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Pauline Kael (; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American Film criticism who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael often defied the consensus of her contemporaries.
One of the most influential American film critics of her era, she left a lasting impression on the art form. Roger Ebert argued in an obituary that Kael "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades". Kael, he said, "had no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards. You couldn't apply her 'approach' to a film. With her it was all personal." In a blurb for The Age of Movies, a collection of her writings for the Library of America, Ebert wrote that "Like George Bernard Shaw, she wrote reviews that will be read for their style, humor and energy long after some of their subjects have been forgotten."
For American readers, she brought attention to international cinema, and championed New Hollywood directors. Sanford Schwartz writes that, in the 1960s, she "gave a breathing, textured life to the aims and sensibilities of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Michelangelo Antonioni, among other European and Asian directors; and she endowed Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Mazursky, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola, among American directors of the following decade, with the same full-bodied presence. ... Her deepest subject, in the end, isn't movies at all—it's how to live more intensely."
Kael wrote of film critics of her generation: "We were in almost at the beginning, when something new was added to the human experience." Her parents took her to see silent films, which she later referred to, writing that D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) was "the greatest movie ever made" and that Renée Falconetti's performance in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was "the finest ever recorded on film". In 1936, Kael matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied philosophy, literature, and art. She dropped out in 1940. Kael had intended to go to law school, but fell in with a group of artists and moved to New York City with the poet Robert Horan.
Three years later, Kael returned to Berkeley and "led a bohemian life", writing plays and working in experimental film. In 1948, she and the filmmaker James Broughton had a daughter, Gina James, whom Kael raised alone.Seligman (2004). p. 11. Gina had a congenital heart defect for much of her childhood that Kael could not afford the surgery to correct.Brantley (1996). p. 10. To support her daughter and herself, Kael worked a series of menial jobs such as cook and seamstress, along with stints as an advertising copywriter.
Kael later said of her writing: "I worked to loosen my style—to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we learn at college. I wanted the sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice."Brantley (1996). p. 95. She disparaged the supposed critic's ideal of objectivity, calling it "saphead objectivity", and incorporated aspects of autobiography into her criticism. In a review of Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946) that has been ranked among her most memorable,Seligman (2004). p. 37. Kael described seeing the film
Kael broadcast many of her early reviews on Berkeley's alternative public radio station KPFA, and in 1955 she married Edward Landberg, the owner of the Berkeley Cinema-Guild and Studio. Their marriage soon ended in divorce, but he agreed to pay for Gina's heart surgery, and made Kael the manager of the cinema in 1955, a position she held until 1960. In that role, she programmed the films at the two-screen facility, "unapologetically repeating her favorites until they also became audience favorites". She also wrote "pungent" capsule reviews of the films, which her patrons began collecting.Thomson, David (2002). "Pauline Kael." The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. . p. 449-50.
That same year, Kael wrote a blistering review of The Sound of Music in McCall's. After mentioning that some of the press had dubbed it "The Sound of Money", she called the film's message a "sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat". p. 214-5. According to legend, this review got her fired from McCall's ( The New York Times said as much in Kael's obituary), but Kael and the magazine's editor, Robert Stein, denied this. According to Stein, he fired her "months later, after she kept panning every commercial movie from Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago to The Pawnbroker and A Hard Day's Night."
Kael's dismissal from McCall's led to a stint from 1966 to 1967 at The New Republic, whose editors continually altered her writing without her permission. In October 1967, Kael wrote a long essay on Bonnie and Clyde that the magazine declined to publish. William Shawn of The New Yorker obtained the piece and ran it in The New Yorker issue of October 21. Kael's rave review was at odds with prevailing opinion, which was that the film was inconsistent in its blending of comedy and violence. According to critic David Thomson, "she was right about a film that had bewildered many other critics." A few months after the essay ran, Kael quit The New Republic "in despair".Brantley (1996). p. 12 In 1968, Shawn asked her to join The New Yorker staff; she alternated as film critic every six months with Penelope Gilliatt until 1979, and became the sole critic in 1980 after a year's leave of absence working in the film industry.
In 1970, Kael received a George Polk Award for her work as a critic at The New Yorker. She continued to publish collections of her writing with suggestive titles such as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, When the Lights Go Down, and Taking It All In. Her fourth collection, Deeper into Movies (1973), won the U.S. National Book Award in the Arts and Letters category.
"National Book Awards – 1974". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-10. (With acceptance speech by Kael.)
