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Kael and Farewell
Kael came on the scene with an informal, conversational style that acknowledged the role of emotional reaction and identification in the moviegoer, and at the same time helped readers feel that they could "get" how a movie worked if they were sensitive and alert. Her reviews were peppered with off-hand references to other films and genres, and to the history of film. You learned things about movies from Kael, even when you didn't agree with her conclusions. Here's an excerpt from her review of Yojimbo:
The review is only nine paragraphs long. It is brashly opinionated, informative, and most of all - fun to read. And she did this week after week, year after year - with a quality that was not always consistent (what critic could claim that?) but always more vital, provocative and interesting than one would expect from a reviewer on deadline.
But Kael's position was not "populist" or anti-art, whatever that might mean. She wrote passionately about directors like Satyajit Ray, Bergman, and Louis Malle. In her capsule reviews of old Hollywood films preserved in "5001 Nights at the Movies" she could be merciless about the compromising mentality and mediocre ideas of what we now call "classic" Hollywood films. Kael was anti-cant. She criticized dishonesty in films wherever she detected it, whether it was high-, middle-, or lowbrow in nature.
Kael's outspokenness, combined with her increasing power and influence as a critic, invited controversy. When she panned Shoah, Claude Lanzmann's huge Holocaust documentary, it was almost a scandal. While it's true that she didn't help matters when she responded intemperately to the criticisms, her attackers seemed to think that it was politically sinful not to praise the film, which is absurd. Kael didn't like it, so that's what she wrote.
Kael knew that her tendency to "reckless excess, in both praise and damnation" (her own words) was a deplorable flaw in her writing. My own experience is that it's a very difficult flaw for a film critic to avoid. Watching anywhere from seventy to a hundred films a year (or many more if you write for a daily), and trying to think of new things to say, you're bound to go overboard in praise when you find what you think is a jewel among the dross - or in damnation when you see something mediocre that's being hyped for Best Picture. Kael was effusive about a lot of films that are now obscure or deservedly forgotten. In her later years she seemed more desperate to find something - anything - to praise. And any style will begin to find its limits at 26 times a year. But she never lost the basic element that made her so readable - her total, loving involvement in the art of movies. I would like to think that Pauline Kael would be impatient with any tribute that failed to criticize her. To be completely unstinting in praise is surely a form of cant. So here I need to say that I think her great influence, reaching the point where her reviews actually helped determine a film's success or failure, went to her head and fostered an inner sense of rightness that impaired her critical faculties. Her criticisms of certain directors sometimes took on a personal quality that was unseemly. And she had a tendency to champion certain other directors to the point where they were like her pets, in a disproportiante relation to their talent or importance.
Another misfortune attached to great influence is that it tends to preclude other influences. Following Kael came an army of Kael imitators, without half her wit, and these Kael clones have sometimes put a damper on different styles. There should be a place for the measured cadences of a Stanley Kauffmann or a Vincent Canby in film writing. And too often, brashly uninformed opinion carries the day, with a host of scribblers employing a "personal" style, but no real knowledge of film history or culture. In one of her last interviews, Kael expressed chagrin that today's college students complain about sitting through a film if it has subtitles. Throughout her career, she always promoted an international appreciation, one that was aware of our debt to the past even as it continually freed itself from that debt with new experiments.
Pauline Kael brought film writing out of the closet and made it popular. How many artists can make that claim about their art? "Our emotions rise to meet the force coming from the screen, and they go on rising throughout our movie-going lives. When this happens in a popular art's form - when it's an art experience that we discover for ourselves - it is sometimes disparaged as fannishness. But there's something there that goes deeper than connoisseurship or taste. It's a fusion of art and love." -- Pauline Kael
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"Kurosawa
has made the first great shaggy-man movie... a glorious comedy-satire
of force: the story of the bodyguard who kills the bodies he is hired
to guard....The excruciating humor of his last line, as he surveys the
carnage - 'Now there'll be a little quiet in this town' - is that we've
heard it so many times before, but not amidst total devastation. His clean-up
has been so thorough and so outrageously bloody that is has achieved a
hilarious kind of style." Here she uses slang ("shaggy man"), and succinctly
states the point about the subversion of genre (not a very common insight
in 1963) that she will develop in more detail later in the piece. After
criticizing the western, she writes, "Of all art forms, movies are most
in need of having their concepts of heroism undermined..." and then goes
on to mention the early two-reelers, Fairbanks, and Gunga Din -
arguing her point while connecting us to movies as an art form with a
complex history. Then she talks about Kurosawa's career up to that time,
championing him against the undervaluation by some other critics (whom
she names), explaining why he's a wonderful and important director, and
then ending the piece with a flourish - "It's true that Shakespeare didn't
dare give his clowns hot blood to drink. But Kurosawa dares." 
One
of Kael's major themes was the celebration of movies as a popular art
form, as opposed to the snobbish approach that looked down on films unless
they were self-consciously "artistic" and had elevated and "important"
subject matter or themes. (In this she showed her great debt to Manny
Farber). In her review of Hiroshima, Mon Amour she wrote: "I would
like to suggest that the educated audience often uses 'art' films in much
the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood 'product,'
finding wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation
on their sensitivities and their liberalism." Although she follows this,
in parentheses, by saying that this is, of course, a generalization subject
to numerous exceptions (she would not be so cautious in later years),
the gauntlet had still been decisively thrown down. There would be no
sacred cows, foreign or domestic. Kael's opinions were always fiercely
her own. Clearly unswayed by popularity or anticipations of success in
the market, she was not afraid to attack anything - West Side Story,
Ordinary People, The Last Emperor....fill in the blanks
with some of your own favorite movies - chances are she panned a few of
them, and with gusto. 
