And although most of the results are bad beyond our wildest fears, as if to destroy all our powers of prediction, a few, even of the most ignorant, pretentious young men and women, are doing some interesting things. The period was also an age of spectacles like Planet of the Apes, The Lion in Winter, and Yellow Submarine. Little is hard about Bruce Baillie or Carroll Ballard whose camera skills expose how inept, inefficient, and unimaginative much of Hollywood’s self-praised work is, or about the elegance and grandeur of Jordan Belson’s short abstract films, like Allures, that demonstrate that one man working in a basement can make Hollywood’s vaunted special effects department look archaic. They simply take short cuts into other art forms or into pop arts where they can “express themselves” now. The new Pauline Kael biography by Brian Kellow gets into this a bit, and it's not flattering to Kael at all. Pauline Kael (/ k eɪ l /; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991. It’s the tension between his hard, swift, cool style and the romantic meaning that style has for him (and for other lovers of “unsentimental”—!—American gangster movies) that is peculiarly modern and exciting in his work. Pauline Kael [remove] 5; Document: director as subject. The immediate is chance. It is the Fellini-Guido figure of 8 ½, the movie director as star. The story may not involve more than a few spies and counterspies, but the wide screen will be filled. “Creativity” is a quick route to power and celebrity. The screen writer greeted her enthusiastically, “I really dig your dress, honey,” he said. The pop singer or composer, the mod designer says of his work, “It’s a creative way to make a living”—meaning it didn’t take a dull lot of study and planning, that he was able to use his own inventiveness or ingenuity or talent to get to the top without much sweat. Those who said they were going to make art movies not only didn’t consider it worth their while to go to see ordinary commercial movies, but usually didn’t even know anything much about avant-garde film. [Pauline Kael; Will Brantley] -- Interviews with Pauline Kael, movie critic for the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. He got an ovation, of course. It's a notion that takes some growing used to, but Pauline Kael makes her case persuasively: "Almost every interesting American movie in the past few years has been directed by a Catholic." When the narrator in Band of Outsiders says, “Franz did not know whether the world was becoming a dream or a dream becoming the world” we may think that that’s too self-consciously loaded with mythic fringe benefits and too rich an echo of the narrators of Orphée and Les Enfants Terribles, or we may catch our breath at the beauty of it. At times there is a disarming, an almost ecstatic, innocence about the way he uses quotes as if he had just heard of these beautiful ideas and wanted to share his enthusiasm with the world. As Godard has been able to solve the problems of economic freedom, his work now poses the problems of artistic freedom—problems that few artists in the history of movies have been fortunate enough to face. But if those who follow the clues come out with odd and disjunctive interpretations, this is because the “clues” are not integral to the movie but are clues to what else the artist was involved in while he was making the movie. Godard brought this way of reacting out into the open of new movies at the same time that the Pop Art movement was giving this kind of experience precedence over responsiveness to the traditional arts. At times it seems as if the movie had no points of reference outside itself. We’ve discounted annual subscriptions by 50% for our End-of-Year sale—Join Now! I once had the experience, as chairman of the jury at an experimental film festival, of getting on the stage in the black silk dress I had carefully mended and ironed for the occasion, to present the check to the prizewinner who came forward in patched, faded dungarees. Yet determined to … At her best, Pauline Kael was everything a film critic should be: passionate, knowledgable, in love with the movies and writing about them, willing to defend her reviews, and vicious. It seems likely that many of the young who don’t wait for others to call them artists but simply announce that they are, don’t have the patience to make art. For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Taking It All In. It’s the sadness in frivolity—in the abandonment of efforts to make sense out of life in art. “I used to have a dress like that once.”, Pauline Kael’s Rousing, Visionary Review that Helped Bring the French New Wave to America. His next film was going to … Kids who can’t write, who have never developed any competence in photography, who have never acted in nor directed a play, see no deterrent to making movies. The men who made the stereotypes drew them from their own scrambled experience of history and art—as Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht drew Scarface from the Capone family “as if they were the Borgias set down in Chicago.”