Kael also wrote philosophical essays on movie-going, the modern Hollywood film industry, and what she saw as the lack of courage on the part of audiences to explore lesser-known, more challenging movies (she rarely used the word "film" because she felt it was too elitist). Among her more popular essays were a damning 1973 review of Norman Mailer's semi-fictional Marilyn: a Biography (an account of Marilyn Monroe's life); an incisive 1975 look at Cary Grant's career; and "Raising Kane" (1971), a book-length essay on the authorship of the film Citizen Kane that was the longest piece of sustained writing she had yet done.
Commissioned as an introduction to the shooting script in The Citizen Kane Book, "Raising Kane" was first printed in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker. The essay extended Kael's dispute of the auteur theory, arguing that Herman J. Mankiewicz, the screenplay's coauthor, was virtually its sole author and the film's actual guiding force. Kael further alleged that Orson Welles had schemed to deprive Mankiewicz of screen credit. Welles considered suing Kael for libel. He was defended by critics, scholars and friends, including Peter Bogdanovich, who rebutted Kael's claims in a 1972 article that included the revelation that Kael had appropriated the extensive research of a UCLA faculty member without crediting him.
Woody Allen said of Kael: "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, but too often what she chooses to extol or fails to see is very surprising." This is Orson Welles, Introduction : My Orson, page xxiii–xv, Da Capo Press, 1998 Edition
Kael battled the editors of the New Yorker as much as her own critics. She fought with Shawn to review the 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat, eventually relenting.Davis (2002). p. 32. According to Kael, after reading her unfavorable review of Terrence Malick's 1973 film Badlands, Shawn said, "I guess you didn't know that Terry is like a son to me." Kael responded, "Tough shit, Bill", and her review was printed unchanged. Other than sporadic confrontations with Shawn, Kael said she did most of her work at home, writing.Davis (2002). p. 40.
Upon the release of Kael's 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down, her New Yorker colleague Renata Adler published an 8,000-word review in The New York Review of Books that dismissed the book as "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless." Adler argued that Kael's post-1960s work contained "nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility" and faulted her "quirks and mannerisms", including repeated use of "bullying" imperatives and rhetorical questions. The piece quickly became infamous in literary circles, described by Time magazine as "the New York literary Mafia's bloodiest case of assault and battery in years." Kael did not respond to it, but Adler's review became known as "the most sensational attempt on Kael's reputation".Seligman (2004). p. 137.
In 1979, Kael accepted an offer from Warren Beatty to be a consultant to Paramount Pictures, but left the position after only a few months to return to writing criticism.
Though she published nothing new, Kael was not averse to giving interviews, occasionally giving her opinion on new films and television shows. In a 1998 interview with Modern Maturity, she said she sometimes regretted not being able to review: "A few years ago, when I saw Vanya on 42nd Street, I wanted to blow trumpets. Your trumpets are gone once you've quit." She died at her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on September 3, 2001, at the age of 82.
Richard Corliss contrasts Kael with Andrew Sarris: "Sarris' prose was dense, balanced, aphoristic, alliterative; he had taken more from the French than just the politique des auteurs. Kael's was loping, derisive, intimate, gag-packed, as American as Lenny Bruce. I can recall reading one of Kael's early pieces in Film Quarterly (1961, maybe) and being shocked—shocked!—to see she'd used a contraction. In those prim days, when most serious film criticism read like term papers in sociology and most popular reviews read like wire copy, Kael's writing was the battle cry of a vital and dangerous new era, the equivalent of Little Richard's primal 'A wop bop a loo bop, a wop bam boom!' that announced the birth of rock 'n' roll."
Kael's reviews included a pan of West Side Story (1961) that drew harsh replies from its fans; ecstatic reviews of Z and MASH that enormously boosted their popularity; and enthusiastic appraisals of Brian De Palma's early films. Her "preview" of Robert Altman's film Nashville appeared in print several months before the film was completed, in an attempt to prevent the studio from recutting the film and to catapult it to box-office success.
Kael was an opponent of the Auteur, criticizing it both in her reviews and in interviews. She preferred to analyze films without thinking about the director's other works. Andrew Sarris, a key proponent of the theory, debated it with Kael in the pages of The New Yorker and various film magazines. Kael argued that a film should be considered a collaborative effort. In "Raising Kane", she argues that Citizen Kane relies extensively on the distinctive talents of Mankiewicz and cinematographer Gregg Toland.Kael, Pauline, "Raising Kane," The New Yorker, February 20, 1971.
