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Pauline Kael

70 quotes

“Object to the Hollywood film and you’re an intellectual snob, object to the avant-garde films and you’re a Philistine. But, while in Hollywood, one must often be a snob; in avant-garde circles one must often be a Philistine.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1956 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Movies, the Desperate Art" (1956)
“I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Replying to Listeners", broadcast on KPFA (January 1963).
“Regrettably, one of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?" (December 1964), from I Lost It at the Movies (1965).
“Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Raising Kane", The New Yorker (February 20, 1971 and February 27, 1971); reprinted in Kael's The Citizen Kane Book (1971).
“October 14, 1972: that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913 — the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed — in music history. There was no riot, and no one threw anything at the screen, but I think it’s fair to say that the audience was in a state of shock, because Last Tango in Paris has the same kind of hypnotic excitement as the Sacre, the same primitive force, and the same thrusting, jabbing eroticism. [...] Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From "The Current Cinema". The New Yorker. October 28, 1972.
“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted by Israel Shenker, "Critics Here Focus on Films As Language Conference Opens," The New York Times (December 28, 1972)
“In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1973 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Newsweek (December 24, 1973).
“A woman who taught at Berkeley dropped in on me once and saw a book burning in the fireplace. She pointed at it in terror, and I explained that it was a crummy ghostwritten life of a movie star and that it was an act of sanitation to burn it rather than sending it out into the world which was already clogged with too many copies of it. But she said, "You shouldn’t burn books" and began to cry.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The New Republic (December 24, 1966)
“Before seeing Truffaut's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid — I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity — a poetic comedy that's really funny.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Small Change, from When The Lights Go Down (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980, ).
“I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing about the bad things in an art form, particularly when young kids are going to be enthusiastic about those things, because they haven't seen anything better, or anything different.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Francis Davis, Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael (Da Capo, 2003, ).
“The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful — our own innocence.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it — not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at "good taste" of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it’s a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That’s what they go to burlesque for.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People who are just getting "seriously interested" in film always ask a critic, "Why don’t you talk about technique and 'the visuals' more?" The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn’t very interesting.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn’t have much to do with art — the expressive use of techniques — it probably doesn’t have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials — which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pauline Kael, in "Trash, Art and the Movies" (February 1969) from Going Steady (1969)
Also quoted by: James Joyce (misattributed)
“Kicked in the ribs, the press says "art" when "ouch" would be more appropriate.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The small triumph of The Graduate was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate — which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it’s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet — one doesn’t expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn’t go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One’s moviegoing tastes and habits change — I still like in movies what I always liked but now, for example, I really want documentaries. After all the years of stale stupid acted-out stories, with less and less for me in them, I am desperate to know something, desperate for facts, for information, for faces of non-actors and for knowledge of how people live — for revelations, not for the little bits of show-business detail worked up for us by show-business minds who got them from the same movies we’re tired of.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a dreadful discrepancy between Michelangelo's works and the words put into the mouth of Charlton Heston, who represents him here, and this picture — which is mostly about a prolonged wrangle between the sculptor and Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), who keeps sweeping into the Sistine Chapel and barking, "When will you make an end of it?" — isn't believable for an instant.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Apparently, Lillian Hellman couldn't shake off the predatory Hubbards after The Little Foxes; she wrote this play about the same family, setting it back 30 years earlier in their dark history. The Hubbards, who are supposed to be rising Southern capitalists, are the greatest collection of ghouls since The Old Dark House of 1932. Hellman must combine witchcraft with stagecraft — who else could keep a plot in motion with lost documents, wills, poisonings, and pistols, and still be considered a social thinker?”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The happiest screen collaboration of Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton — they're both wonderful — is in this adaptation of a Somerset Maugham story, "The Vessel of Wrath." It's set on an island in the Pacific, which Maugham calls Baru, and it's concerned with the efforts of the prim missionary (Lanchester) to reform the carnal, ribald beachcomber (Laughton). The situation is the reverse of that in Maugham's Sadie Thompson story, but with a light, comic tone. The Hepburn-Bogart "African Queen" probably took a few notions from it.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it surfaces in this movie.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hilariously florid — sometimes referred to as "Lust in the Dust." This Wagnerian western features Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones as lovers so passionate they kill each other. She's Pearl Chavez, a half-breed wench, and so, by Hollywood convention, uncontrollably sexy, and Peck actually manages to bestir himself enough to play a hunk of egotistical hot stuff — maybe the name Lewt McCanles got to him, or maybe the producer, David O. Selznick, used electric prods. Peck clangs his spurs and leers, while Jones heaves her chest; when they kiss, lightning blazes.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Charles Laughton is superbly vulgar in this whack at the backside of Victorianism. He makes a great vaudeville turn out of the role of an egocentric scoundrel, the prosperous bootmaker who doesn't want to part with his three marriageable daughters because they are too useful as unpaid labor. As the oldest daughter, the spinster in spite of herself, Brenda de Banzie is so "right" that when she marries her father's best workman and puts belching, drunken old Dad out of business, one feels the good old-fashioned impulse to applaud.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though she came from the theatre, Barbara Stanwyck seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera; perhaps she had been an unusually "natural" actress even onstage. This was her first big hit in the movies. Under Frank Capra's direction, she plays a tough "party" girl (euphemism for call girl) who poses for a wealthy young artist (Ralph Graves); he sees in her the spirituality that she attempts to deny. The story is a museum piece of early-talkies sentimentality, but, in a way, that only emphasizes Stanwyck's remarkable modernism.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“TV executives think that the programs with the highest ratings are what TV viewers want, rather than what they settle for.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The conglomerate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned they have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people — how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no?”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture — turning it into Pop art and camp — had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures — and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Bad Dream/A Masterpiece," review of The Moon in the Gutter (September 19, 1983), p. 48.
“Unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.)”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Busybody," review of Silkwood (January 9, 1984), p. 107.
“If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: King Candy," review of Against All Odds (March 19, 1984), p. 145.
“It tackles a wonderful subject without preening, and brings it off unassertively — so unassertively that the movie is in danger of being overlooked. (Variety has already dismissed it as something "for a very limited audience.") We're getting to the point where the press assumes that movie audiences won't be willing to bring anything to a picture, and warns them off.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Circus," review of Moscow on the Hudson (April 16, 1984), p. 160.
“Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 — a whole community saying grace — made me expect the worst.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mirrors," review of Places in the Heart (October 15, 1984), p. 246.
“What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Pop Mystics," review of Pale Rider (August 12, 1985), p. 17.
“Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Drifters, Dopes and Dopers," review of 8 Million Ways to Die (May 19, 1986), p. 156.
“If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1986 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ersatz," review of Stand By Me (September 8, 1986), p. 197.
“It's as if Brian de Palma were saying, "What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors. People used to say that Gary Cooper was a fine actor — probably because when they looked in his face they were ready to give him their power of attorney.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Potency," review of Born on the Fourth of July January 22, 1990), p. 254.
“This is a nature-boy movie, a kid's daydream of being an Indian. When Dunbar has become a Sioux named Dances with Wolves, he writes in his journal that he knows for the first time who he really is. Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New Age Daydreams," review of Dances with Wolves (December 17, 1990), p. 295.