’re a damn fool and serve no purpose whatsoever. ” So, Kael took her risk and said what she wanted to say, and in that way put herself on the line as well. She was a strong, personal voice, independent, non-conforming – which is part of the reasons why many people liked her writing so much.
Notice how, a couple of paragraphs in, we’re still not really discussing the film, nor any of my specific critiques of Kael’s essay.
Furthermore, regarding Kael’s review of “Interiors”: I find her description of characters is very sharp and accurate. For example the way she describes the Geraldine Page character (“The problem for the family is the towering figure of the disciplined, manipulative, inner-directed mother. She is such a perfectionist that she cannot enjoy anything, and the standards of taste and achievement that she imposes on her three daughters tie them in such knots that they all consider themselves failures (…) She wears icy grays and lives among beiges and sand tones; (…) She is a nightmare of sexual austerity, (…) She represents the death of the instincts, but she also represents art, or at least cultivation and pseudo-art.” etc.)
These are fairly rote descriptions, partly because they’re pretty obvious to any intelligent viewer, and partly because they are misleading or trite. It is so like Kael to throw in an irrelevant, sexual jab (“nightmare of sexual austerity”) that neither she nor we can even adjudicate.
A “nightmare” of sexual austerity? Really, we dream of boring sex? Think about what words mean, and how they die in the wrong combinations.
Similarly, I find her discussion of the actors/performances very percepetive and interesting, particularly her discussion of Keaton’s performane (“Diane Keaton does something very courageous for a rising star. She appears here with the dead-looking hair of someone who’s too distracted to do anything with it but get a permanent, and her skin looks dry and pasty. There’s discontent right in the flesh, (…)This physical transformation is the key to Keaton’s thoughtful performance: she plays an unlikable woman — a woman who dodges issues whenever she can, who may become almost as remote as her mother.” etc.)
Yes, I agree, a few good lines, like the thin bread portion of a sandwich otherwise stuffed with tangents, bad writing, cliches, and silly observations.
I’ve already given plenty of examples of those tangents, bad writing, cliches, and silly observations in my essay. It would help discussion if you could address those examples, and not merely bring up a line here or there, or get into fresh stuff while my original arguments remain unanswered.
Obviously I don’t expect anything other than you trying to pick my sentences apart, which you are very good at (that is actually a compliment). So maybe we should just stop here, or else I have nothing else to do in my future spear time except searching for the right way to write this in english? (You have no idea how much time it takes me). I also have a book I want to write, and also several other creative projects going on, like yourself. But if you respond, though, I – of course, might be tempted to answer (I probably couldn’t resist).
I still see nothing that addresses the arguments in this essay, and the reasons I’ve outlined for the failures of her criticism.
You can’t say the house didn’t burn down simply because you can still point to a few small patches of grass.
Just think about the arguments I’ve in fact made, and not the re-wordings and re-interpretations to which you’re subjecting my arguments.
Goddamn it, just suck it up buttercup. You’re mad that no one liked your favorite flick. Calm down, baby
Lol, I’ll just leave this one up without comment.
What bothers me about the replies is the same thing that bothers the author of the post–no actual addressing of what he said, and the hiding behind the assertion that “objectivity is impossible anyway.” If you see a cat on a mat, and you say “A cat is on the mat,” you are being objective. If you say “I don’t like that cat, and I don’t like that mat,” you are also being objective–objectively reporting your response. If you say “I don’t like that cat because it keeps attacking me and ruining my furniture,” you are one again being objective. I don’t agree with the possible meaning of the claim that everything is “a mixture of objectivity and subjectivity.” What is meant by “subjectivity”? The fact that there is no awareness of reality (including the attributes of a movie) with a consciousness, a self, to be aware? That this self has attributes, including values and preferences, different from those of other selves? Well, yes. But the danger here is that “subjective” will also be understand to mean that the attributes and perceptions of the self are necessarily and inevitably cut off from reality, which is a wholesale rejection of the possibility of knowing reality as it is (“in itself”); so that all we can have is movie-as-it-seems-to-me or to-you or to-the-other-guy. But I agree with the author that response can be distinguished from that to which one is responding. And there is a something. The movie is not a figment of the movie-goer’s imagination. It is in black-and-white, or color. It is 137 minutes long, and not five hours long. The more complicated the attribute one is perceiving and trying to capture, the harder it is to get the thing right. But the movie still has those attributes, whether you get it right or not, whether you have developed good judgment and sound critical standards by that point in your life or not.