. The basic ideas among young American film-makers are simple: the big movies we grew up on are either corrupt, obsolete or dead, or are beyond our reach (we can’t get a chance to make Hollywood films)—so we’ll make films of our own, cheap films that we can make in our own way. They’re a generation of familiar strangers. Instant Watch Options; Genres; Movies or TV; IMDb Rating; In Theaters; On TV ; Release Year; Keywords; Prime Video (31) … In addition to the corpses of old dramatic ideas (touched up here and there to look cute as if they were alive), big movies carry the dead weight of immobile cameras, all-purpose light, whorehouse décor. Is Hollywood interested in the young movement? Silly? Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive 14th feature film (one of no less than three Godard masterpieces that were released in 1967), which Pauline Kael called “ a speed-freak’s anticipatory vision of the political horrors to come,” is getting a 50th anniversary re-release at the Quad Cinema in New York. Godard is what is meant by a “film-maker.” He works with a small crew and shifts ideas and attitudes from movie to movie and even within movies. I have put it that way to be either irritatingly pretentious or lyrical—depending on your mood and frame of reference, in order to provide a critical equivalent to Godard’s phrases. You play at cops and robbers but the bullets can kill you. That was more a confession than a description. After smiling with pleasure as we do when a child discovers the beauty of a leaf or a poem, enabling us to reexperience the wonder of responsiveness, we may sink in spirit right down to incredulity. What was to be a simple commercial movie about a robbery became. Because they have actors and a story. As proof of their creative sincerity they may leave in the blurred shots. “The ideal for me,” he says, “is to obtain right away what will work—and without retakes. At one point he quotes Kael's review of … They’re rich and rotten.” But, of course, you can be poor and not so very honest and, although it’s harder to believe, you can even be rich and not so very rotten. The world of Band of Outsiders is both “real”—the protagonists feel, they may even die; and yet “unreal” because they don’t take their own feelings or death very seriously, as if they weren’t important to anybody, really. Essays and criticism on Jean-Luc Godard - Pauline Kael. “Andrew Sarris, ‘who loved movies’ (as Roger Ebert described him), was long considered the ‘dean of American film critics.’Reading the accounts and appreciations of him today, I was surprised to see how many people perpetuated the myth that Sarris and Pauline Kael were like the print era’s Siskel & Ebert who, instead of facing off with each other over new … His movies themselves become playful gestures, games in which you succeed or fail with a shrug, a smile. We do something similar when reading Cervantes. And a staggering number of them wish to be or already call themselves “film-makers.”. It can be funny in a cheap sort of way—as in Robert Downey’s Chafed Elbows where the images and the sound are, at least, in the same style; but this isn’t fundamentally different from the way George Axelrod works in Lord Love a Duck or Blake Edwards in What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? Putting into the work whatever just occurred to the artist is its own rationale and needs no justification for young Americans encouraged from childhood to express themselves creatively and to speak out whatever came into their heads. Pauline Kael: From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. Griffith, Eisenstein, Von Stroheim, Von Sternberg, Cocteau, Renoir, Max Ophuls, Orson Welles—they were defeated because they weren’t in a position to do what they wanted to do. In a Hollywood movie, the big scenes usually look pie- arranged; in a film by David Lean, one is practically wired to react to the hard work that went into gathering a crowd or dressing a set. Although Miss Kael is as different from these two men as they were different from each other, like them she begins with an unshakable love for the movies. (There are, of course, some young film-makers who are not interested in movies as we ordinarily think of them, but in film as an art-medium like painting or music), and this kind of work must be looked at a different way—without the expectation of story content or meaning.) By now—so accelerated has cultural history become—we have those students at colleges who when asked what they’re interested in say, “I go to a lot of movies.” And