Of Pauline Kael, fan mail, and other burning issues of film criticism.

I had to hit the ground running when I got back from Brookline, MA last week, so I didn’t get time to sit down and do a proper report on the “Beyond Thumbs Up: A Critical Look At Film Criticism” panels I participated in up there at the lovely Coolidge Corner Theater. We—myself, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly, Armond White of The New York Press, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe, Scott Foundas of L.A. Weekly, the venerable David Sterritt and the venerable Phillip Lopate and moderators Richard Porton and Cynthia Lucia of Cineaste—were treated like royalty by the lovely staff there, and we had a grand time arguing over the course of three 150 minute panels over two days. It was kind of exhausting. (There's a very kind review of one of the panels here.)

We began by describing how we each got into film criticism; I think I got cut off about 20 minutes into my own account, by which time I was up to my first driving test. After that, one name started coming up a lot. And a lot.

Almost everyone on the panel had had some significant contact at least, or a substantial personal/professional relationship at most, with Pauline Kael.

Indeed, the narrative that emerged during the second panel, on “Traditional and Evolving Modes of Film Criticism,” posited Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Kael’s defense of it as paradigm shifts in both American moviemaking and criticism, setting many on the panel off on reveries that led Lopate to, in his inimitably firm but polite way, accuse the panel of indulging in 60s/70s narcissism. It was all quite lively and stimulating. After the second panel I suggested that we make a rule—as a sort of Oulipean exercise, ala George Perec’s written-without-the-letter-“e” novel La Disparation—not to mention Kael at all during the third. An hour in somebody blew it.

Now I myself had never once met or spoken to Kael, who died in 2001, and my relationship with her as a reader was largely, shall we say, adversarial. (I stand with Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum in their appalled indignation at the scholarly sloppiness and barely concealed malice of “Raising Kane.” And it wasn’t just her use of the second person I found presumptuous and patronizing; I vividly remember, back in 1979, reading her review of Walter Hill’s The Warriors and snorting derisively at her citation of the “terrific” Martha and the Vandellas song “Nowhere To Run” on the film’s soundtrack. “Gee, thanks for the tip, Grandma,” I said to myself. Boy I was a rotten kid.) As the panelists discussed her, and her influence on film criticism, and her influence on them, unpleasant memories of high school gym, and my exclusion therein from softball games, began to stir in my breast.

So, and I don’t recall if this was in the first or second panel, as the frequency of Kael-evoking bid fair to reach a boil, I figured I’d make a joke. It was one I’d already “done,” at a dinner in Cannes last year with Mr. Lopate and my friends Tom Carson and Arion Berger. Tom wrote an, um, terrific essay about his own Kael ambivalence in Esquire a few years back, available online only via this for-pay service, while Phillip’s typically probing profile "The Passion of Pauline Kael," first published in 1979 and reprinted in his invaluable collection of film writing Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, is still apparently earning him dirty looks from some Kael devotees today. Tom and Arion had just met Phillip for the first time, so Tom mentioned his admiration for “The Passion…” and away we, or they, went apropos Kael. Feeling a bit puckish (I really ought to sequester myself during such moods), I chimed in, “I got ‘the call’ from Pauline once.” (One thing Kael’s old friends and associates like to cite is her generosity, which sometimes manifested itself via her seeking out and encouraging young writers whose work she admired, usually by phone.)

“Really?” said someone.

“Yeah. I was about 25, and I’d had a couple of pieces in The Voice, and one night she called...”

Strategically pregnant pause, followed by ruefully downcast eyes...

“...but my mom told her I wasn’t home.”

Well. It got a pretty big laugh at the dinner, lemme tell ya. So I figured I’d try it here, but I must have muffed it, or maybe the Cannes reaction was the kindly indulgence of friends. It got a bit of a laugh, not enough of one that I wasn’t obliged to explain that I had been joking and had never in fact met or spoken to, etc. But here’s the thing—Scott Foundas of the L.A. Weekly, young ‘un that he is, had the same thing happen to him for real, sort of. As a teen film fanatic he had written a fan letter to Kael, and she responded with a phone call, which his mom took. (I am reminded of a story I heard third-hand about a then-NYU film and future music video director, the scion of good Queens working class Italian stock, who once came home to be informed by his irate mother that “some guy named Jack Ribbit” had called. It had, in truth, been Jacques Rivette, responding to an interview request.)

The fan letter was a leitmotif in several Kael stories, Owen Gleiberman’s quite prominently. This caused me to reflect on a peculiar feature of my life that I never gave any consideration to before. I’ve never written a fan letter in my life and it’s never even occurred to me to ever do so. Sure, I’ve written a few fulsome pitch letters and solicitations, but never a fan letter. I’ve never approached a celebrity for an autograph, not counting the occasional book signing event, which is probably not the same thing. I don’t know if it’s because I consider it presumptuous or because I’m just such a monumental egotist myself. But I do know that at this particular juncture in film history and film criticism, we who write about and care about films allow ourselves to be borne back ceaselessly into the past do so at our own peril. One of the kicks about doing this blog is the idea it forces on a somewhat old-school wordsmith like myself, that criticism can be a multi-media discipline. I’ll always love Manny Farber, Andrew Sarris, Herman G. Weinberg, Robin Wood, and yes, some Kael. But Sonic Youth also had a point when they advised, in their overstated mode of the time, “Kill Yr Idols.”

Comments

[Chris Goldstein]

I blame Kael for Armond White, the most absurd film critic of our time and space. His review of Before the Devil Knows Your Dead feels like his penultimate act of knee-jerk contrarianism. It's like he waited to read all the reviews of the new Lumet before he decided that he was going to hate it solely on principal. It's hard to imagine that Armond White has any friends. And what bugs me the most about him is that he never talks about the filmmaking. His reviews always focus on how said film does not live up to Stalin-esque standards of social realism or how said film is nowhere near as good and true as Catch Me If You Can.

Kael wasn't a bore. Most of her acolytes are. What's most boring is their peevishness.

[demimonde]

Ugh, I think my brush near the outskirts of the proximity of The Call may be the skeeviest of all. Three words: intermediary Howard Hampton. Hit 'em up, pimp-style.

And to be fair (to you, G, as I think you were being to Kael), Sonic Youth did write a song about Robert Christgau. I mean, they knew his value, for better or worse -- and that his blessing made things both better and worse. They were better consumers of criticism, if I may stretch the parallel, than the second generation of Paulettes are actual critics.

[Garrett]

If you want to talk about malice, Glenn Kenny, talk about Andrew Sarris's shameless decades-long (petty, resentful) response to Pauline Kael...

[Glenn Kenny]

Yeah, Garrett, Sarris' latter-day rejoinders to Kael were hardly among his finest hours, and his post-mortem made my eyes roll back up into my head. But malice among critics (and this post, which I considered fairly innocuous, has earned me some—in the form of private e-mails, presumably since the individual doesn't want to dignify my putative desecrations with a public response) belongs, I think, in a different category than a critic's malice toward an artist.

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