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Pauline Kael Left Jewish Imprint on Criticism

20.05.12

“The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael” which was compiled by Sanford Schwartz and released from Library of America on October 27 , offers a solid selection of articles that convey Kael’s flavorful personality, expressing what she loved and loathed. On the same day, Viking published “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark,” a biography by Brian Kellow that followed on the heels of Doubleday’s telling, if self-aggrandizing, “Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York.” The memoir is written by a onetime Kael friend, journalist James Wolcott, and Kael is a key character, helping him and rejecting him in turn.

Kael was a whip-smart, highly opinionated person who expressed her views in enticingly conversational prose in The New Yorker. To “make sure that it ‘played,’” she would read each article aloud to friends and editors prepublication, as Wolcott describes. Unlike America’s two other transcendent film critics, James Agee (who was a poet and screenwriter) and painter Manny Farber, both of whom Kael admired, her life was almost single-mindedly devoted to criticism. Her sometimes maddeningly willful opinions, breathlessly shared with readers, are reminiscent not of any other film critic, but rather of a cross between a wisecracking Dorothy Parker and the 19th-century French literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. Like Sainte-Beuve, Kael enraged some and was ridiculed by others, but she was nevertheless a writer of real talent. Some of today’s stable of salaried film critics started out as gushing but pale imitators of Kael and became competent journalists, if rarely anything more. Beyond the wholly temporal, if journalistically valid, question of whether a new film is worth its ticket price, Kael addressed a rarer, more lasting question: Can any permanent meaning be derived from watching it?

Source: Forward