Remembering Pauline Kael
Greil Marcus, Roger Ebert, Allen Barra, Michael Sragow and Charles Taylor remember the influential critic's caustic wit, sharp opinions and boundless enthusiasm for film and writing.
Sept. 3, 2001 | Pauline Kael, the influential film critic of the New Yorker from the 1960s until the early '90s, died Monday. She was 82 and suffered from Parkinson's disease. Salon asked those who knew her or admired her work to share their thoughts.
For the Associated Press obituary of Kael, click here.
For Stephanie Zacharek's appreciation, click here.
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Andy Klein:
Having spent my entire career on the West Coast and having started only a few years before the end of Kael's career, I'm one of the few critics of my generation not to have known her personally. When a mutual friend once relayed some reaction she had to a piece I had written, I nearly went into shock. She was so clearly the dominant role model in American film criticism that the very notion that I would have registered on her radar had never entered my mind. At first, I was going to say that Kael was the most stylistically influential critic since James Agee; then it occurred to me that Agee, while a wonderful stylist, hadn't had anywhere near the impact that Kael did. Which would make her simply the most stylistically influential film critic ever.
While unquestionably a tribute to her talent, this was not always a purely good thing: rather than taking the lesson that one could (and should) have one's own strong personal voice, there was a tendency for younger writers to be so overwhelmed by the power of her voice as to echo it.
But her general approach lifted the level of American film criticism permanently. Better than anyone else, she bridged the gap between "reviewing" (consumer guide for the moment) and "criticism" (deeper analysis in which the direction of the thumb was not the prime concern). She was not alone in this: her "feud" with Andrew Sarris -- which sometimes seemed like a Fred Allen/Jack Benny put-on (but wasn't) -- helped define the direction of criticism in the '60s, even if, in retrospect, their similarities seem greater than their differences. Critics may still have little effect on American film practice, but what effect they have is thanks at least as much to Kael as to any one other writer.
(Andy Klein is a critic for the New Times newspaper chain.)
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Michael Covino:
There were American critics who wrote well about film before Pauline Kael -- James Agee for one -- but by and large it was a dim, desultory field, rather like a Brahmin gentlemans saloon where the lights are low, the bartender knows every mans drink, no one raises his voice and the discourse is kept polite and dull. Kael didnt seem to notice. She entered as if she were knocking back the swinging doors in a Western saloon in a favorite Howard Hawks movie and commenced brawling. She broke chairs over other critics heads and sent the critics sailing over the bar. And she did it with wit and style, in this way pushing movie criticism into brave new terrain.
What exactly was this new terrain? Before Kael, it was the literary critic who ruled the roost, and in the first half of the twentieth century Edmund Wilson was the big gun. But we Americans had some catching up to do; we hadnt yet caught on, as Lenin had pointed out early in the century, that film is "the most important art." Kael recognized that, and its fair to say that by the end of the American 20th century she was the most important critic. There was no longer a single corresponding voice in the literary world that had her impact and stature: She was the new Edmund Wilson.
What I admired most about Kael, besides her wonderful prose, was her tough, independent stance. When I was in college I was completely befuddled by my friends deep, almost reverential admiration for Antonioni, who I couldnt stand. Then I read something Kael wrote on "The Red Desert": "Despite this relationship to the world around us, I found the movie deadly: a hazy poetic illustration of emotional chaos -- which was made peculiarly attractive. If Ive got to be driven up a wall, Id rather do it at my own pace -- which is considerably faster than Antonionis."
It was criticism that made me feel a little less lonely.
(Michael Covino has written about film in the East Bay Express for 25 years.)
Michael Sragow:
I'm still in shock. I spoke to her over the phone at noon; she died an hour or so later. She seemed to go in and out of the conversation, but at the close of it I mentioned that a veteran director we both admired, Lamont Johnson ("The Last American Hero"), had called me recently and sounded as vigorous as ever. With a burst of enthusiasm, she said, "Isn't he amazing?" It may have been her last critical judgment. To the end, she drew energy from the art she loved, just as her own work replenished it.
(Michael Sragow worked with Kael at the New Yorker. He is now film critic at the Baltimore Sun.)
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Greil Marcus:
Many people today live far more fully than they would have if Pauline Kael had never written. As a Petaluma-born, at first Berkeley-based movie critic whose first piece, "Some Notes on Chaplin's 'Limelight,'" appeared in the occasional journal of the San Francisco bookstore City Lights in 1953, she was kin in her '50s way to both idol-smashing literary critic Leslie Fiedler (born in Newark, working out of Missoula, Montana) and then shockingly frank and funny lovelorn columnist Dear Abby (born in Iowa, first publishing in the San Francisco Chronicle). From places that on the media map did not exist, people were speaking without care for what people would think of them -- or, maybe, trying as hard as they could to piss people off, to rattle their cages, to wake them up.
Still, Fiedler cultivated a certain archness and Dear Abby had responsibilities -- to all the abused, desperate, suicidal people writing her in hopes that she might save their lives. Kael was neither arch nor responsible: she responded, then dove down deep into her own responses -- I hate this, I love this -- and came back with stories, analyses, wisecracks overheard in the theater, with a picture of the U.S.A., or Europe, or anywhere else, in which she was the citizen and the movie in question the charter for the world to come or the world that was already lost. Her credo -- "Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply," she wrote in 1963, "just because you must use everything you are and everything you know" -- brought countless readers, and countless people her readers talked to, argued with, scorned, laughed at, dragged into theaters to see movies they would never forget or never forgive, into the action. Embarrassment in the face of movie -- of anything you care about -- is a sin, her pieces said, one by one, year after year; pretending to like a movie or anything else you're supposed to like is worse. Making that case is a battle that's never won, but Kael turned up the volume. I don't know if the world is a better place because for more than 40 years she wrote, but I know it's more of a place.
Happy birthday, Pauline, for as long as I'm around to say it.
(Greil Marcus is the author of many books, including "Mystery Train." He is a columnist for Salon.)
Next page: Roger Ebert and Charles Taylor remember Kael