Lights, Camera, Conversation… “Reviewing a Reviewer”

A decade after her death, Pauline Kael is suddenly everywhere. And it’s because she was more than just a “critic.”

I hate the word “critic.” The online dictionaries offer a spectrum of definitions, scattered between “a professional judge of art, music, literature, etc.” and “a person who often finds fault and criticizes,” but it’s the latter that primarily colours the mind while approaching the function of a critic, perhaps because – like a stone in its setting – “critic” is inextricably embedded in “criticism.” A farmer farms, a welder welds, an actor acts, and a critic criticises – practice and practitioner are forever conjoined in the popular imagination. That is why a critic is often accused of being “overly critical,” which always makes me imagine a pallid creature hooked to an IV, his life’s breath gently ebbing away. But what is the alternative? “Judge” is too imperious, too Solomonic. “Analyst,” on the other hand, belongs on the business cards of the geeks at Microsoft and IBM. I like the sound, the benign non-specificity, of “commentator,” but I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for someone who merely “comments.” Then “writer,” perhaps? After all, I do write. But so does the restaurant critic.

I wonder if Pauline Kael liked being called a critic. A decade after her death, the most celebrated (and controversial) film critic of her era, who became famous with her lengthy reviews for The New Yorker, is back in the limelight. A Booklist blurb announces that James Wolcott, in his memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York, “praises to the skies his guiding light, film critic extraordinaire Pauline Kael.” The Library of America will soon come out with a compendium, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, and almost simultaneously, Brian Kellow’s biography of the critic will hit the stands, appropriately titled A Life in the Dark.

The New York Times critics AO Scott and Manohla Dargis have added their voices to the chorus, debating Kael’s legacy, and the New Yorker, in addition to reviewing these books, dug into its archives and excavated “five classic reviews,” beginning with the rave for Bonnie and Clyde that made Kael’s name (besides establishing her sybaritic style, which could sound, sometimes, like the moans of pleasure of a Cambridge-educated groupie when her idol glanced her way during a concert) and ending with her blunt butchering of the most sacred of cows, the Holocaust documentary Shoah that ran over nine hours.

To the uninitiated, this can seem an awful lot of fuss about a critic, someone who simply reviewed films. It’s not like she wrote The Odyssey. But then, none of the traditional dictionary definitions can contain the work that Kael did. She was “a professional judge of art, music, literature, etc.” and she was “a person who often finds fault and criticizes,” but she was something more. She wrote about cinema as no one had before. The critic Armond White, himself no stranger to controversy, noted, in a recent essay titled Pauline Kael, Criticism’s Last Icon, “Kael significantly diverged from the haughtiness of film critic authorities Graham Greene, James Agee and Robert Warshow—men who all harbored mid-20th-century guilt that there were greater, more intellectual pursuits than movies or movie criticism. Kael, no less professional than they were, brandished guilt-free enthusiasm, not because she was illiterate or a vulgar sensationalist but because she was a literate, sensual aesthete who appreciated those qualities in the most kinetic of art forms.”

Kael was not interested in being a gatekeeper for the art form that animated the twentieth century, checking off a catalogue of virtues and sins while films stood in a line that ran round the block, desperately seeking to be permitted into the pantheon. She did not adhere to a set of standards, and she never pretended to be objective – the only commandment that mattered, apparently, was “Thou shalt not bore me.” She simply let films seduce her, and later, lighting up a cigarette, she recorded in heavenly prose the mechanics of this seduction. The bluish titles of her books were inevitable – I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and most memorably, Taking It All In.

In other words, you didn’t read Kael for an answer to the question: “Is this movie any good? Should I see it?” You read her to find out: “Did she like the film? Why?” And you understood that her liking (or disliking) a film came with no guarantees that you would record the same reactions. Kael knew that writing about movies was something personal, like the story about the blind men and the elephant – your understanding of the elephant came from the part you were familiar with. We are all, in a way, blind men, because we cannot know everything. I may know, for instance, that giving birth is painful, but beyond an abstract sense of pain, I cannot claim to possess specifics. We are limited by gender, by upbringing, by the social classes we move around in, by the experiences we’ve had, by our liking for stars and directors and styles, and because Kael recognised this, her writings reflect her responses to cinema with the implicit caveat that these responses were hers and no one else’s. She was writing about herself as much as she was writing about films. In her case, the dictionary definition would have simply been “autobiographer.”

Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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Posted in: Books, Cinema: English, Lights Camera Conversation