The upcoming release of Alain Resnais’s classic Last Year at Marienbad on Blu-ray DVD reminds us that Marienbad was one of the many formally ambitious films released in the 1960s that popular critic Pauline Kael simply didn’t “get.” Blind to its visual beauties, indifferent to its innovative stylistic strategies, she dismissed Resnais’s masterwork as pretentious drivel.
She also didn’t “get” Antonioni’s Blow-up.
And she didn’t “get” Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In short, Kael didn’t “get” the ’60s.
Kael began the decade by pissing on the auteur theory (a theory she later embraced in practice, if not in name, by championing such ’70s auteurs as Altman, De Palma, and Spielberg). She ended the decade with a book-length monograph, Raising Kane, based on the ridiculous premise that the primary source of Citizen Kane‘s lasting greatness was the talent of screenwriter-for-hire, Herman J. Mankiewicz.
It’s not difficult to understand Kael’s appeal. She was a lively writer, and some of her insights were on the mark. (Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.) In opposition to gender stereotypes, she liked films that were sexual or violent or some combination thereof. She made it OK for New Yorker-reading intellectual wannabes to like “popcorn movies” so long as they didn’t take such “trash” seriously.
America has had a long tradition of populist anti-intellectualism, and Kael was very much a part of that tradition, arguably one of its finest flowers. Her entire career was based on the false dichotomy between popular entertainment and art. She never seemed to realize that one could like both, or how frequently the two categories overlapped.
I knew Pauline Kael–not well, but well enough to be on a first name basis. She drank a lot. Do you think that has anything to do with the way she reviewed movies? OK, can I tell you about the frat party at Dartmouth she, Bosley Crowther, Boz Scaggs and Steve Miller were at? No. OK, I don't remember it all that well. It was the 60s.
One of the most known lines by Kael was: “If art isn’t entertainment, then what is it? Punishment?” I think this clearly states that she though art was supposed to be entertaining. I don’t think she believed in any false dichotomy. She loved many art-movies. Movies by Bergman, Kurosawa, Bertolucci, Taviani brothers, Bunuel, Truffaut, just to name a few. Sure she had blank spots: Bresson, Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, but so what?
If I was asked to pick the three most over-rated movies of the 60s, I couldn’t do better than “Marienbad,” “Blow-Up” and “2001.” Kael “got” the fact that visual beauty (arguable in regard to “Marienbad” which looks more and more like a bad Vogue photo spread) and stylistic innovation for their own sake don’t make a movie worth watching. Her entire career was devoted to *eliminating* the distinction between popular culture and “art” — and to pointing out that a certain type of narrow intellectualism was, in fact, the greatest enemy of art.
Yes, Kael was angered by anyone who dared to ruin her popcorn entertainment with things like “art” and “visual style.” (See, for example, what she liked and didn’t like about CITIZEN KANE.) When she did champion an “art film” it was usually one that emphasized sex and violence or, best of all, violent sex – BONNIE AND CLYDE, LAST TANGO IN PARIS, WEEKEND, STRAW DOGS. She reminds me of the quotation attributed to Hermann Goering, “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my revolver.”
Kael responded to the sensual quality of movies, which is after all a lot of the reason why we go to the movies. After all, the title of one of her books is “Kiss kiss bang bang”. And the way she wrote was very personal, which might have strengthened this impression of her even more. But to say that sex and violence was all she cared about is plain wrong. For instance she loved the human aspects of the movies by Satyajit Ray, Robet Altman, and Jonathan Demme.
Lasse – I never said that sex and violence was *all* that she cared about. And I value some of her writings about Altman, Demme, De Palma, and other ’70s auteurs – she could be a good writer when she liked something and wasn’t being snarky and superior. All my post was saying (and I hate to repeat myself) is that when it came to the great, formally innovative films of the 1960s she had a huge blind spot – she couldn’t appreciate the coolly sensual beauty of a 2001 or a Marienbad. She didn’t get Ford, she didn’t get Hitchcock, and the damage she did to the careers of Welles and Lean was unforgiveable.
As for the false dichotomy between entertainment and art that she obsessed on, I think Paul Schrader nailed it when he wrote, “I remain indebted to her as a mentor, inspired by her as a writer, deeply fond of her as a person; but in the matter of trash, art, and the movies, she was simply wrong.”
Maybe you’re right that Kael “didn’t get” some of those formally innovative movies of the 1960s. But so what? She liked a lot of other formally innovative films, like Godard’s Weekend, Bertoluccis Last Tango or Altman’s Nashville (that may have the sensuality to go with them). We all have different tastes. As Kael herself put it, “we read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn’t fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgment we can usually make for ourselves”. Who cares for later Hitchcock anyway? Torn Curtain anyone? Topaz??? (even though I like Frenzy and Family Plot)