In Memoriam: Pauline
Kael
by
Ian Waldron-Mantgani, September 4, 2001
It would be oversight to the point of sin to go
without marking the passing of Pauline Kael, the legendary film critic for
New Yorker Magazine in the 1960s and 70s, who wrote books like "I Lost It
at the Movies", "Going Steady" and "Kiss Kiss Bang Boom". Those titles reflect
the depth of her love of cinema -- "Responsible artists," she once said,
"affect you sensually, in a way that enlarges your
experience."
Kael was 82 years old when she died yesterday
at her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, having been out of the game
since 1990, when she began to succumb to Parkinson's disease. Asked in an
interview why she did not simply dictate reviews, she suggested "I think
I wrote more wrote more with my hand than with my brain."
Kael felt movies.
She was privileged to work during Hollywood's
explosion of personal creativity in the 1970s, championing films like "Bonnie
and Clyde", "Mean Streets", "MASH" and "Last Tango in Paris". She also recognised
that junk entertainment had its place, saying "The movies are so rarely great
art that if we cannot appreciate great trash there is little reason for us
to go." What she detested was empty movies, be they low or high art -- she
ripped into Michelangelo Antonioni's acclaimed "Blow-Up" as "a Disposall
for intellectual refuse... confused symbolism with a heavy sense of
self-importance".
Kael's thoughts on the purpose of a critic were
positive, accurate and brilliantly put: "We can't stop the expensive trash
with the millions of dollars behind it, but what we can do is help a good
little film get shown, and direct attention to the best new directors, the
ones who are fresh and exciting. John Leonard said that critics were lice
on the body of art. But art would never reach the public without the critics.
I don't feel like a louse."
As a kid, I disliked Kael's work, because she
seemed to write an excessive amount of merciless pans. Through my teens I
grew to respect her, and learned to understand her importance in influencing
a deeply felt, first-person style of reviewing. As Louis Menand of the New
York Times said in 1995, "The manner of appreciation she invented has become
the standard manner of popular culture criticism."
In her own words -- "I was a film critic the way
some people might write poetry; for fun or love."
COPYRIGHT© 2001 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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