Nowadays, no writer in any field exercises the influence Pauline Kael wielded as a film critic. Hired by the New Yorker in 1967, she was handed a platform at America’s most culturally prestigious publication at the moment when film was about to change. A younger generation of filmmakers was on the rise and along with their generational cohort across the world, they were intent on doing things differently.
Rob Garver’s documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael locates her in the smart wing of a cultural ferment where vigorous debate was encouraged, hurt feelings be damned. And let’s be clear: Kael could be hurtful as well as thoughtful and many of her remarks had a cruel edge. By the time political correctness became widely fashionable, Kael was semi-retired, partly from the shaking hands of Parkinson’s and partly because the revolution ended in defeat. After the 1970s, Hollywood’s second golden age, big studio American films were largely rotten in conception, imaginatively impoverished, falling far short of Kael’s demanding standards.
During those boom years of Mean Streets, The Godfather and Nashville, Kael’s prose had the ability to make readers see movies in new ways. They were arguments and many critics, fans and filmmakers argued back. David Lean was devastated by her contempt and Ridley Scott was outraged by her review of Blade Runner. Kael didn’t get Blade Runner when it was released 1982. Maybe she was already losing touch.
Inspiring Fear
But during the ‘70s, many critics across the U.S. read Kael like a map, following her direction in their own quests for meaning. According to What She Said, Kael often worked the phone, calling critics in her thrall and convincing them to see it her way. She was feared in the industry. And inspiring to aspirants, as one of the documentary’s interviewees, Quentin Tarantino, insists.
“People don’t tend to like a good critic,” Kael said in one of the documentary’s archival interviews (she made the TV talk show circuit in the ‘70s). Too many critics are softies, she explained, or star struck. Kael didn’t care what the studio publicists thought. They didn’t invite her to advance screenings but she went to pictures when they opened, like any member of the public, and sometimes took audience reaction into account.
In an early essay, Kael attacked the auteur theory first developed by French critics in the ‘50s and popularized in America by the Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris in the ‘60s. The theory held that many Hollywood directors were authors of their films—that recurring traits and themes, the stamp of their own personalities, were identifiable throughout their oeuvre despite the interference of studios and censors and the collaborative nature of the medium. Ironically (or did she change her mind?), Kael came to champion the great directors of the ‘70s, drawing attention to their individual films as part of a larger body of work. Robert Altman and David Lynch’s career benefitted from her attention. So did Steven Spielberg. “Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery” she wrote in her review of Fiddler on the Roof (she praised it as “the most powerful movie musical ever made”). Pretense is what she most despised in cinema. Kael was an early defender of “trash movies,” holding that gems can sometimes be discerned gleaming in even the rankest garbage bin.
Fearless, highly subjective, sometimes insensitive, Kael was the enemy of self-righteous message peddlers and maudlin tearjerkers, of academics whose turgid theorizing obliterated the pleasures of moviegoing. Although she cultivated followers, Kael insisted that a critic’s job is to stimulate thinking and encourage you to develop your own opinions.
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