some of them are so proud of how compulsively they see everything in terms of movies and how many times they’ve seen certain movies that there is nothing left for them to relate movies to. In certain groups, automatic writing with a camera has come to be considered the most creative kind of film-making. He plays with his belief and disbelief, and this playfulness may make his work seem inconsequential and slighter than it is: It is as if the artist himself were deprecating any large intentions and just playing around in the medium. The movie brutalists, it’s all too apparent, are hurting our eyes to save our souls. Pauline Kael was America's most revered film critic. His next film was going to be about a girl and a gun—”A sure-fire story which will sell a lot of tickets.” And so, like Henry James’ hero in, he proceeded to make a work of art that sold fewer tickets than ever. For this is the rapture with “thoughts” of those whose minds aren’t much sullied by thought. The crime does not fit the daydreamers nor their milieu: We half expect to be told it’s all a joke, that they can’t really be committing an armed robbery. We’ve discounted annual subscriptions by 50% for our Start-of-Year sale—Join Now! And we watch, apprehensive and puzzled, as the three of them act out the robbery they’re committing as if it were something going on in a movie—or a fairy tale. If there are no cinematographers in modern Hollywood who can be discussed in the same terms as Henri Decae or Raoul Coutard or the late Gianni di Venanzo it’s because the studio methods and the union restrictions and regulations don’t make it possible for talent to function. More Pauline Kael in the July 2019 issue of Sight & Sound Mission critical. If the honking horns (which to an acolyte like Pauline Kael sounded like something out of Purcell) don’t do you in, then the black guy on the garbage truck will. CineFiles is a free online database of film documentation and ephemera Preposterous as much of this seems, it is theoretically not so far from Godard’s way of working. \/ Sam Staggs -- Passion of a critic : Kael on mediocrity, risk and … Collectively, the interviews provide rewarding perspectives on Kael's aesthetics, her politics, and her perceptions about what it is she does as a critic. His characters are young; unrelated to families and background. He doesn’t, like many artists, deny the past he has outgrown; perhaps he is assured enough not to deny it, perhaps he hasn’t quite outgrown it. Youth makes them natural aristocrats in their indifference to sustenance, security, hard work; and prosperity has turned a whole generation—or at least the middle-class part of it—into aristocrats. The workmen’s clothes and crude movie techniques may cry out, “We’re poor and honest. Few seem to have noticed that by the time of Juliet of the Spirits he had turned into a professional party-giver. Flashdance US (1983): Drama 96 min, Rated R, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc A lulling, narcotizing musical, it sells the kind of romantic story that was laughed off the screen 30 years ago, and then made a comeback with ROCKY I, II, and III, and it's like a sleazo putting the make on you. To say it flatly, Godard is the Scott Fitzgerald of the movie world, and movies are for the sixties a synthesis of what the arts were for the post-World-War-I generation—rebellion, romance, a new style of life. Perhaps a crucial difference between Cervantes’ mock romances and Godard’s mock melodramas is that Godard may (as in Alphaville) share some of his characters’ delusions. It’s always been relatively respectable, and sometimes fashionable, to respond to our own experience in terms drawn from the arts: To relate a circus scene to Picasso, or to describe the people in a Broadway delicatessen as an Ensor. Search. One of Kael’s friends observed that while writing, Kael “had the habit of holding her breath as she began each sentence and gasping explosively for air only when she … He reintroduces it, giving it a different quality, using it as shared experience, shared joke. Find all 20 songs in What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael Soundtrack, with scene descriptions. Legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael is the subject of a new documentary, now at the Gene Siskel Film Center. They also contain discussions of films that Kael did not have the chance to … This is what makes his movies (and, to a lesser degree, the movies of Jacques Demy) seem so new: For they are movies made by a generation bred on movies. What is not so generally understood is the studio executives’ implicit assumption that this is also what American audiences like. Jean-Luc Godard intended to give the public what it wanted. And some of Kael's favorites return on 35MM. 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