"Trash,
Art, and the Movies" was written in 1969. It is one of the great film
essays. Too subtle to adequately summarize, it should be read by anyone
interested in writing about cinema. She starts by describing how a movie
like Wild in the Streets can be entertaining even though it's trash,
while an artful film like Petulia can be a total bore. "It's preposterously
egocentric to call anything we enjoy art - as if we could not be entertained
by it if it were not; it's just as preposterous to let prestigious, expensive
advertising snow us into thinking we're getting art for our money when
we haven't even had a good time." 
A weakness
in her views about the importance of enjoyment in movie-watching is that
she could often be limited by her own conceptions of what enjoyment had
to be. She couldn't believe that someone could honestly enjoy something
like Last Year at Marienbad - so she characterized that film's
audience as pretentious pseudo-intellectuals. This habit of pigeonholing
a film's audience as a way of criticizing the film could sometimes constrict
her effect, calling her aesthetic judgments into question rather than
reinforcing them, but it was an integral element in her approach, which
always kept in mind the effect of a film on actual viewers in a theater.
Kael
achieved popularity and influence during her long reign as chief critic
for The New Yorker, beginning in 1967 and ending with her retirement in
1991. My first critical appreciation of film came from her. My parents
subscribed to the magazine. I would open each new issue to the Table of
Contents, find the page for Kael's review, and go straight to it. She
stimulated my thinking - not only about movies, but about those things
movies were trying to deal with in the 1970s - the war, race relations,
the "establishment" versus the "counterculture." Kael's writing displayed
an intriguing combination of hipness and erudition. She was knowledgable
and aware, yet funny and sarcastic. One couldn't help but be influenced
by her. An entire generation of film writers have been, and you can see
it in their styles. Often they've only imitated her conversational tone
and her personal approach without bothering to aspire to her deep knowledge
of film history or her awareness of the subtleties of acting and visual
technique. 
Kael
was unusually sensitive to the way an actor's method merged with a star
persona to create an effect. Here she is on McCabe and Mrs. Miller:
"Julie Christie has that gift that beautiful actresses sometimes have
of suddenly turning ugly and of being even more fascinating because of
the crossover. When her nose practically meets her strong chin and she
gets the look of a harpy, the demonstration of the thin line between harpy
and beauty makes the beauty more dazzling..." I picked this quote at random.
Kael's reviews are full of observations like this about the faces of performers
and their effects. She was of course just as observant of the ways a performance
didn't work - although she tended to be more forgiving of deficiencies
in an actor than she was of the failings in direction or script. 
"Raising
Kane," her book-length study of Citizen Kane, was also controversial
because it pitted the director, Orson Welles, against his co-screenwriter
Herman J. Mankiewicz, attributing more credit to Mankiewicz for the majority
of the script as well as the artistic success of the film, and stating
that Welles tried to claim sole authorship of the picture - a statement
that Welles denied. The whole brouhaha around the Kane book has obscured,
I think, how good a book it really is. Pick it up now, thirty years after
it was published, after Citizen Kane has been dissected and analyzed
in every academic film journal to the point of exhaustion, and Kael will
make the movie come alive again for you, making connections between it
and the news reporter genre, traditional studio melodrama, and German
expressionism, while describing the process of its creation, how it works
on the screen, Kael's own reactions to it in the present, Welles' complex
relationship to film tradition - and much more than I can describe here,
all (and here is the wonder) in an enjoyable, fluid, easily understandable
yet stimulating prose that is a model of sustained, thoughtful analysis.
Kael's
enthusiasm, when she felt it, could be unbridled. Her review of Last
Tango in Paris famously declared that its first showing should be
declared a landmark in movie history, comparable to the first performance
of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." The picture has not had anything like
the subsequent influence her review would seem to warrant, but I wouldn't
be too quick to mock her reaction. Her review is an eloquent argument
for a ground-breaking approach to sexuality and personal drama on film.
Whatever one may think of Last Tango, it is a crucial trait of
the best critics that they be on the lookout for important innovations
in the art, and that they be willing to pick up the cudgels and champion
the work when they see it - or think they do. 
Brian
De Palma is only the most well-known example. To read her rave review
of The Fury, or Dressed to Kill, and then to go see the
film on her recommendation, was for me a disappointing experience. There
were quite a few De Palma films, and Alan Rudolph films, and other films
I could name, that I went to see through belief in Kael - until I finally
gave up on whatever director it happened to be. I guess, in a backhanded
way, that's another tribute to her skill as a writer. Nowadays I find
myself disagreeing with her reviews about as often as I agree with them,
but I don't disagree with her talent. In the case of De Palma, I think
his style matched her love of a certain kind of "trash" cinema, a cinema
that subverted romantic expectations. In the case of Kubrick, one of Kael's
pet hates, his coldness and misanthropic humor did not fit her view of
things, which always had an element of hope and passion and engagement
- and so she was never shy about panning a Kubrick film. Any critic worth
her salt has a world view. Kael stuck to hers, and its strengths were
inseparable from its weaknesses. 
It seems
an inescapable aspect of greatness that its influence becomes a barrier
to future work even though it advanced that very work to a place unimaginable
before. The time will come - or perhaps it has already come - when there
will be a backlash, and film critics will aspire to be the anti-Kael in
order to define themselves. All of which is a predictable and even necessary
thing. 
But
on the occasion of Pauline Kael's death, I would hope that all of us who
write about movies can acknowledge our debt to her. She opened the door
for us. Her trust in her own intelligence and abilities was evident in
her prose. She showed us that we needn't kowtow to received opinion when
it came to movies - when the lights went down we could trust ourselves
to respond to what we saw on the screen, and then write about it honestly
and entertainingly, without jargon and without fear.