Kael was an enthusiastic, if occasionally ambivalent, supporter of Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill's early work, both of whom specialized in violent action dramas. Her collection 5001 Nights at the Movies includes favorable reviews of nearly all of Peckinpah's films except The Getaway (1972), as well as Hill's Hard Times (1975), The Warriors (1979), and Southern Comfort (1981). Despite her initial dismissal of John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) for what she felt was its pointless brutality, she later called it "intermittently dazzling" with "more energy and invention than Boorman seems to know what to do with ... one comes out exhilarated but bewildered".Kael, Pauline. 5001 Nights at the Movies, Henry Holt and Company, 1991.
But Kael reacted badly to some action films she felt pushed what she called "right-wing" or "fascist" agendas. She called Don Siegel's Dirty Harry (1971), starring Eastwood, a "right-wing fantasy", "a remarkably single-minded attack on liberal values", and "fascist medievalism".Kael, Pauline. Deeper into Movies, Warner Books, 1973. In an otherwise extremely favorable review of Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Kael concluded that Peckinpah had made "the first American film that is a fascist work of art".
In her review of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), Kael wrote that she felt some directors who used brutal imagery were desensitizing audiences to violence:
In her review, Kael called the straight-themed Rich and Famous "more like a homosexual fantasy", saying that one female character's "affairs, with their masochistic overtones, are creepy, because they don't seem like what a woman would get into".Seligman (2004). p. 152. Byron, who "hit the ceiling" after reading the review, was joined by The Celluloid Closet author Vito Russo, who argued that Kael equated promiscuity with homosexuality, "as though straight women have never been promiscuous or been given the permission to be promiscuous".
In response to her review of Rich and Famous, several critics reappraised Kael's earlier reviews of gay-themed films, including a wisecrack Kael made about the gay-themed The Children's Hour: "I always thought this was why lesbians needed sympathy—that there isn't much they can do."Seligman (2004). p. 155. Seligman has defended Kael, saying that these remarks showed "enough ease with the topic to be able to crack jokes—in a dark period when other reviewers ... 'felt that if homosexuality were not a crime it would spread.Seligman (2004). p. 156. Kael rejected the accusations as "craziness", adding, "I don't see how anybody who took the trouble to check out what I've actually written about movies with homosexual elements in them could believe that stuff."Brantley (1996). p. 96.
Kael was subsequently misquoted as having said, "I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anyone who voted for him" or something that similarly expressed surprise at the election result. This misquotation became an urban legend, and has been cited by conservatives (such as Bernard Goldberg, in his 2001 book Bias) as an example of insularity among the liberal elite. The misquotation has also been attributed to other writers, such as Joan Didion.
Asked in 1998 whether she thought her criticism had affected the way films were made, Kael deflected the question, saying, "If I say yes, I'm an egotist, and if I say no, I've wasted my life". Several directors' careers were profoundly affected by her, most notably that of Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, who was accepted at UCLA Film School's graduate program on Kael's recommendation. Under her mentorship, Schrader worked as a film critic before taking up screenwriting and directing full time. Derek Malcolm, who worked for several decades as a film critic for The Guardian, said: "If a director was praised by Kael, he or she was generally allowed to work, since the money-men knew there would be similar approbation across a wide field of publications". Alternately, Kael was said to have had the power to prevent filmmakers from working; David Lean said that her criticism of his work "kept him from making a movie for 14 years" (referring to the 14-year break between Ryan's Daughter in 1970 and A Passage to India in 1984).
In 1978, Kael received the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women in the entertainment industry. In his 1988 film Willow, George Lucas named one of the villains "General Kael" after her. Kael had often reviewed Lucas's work unenthusiastically; in her review of Willow, she called the character an " hommage à moi".
Though he began directing films after she retired, Quentin Tarantino was also influenced by Kael. He read her criticism voraciously while growing up and said that Kael was "as influential as any director was in helping me develop my aesthetic". Wes Anderson recounted his efforts to screen his film Rushmore for Kael in a 1999 The New York Times article titled "My Private Screening With Pauline Kael". He later wrote to Kael, saying: "Your thoughts and writing about the movies have been a very important source of inspiration for me and my movies, and I hope you don't regret that". In 1997, cultural critic Camille Paglia said Kael was her second-favorite critic (behind Parker Tyler), criticizing Kael's commentary on such films as La Dolce Vita and Last Year at Marienbad but also calling her "unfailingly perceptive ... her tart, lively, colloquial style I thought exactly right for a mass form like the movies."