Apparently, I cannot edit my comment. To avoid confusion and so that everyone can pass the quiz later: “you are one again” should be “you are once again”; “The fact that there is no awareness of reality (including the attributes of a movie) with a consciousness, a self, to be aware?” should be “…without a consciousness…to be aware?”; “‘subjective’ will also be understand…” should be “‘subjective will also be understood…”
This article is a lot of bloated nonsense and self masturbation. I read Pauline Kael contemporaneously, never like her, but dislike nonsense such as this article even more.
Regarding Woody Allen, as it turns out, Kael was right about his affinity for teenagers, correctly calling him out for finding pedophilia some kind of search for truth or meaning.
Oh, for a second there I thought you might actually present an argument.
Thanks for reading.
Not only is Pauline Kael a MUCH better film critic than you she is a far superior writer.
She is neither, and it’s no coincidence that she attracts equally incompetent fans.
Perhaps not really a film critic, Pauline Kael was more like pop psychology analyst. She liked getting into reasons why people responded to what they came in the movies and her discernment of trends was razor sharp. Her essay “Trash, Art and the Movies” really is the go to piece for getting a handle on Kael and understanding her approach to criticism. And in addition to being staggering with insight and observation, it is an enormously entertaining read.
There has never been a critic who was as perceptive as Kael. In her review of “Stardust Memories”, Kael wrote “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?” And this, how many years before the Sun Yo scandal broke in the 90s? And Kael’s 1981 review of Faye Dunaway’s performance in “Mommie Dearest” was staggeringly on point.
She discussed things that other critics and I can’t think of any reason for that except that she just must have been better at what she did… Maybe not a better critic, but certainly a better thinker and certainly a better writer.
I love her, but I can say that possibly she was TOO perceptive to be a great critic, whose greatness depends on JUDGMENT rather than PERCEPTION and Pauline Kael is my cup of tea.
The starter upper of this piece mentioned her 1,000 word piece on a little known, rather obscure movie called “X, Y and Zee”, which is perhaps my all time favorite review of Kael’s. Kael was probably the only critic to give a semi favorable to the movie (which is badly under-rated, absolutely superior to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) and an absolutely FASCINATING look into the performance that Elizabeth Taylor was giving up on the screen. Kael dissected and discerned and discussed the documentary of Taylor coming into her own being, and Carl Jung would have been stunned for a moment or two.
And if she did have an ego and like to show off a bit, I say good for her! You were all the more better for it, PK! There is a tendency among scholarly types to disparage Kael, but at the bottom of that is a jealousy of Kael, who was smarter than they were and who didn’t play by the rules and who generated much resentment as a result (e.g., Warren Beatty’s inviting Kael to Hollywood for the purpose of humiliating her) All this really comes down to human nature as people love to ostracize the stranger and Kael was, by all standards, unconventional. And look at how much controversy she got going! We are still talking about her and there is a reason for that.
I absolutely think that Kael hit her peak in the late 60s- early 70s and her review of “Last Tango in Paris” was over cooked and she never fully recovered and when I read Renata Adler’s review of Kael’s collection “When the Lights Go Down”, I see much of what Adler was saying and , even being the huge Kael that I am (see how flexible and reasonable the MATURE mind is…) I acknowledge that she took her popularity a bit too much to heart and she began to repeat herself. But at the same time, Kael responded to the criticism with a humility that must have been genuine, as her next collection of reviews “Taking It All In” was a noticeable, marked change in Kael’s writing style, which had become rather bombastic. But she took a breath and she improved. My God, just go read her review of “Madame X” and enjoy being stung by Kael’s great wit and her untold gift of perception.
A quick copy and paste job, the proof is in the pudding… Enjoy and be amazed!
