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Pauline Kael

70 quotes

“If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Hal Espen, The New Yorker (March 21, 1994); reprinted in Espen's Conversations with Pauline Kael (University of Mississippi Press, 1996, ), p. 162.
“Goodman: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Kael: I hate it. It is very creepy being imitated.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Susan Goodman, Modern Maturity (March/April 1998) .
“Earlier generations went to see what was forbidden in life and developed a real excitement about the movies. Today’s rating system keeps kids out of the good ones. I wouldn’t want them to see movies like Natural Born Killers, but my tendency is you’re better off seeing things than not. That glazed indifference kids develop can be worse than over-excitement.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Susan Goodman, Modern Maturity (March/April 1998).
“Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1998 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Susan Goodman, Modern Maturity (March/April 1998).
“It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Perils of Being Pauline", interview with Francis Davis, The New Yorker (October 2001).
“I still don't look at movies twice. It's funny, I just feel I got it the first time. With music it's different. People respond so differently to the whole issue of seeing a movie many times. I'm astonished when I talk to really good critics, who know their stuff and will see a film eight or ten or twelve times. I don't see how they can do it without hating the movie. I would.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Perils of Being Pauline," interview with Francis Davis, The New Yorker (October 2001).
“For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Perils of Being Pauline," interview with Francis Davis, The New Yorker (October 2001).
“After one of those terrible lovers' quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, "Well I don't see what was so special about that movie." I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?... Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review for Shoeshine (1946) as quoted in Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (2004) by Craig Seligman.
“Movies make hash of the schoolmarm’s approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money — and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the "artist’s intentions" you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn’t need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn’t need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made — which is more or less implicit.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the movies we want something good, something sustained, we don’t want to settle for just a bit of something, because we have other things to do. If life at home is more interesting, why go to the movies? And the theatres frequented by true moviegoers — those perennial displaced persons in each city, the loners and the losers — depress us. Listening to them — and they are often more audible than the sound track — as they cheer the cons and jeer the cops, we may still share their disaffection, but it’s not enough to keep us interested in cops and robbers. A little nose-thumbing isn’t enough. If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films — the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us — that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it's eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Stanley Strangelove" (January 1972), review of A Clockwork Orange
“A filmed play like this doesn't offer the sensual enjoyment that movies can offer, but you don't go to it for that; you go for O'Neill's crude, prosaic virtuosity, which is also pure American poetry, and for the kind of cast that rarely gathers for a stage production. [...] Larry, a self-hating alcoholic, is a weak man and a windbag, but Ryan brings so much understanding to Larry's weakness that the play achieves new dimensions. Ryan becomes O'Neill for us; he has O'Neill's famous "tragic handsomeness" and at the end, when Larry is permanently "iced" — that is, stripped of illusion — we can see that this is the author's fantasy of himself [...] Fredric March interprets Harry Hope with so much quiet tenderness that when Harry regains his illusions and we see March's muscles tone up, we don't know whether to smile for the character or the actor.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands--millions--of eyes and noses. Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn't smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer--he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history — probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“De Niro's inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He's Travis Bickle, an outsider who can't find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can't sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted — whores, pimps, transients — he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground. Martin Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]his film offers a nightmare image: the "Black Rebels," an outlaw motorcycle gang — a leather-jacketed pack who resemble storm troopers — terrorize a town. Their emblem is a death's head and crossed pistons and rods, and Marlon Brando, in his magnetic, soft-eyed youth, is their moody leader. The picture seemed to be frightened of its subject — the young nihilists who say "no" to American blandness and conformity — and reduced it as quickly as possible to the trivial meaninglessness of misunderstood boy meets understanding girl (Mary Murphy), but the audience savored the possibilities, and this clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In movies, the balance between art and business has always been precarious, with business outweighing art, but the business was, at least, in the hands of businessmen who loved movies. As popular entertainment, movies need something of what the vulgarian moguls had — zest, a belief in their own instincts, a sentimental dedication to producing pictures that would make their country proud of their contribution, a respect for quality, and the biggest thing: a willingness to take chances. The cool managerial sharks don’t have that; neither do the academics. But the vulgarians also did more than their share of damage, and they’re gone forever anyway. They were part of a different America. They were, more often than not, men who paid only lip service to high ideals, while gouging everyone for profits. The big change in the country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People have expected less of movies and have been willing to settle for less. Some have even been willing to settle for Kramer vs. Kramer and other pictures that seem to be made for an audience of over-age flower children. These pictures express the belief that if a man cares about anything besides being at home with the kids, he’s corrupt. Parenting ennobles Dustin Hoffman and makes him a better person in every way, while in The Seduction of Joe Tynan we can see that Alan Alda is a weak, corruptible fellow because he wants to be President of the United States more than he wants to stay at home communing with his daughter about her adolescent miseries. Pictures like these should all end with the fathers and the children sitting at home watching TV together.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be very convincing to say that there’s no hope for movies — that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level. And there’s plenty of evidence, such as the success of Alien. This was a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space. It reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach; it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn’t mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they’d felt something: they’d been brutalized. It was like an entertainment contrived in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World by the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering.”
Pauline Kael (1919–2001) said by 2001 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source