In January 2000, filmmaker Michael Moore posted a recollection of Kael's response to his 1989 documentary film Roger & Me. Moore wrote that Kael was incensed that she had to watch Roger & Me in a cinema after Moore refused to send her a tape for her to watch at home, and she resented Roger & Me winning Best Documentary at the 55th New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Moore said:
In a 2024 interview, director Ridley Scott said that Kael's harsh critique of his 1982 film Blade Runner made him question the value of such reviews, and that he never read reviews of his films after that.
The Pauline Kael Breakout Award for outstanding contribution to cinema is awarded annually by the Florida Film Critics Circle.
Rob Garver's documentary was released in 2018. With Sarah Jessica Parker narrating for Kael, the film is a portrait of Kael's work and her influence on the male-dominated worlds of cinema and film criticism.
David Thomson wrote of Kael: "How good was she? Very, very good, because she was a terrific journalist who took immense pains to seem spontaneous, who believed that it ought to be possible to write about entertainments in ways that made them more stimulating for thousands of people ... she established for a while something that had not been true since the impact of television—that the movies were ours, that they spoke to and for a society and were the most telling, deeply felt impression of who we were and might be ... as time passes, I suspect she will seem more remarkable, more useful as a measure of her time, and more sexy. I suspect she would have given it all up if she could have had one scene in one film—like Dorothy Malone with Bogart in The Big Sleep.
Early career
In 1952, Peter D. Martin, the editor of City Lights, overheard Kael arguing about films in a coffeeshop with a friend and asked her to review Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952). Kael dubbed the film "Slimelight" and began publishing film criticism regularly in magazines.
Going mass-market
Kael continued to juggle writing with other work until she received an offer to publish a book of her criticism. Published in 1965 as I Lost It at the Movies, the collection was a surprise bestseller, selling 150,000 paperback copies. Coinciding with a job at the high-circulation women's magazine McCall's, Kael (as Newsweek put it in a 1966 profile) "went mass".Brantley (1996). p. 3-4.
The New Yorker tenure
Initially, many considered Kael's colloquial, brash writing style an odd fit with the sophisticated and genteel New Yorker. Kael remembered "getting a letter from an eminent The New Yorker writer suggesting that I was trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung".Seligman (2004). p. 12. During her tenure at The New Yorker, she took advantage of a forum that permitted her to write at length—and with minimal editorial interference—thereby achieving her greatest prominence. By 1968, Time magazine called her "one of the country's top movie critics".
"Arts and Letters" was an award category from 1964 to 1976. It was the first nonfiction book about film to win a National Book Award.
Later years
In the early 1980s, Kael was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which sometimes has a cognitive component. As her condition worsened, she became increasingly depressed about the state of American films, along with feeling that "I had nothing new to say". In a March 11, 1991, announcement that The New York Times called "earth-shattering", Kael announced her retirement from reviewing films regularly. She said she would still write essays for The New Yorker and "reflections and other pieces of writing about movies", but over the next 10 years, she published no new work except an introduction to her 1994 compendium For Keeps. In the introduction (which was reprinted in The New Yorker), Kael wrote: "I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have".
Style
Kael was known for mingling high and low culture; per The New York Times, "Kael could mingle references to literary lions like Saul Bellow, Jean Genet and Norman Mailer with demotic condemnations like loony, sleazo, junk and bummer." She often made allusions to other arts; reviewing Jules and Jim, she wrote, "The film was adapted from Henri-Pierre Roché's autobiographical novel, written when he was seventy-four .. If some of us have heard of Roché, it is probably just the scrap of information that he was the man who introduced Gertrude Stein to Picasso—but this scrap shouldn't be discarded, because both Stein and Picasso are relevant to the characters and period of Jules and Jim. Roché is now dead, but the model for Catherine, the Jeanne Moreau role, is a German literary woman who is still alive; it was she who translated Lolita into German." She writes that the two title characters are "Mutt and Jeff, Sancho Panza and Alonso Quijano, devoted friends, contentedly arguing about life and letters."
Opinions
Kael's opinions often ran contrary to her fellow critics'. Occasionally, she championed films considered critical failures, such as The Warriors and Last Tango in Paris. She was not especially cruel to some films that many critics deplored—such as the 1972 Man of La Mancha (she praised Sophia Loren's performance). She panned some films that had widespread critical admiration, such as Network, Madder Than Hell: How Network Anticipated Contemporary Media - The Atlantic A Woman Under the Influence ("murky, ragmop"), Cinema Scope|I Lost It at the Movies: Charlie Kaufman's Antkind and I'm Thinking of Ending Things The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, most experimental cinema (calling it "a creature of publicity and mutual congratulations on artistry"), most student films ("freshmen compositions"), It's a Wonderful Life, Shoah Shoah|AV Club ("logy and exhausting"), Five Classic Pauline Kael Reviews|The New Yorker Dances with Wolves ("a nature boy movie"), and ("monumentally unimaginative"). Her opinions' originality and the forceful way she expressed them won her ardent supporters and angry detractors.