“Faye Dunaway gives a startling, ferocious performance in Mommie Dearest. It’s deeper than an impersonation; she turns herself into Joan Crawford, all right, but she’s more Faye Duanway than ever. She digs into herself and gets inside “Joan Crawford” in a way that only another torn, driven actress could. (She may have created a new form of folie a deux.) With her icy features, her nervous affectations, her honeyed emotionalism, Dunaway has been a vivdly neurotic star; she has always seemed to be racing–breathless and flustered–right on the edge of collapse. In Mommie Dearest, she slows herself down in order to incarnate the bulldozer styles in neurosis of an earlier movie era; her Joan Crawford is more deliberate and calculating–and much stronger–than other Dunaway characters. As Joan the martinet, a fanatical believer in discipline, cleanliness, order, Dunaway lets loose with a fury that she may not have known was in her. She goes over the top, discovers higher peaks waiting, and shoots over them, too. Has any movie queen ever gone this far before? Alone and self-mesmerized, she plays the entire film on emotion. Her performance is extravagant–it’s operatic and full of primal anger; she’s grabbing the world by the short hairs…. Dunaway brings off the camp horror scenes–howling “No wire hangers!” and weeping while inflecting “Tina, bring me the axe” with the beyond-the-crypt chest tones of a basso profundo–but she also invests the part with so much power and suffering that these scenes transcend camp . . . Dunaway takes this star-machine Joan Crawford and shows you that she isn’t evil or inhuman–she’s frighteningly human….. Dunaway sees a grandeur in Joan Crawford, and by the size and severity of the torments she acts out she makes Crawford seem tragic. After Michael Redgrave played the insane ventriloquist in Dead of Night, bits of the character’s paranoia kept turning up in his other performances; it could be hair-raising if Faye Dunaway were to have trouble shaking off the gorgon Joan.”
Pauline Kael
New Yorker, October 12, 1981
Taking It All In, p.
She was neither a perceptive critic nor a good writer. Just look at your own example:
There has never been a critic who was as perceptive as Kael. In her review of “Stardust Memories”, Kael wrote “What man in his forties but Woody Allen could pass off a predilection for teenagers as a quest for true values?”
Really? Woody Allen, in EVERY situation where his character goes for a teenager, gets absolutely destroyed. Isaac Davis is twisted and manipulative in Manhattan- and the fact that so many critics (Kael included) assert it’s a film about love and true values speaks to their sloppy thinking. The fact that viewers identify with Alvy Singer, who is immature, judgmental, and ends up in a worse life situation than a younger, dumber woman he does not respect, speaks to how easy moviegoers (like you) can be manipulated. And Kael’s take on Stardust Memories, in particular, is just silly for the reasons I’ve gone over, if you wish to address them.
(see how flexible and reasonable the MATURE mind is…)
So far, you haven’t really shown this, Todd.
It’s amazing that so many people comment here, trying to be nasty to me, and don’t realize how desperate they sound.
I’ve given a ton of reasons re: Kael’s failures as both writer and critic, and you have addressed none of them. Like every other dissenter, you change the subject with new examples, other bits of writing, and so on, as if Kael’s failure with Woody’s films was just an accident.
Then, the one time you do bring up Woody, your own example makes my point and discredits yours.
OK, Todd.
Dude, just say you hate women and go.
Are you the same dude up there who commented back in September 2018? Different name, but same display pic- what are the chances?
Imagine being so butthurt your favorite critic got blown up that you post a whiny comment, stress out about the article for an entire year, and come back to post some slander because you have nothing else.
And if that other person wasn’t actually you, well, you’re still a sad little bitch!
Damn, this is embarrassing. But it’s also expected- they’ll keep coming back, re-reading whatever has ‘hurt’ them, and might even become fans.
Pauline Kael was indeed a terrible writer, with no style to speak of, narcissistic, and apparently without even a bare understanding of how films were made. Her hilarious comments about some of the finest films ever made (from Kubrick, Bergman, Malick, Antonioni, etc.) demonstrate an asounding level of incompetence. She was a popular hack who lowered the standards of criticism.
Compare with Ebert, who also began as a popular hack but knew far more about film-making, had deep insights, made his writing about his subject, not himself, and ultimately elevated the form.
Indeed. Notice how, despite dozens of pissed off comments under this article, not a single person ever justifies her nonsense, and constantly pivots to reviews of films that “just so happen” to not be under discussion here.