Views on violence
Kael had a taste for antihero films that violate taboos involving sex and violence; this reportedly alienated some of her readers. But she panned Midnight Cowboy (1969), the X-rated antihero film that won an Oscar for Best Picture. She also strongly disliked films she felt were manipulative or appealed in superficial ways to conventional attitudes and feelings. She was particularly critical of Clint Eastwood: her reviews of his films and acting were resoundingly unfavorable, and she became known as his nemesis.
Accusations of homophobia
In his preface to a 1983 interview with Kael for the gay magazine Mandate magazine, Sam Staggs wrote: "she has always carried on a love/hate affair with her gay legions. ... like the bitchiest queen in gay mythology, she has a sharp remark about everything".Brantley (1996). p. 91. But in the early 1980s, largely in response to her review of the 1981 drama Rich and Famous, Kael faced notable accusations of homophobia. First remarked upon by Stuart Byron in The Village Voice, according to gay writer Craig Seligman, the accusations eventually "took on a life of their own and did real damage to her reputation".Seligman (2004). p. 151.
Nixon quote
In December 1972, a month after U.S. President Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide, Kael gave a lecture at the Modern Language Association during which she said: "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they Nixon's are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them." A New York Times article about the lecture quoted this.
Influence
Owen Gleiberman said Kael "was more than a great critic. She reinvented the form, and pioneered an entire aesthetic of writing." As soon as she began writing for The New Yorker, Kael greatly influenced her fellow critics. In the early 1970s, Cinerama distributors "initiated a policy of individual screenings for each critic because her remarks during were affecting her fellow critics".Brantley (1996). p. 16. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kael cultivated friendships with a group of young, mostly male critics, some of whom emulated her distinctive writing style. Referred to derisively as the "Paulettes", they dominated national film criticism in the 1990s. Critics who have acknowledged Kael's influence include, among many others, A. O. Scott of The New York Times, David Denby and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, David Edelstein of New York Magazine, Greil Marcus, Elvis Mitchell, "Q&A: Elvis Mitchell: Part 1", Undercover Black Man, March 5, 2007. Michael Sragow, Armond White, and Stephanie Zacharek of Salon. It was repeatedly alleged that, after her retirement, Kael's "most ardent devotees deliberated with each other to forge a common School of Pauline position" before their reviews were written. When confronted by the rumor that she ran "a conspiratorial network of young critics", Kael said she believed that critics imitated her style rather than her opinions, saying, "A number of critics take phrases and attitudes from me, and those takings stick out—they're not integral to the writer's temperament or approach".
two weeks later, she wrote a nasty, mean review of my film in The New Yorker. It was OK with me that she didn't like the film, and it didn't bother me that she didn't like the point I was making, or even how I was making it. What was so incredibly appalling and shocking is how she printed outright lies about my movie. I had never experienced such a brazen, bald-faced barrage of disinformation. She tried to rewrite history.... Her complete fabrication of the facts was so weird, so out there, so obviously made-up, that my first response was this must be a humor piece she had written.... But, of course, she wasn't writing comedy. She was a deadly serious historical revisionist.
Kael's career is discussed at length in the 2009 documentary by critics whose careers she helped shape, such as Owen Gleiberman and Elvis Mitchell, as well as by those who fought with her, such as Andrew Sarris. The film also shows several of Kael's appearances on PBS, including one alongside Woody Allen. In 2011, Brian Kellow published a biography of Kael, A Life in the Dark.
Awards
Bibliography
Books
Reviews and essays
See also
Works cited
Further reading
External links
Categories: 1919 Births, 2001 Deaths, 20th-century American Jews, 20th-century American Journalists, 20th-century American Musicians, 20th-century American Non-fiction Writers, 20th-century American Women Writers, American Film Critics, American People Of Polish-jewish Descent, American Women Critics, American Women Film Critics, American Women Non-fiction Writers, Deaths From Parkinson's Disease In Massachusetts, Jewish American Journalists, Jewish American Musicians, Jewish American Non-fiction Writers, Jewish Women Writers, Journalists From The San Francisco Bay Area, National Book Award Winners, National Society Of Film Critics Members, The New Yorker Critics, People From Great Barrington, Massachusetts, People From Petaluma, California, Uc Berkeley College Of Letters And Science Alumni, Writers From The San Francisco Bay Area
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