A little more Pauline Kael

In all this excite­ment I nearly for­got that, for a fea­ture for the Nomad “ver­tic­al” Wide Screen, I inter­viewed Brian Kellow, the author of the bio­graphy Pauline Kael: A Life In The Dark (Viking). 

I fondly remem­ber back in the mid-eighties at a Red Krayola show at Danceteria, my man Mayo Thompson wryly thank­ing a power­ful NYC rock crit­ic who had some­what war­ily preview-picked the show for “provid­ing us with two stools to fall between.” I try to pitch Nomad Wide Screen between the two stools of gen­er­al interest and informed cinephil­ia, and while I wanted to format my inter­view with Kellow as more a con­ver­sa­tion of sorts, I also aimed for a par­tic­u­lar form of detach­ment. Anyway, I repro­duce a por­tion of the piece below; you can read the whole thing here and I do, really, encour­age you to sub­scribe to the thingamajug; it’s cheap, for one thing, and every week deliv­ers good stuff from the likes of Vadim Rizov, Karl Rozemeyer, Simon Abrams, Tony Dayoub, and some­times even the fab­ulous Self-Styled Siren. And yes, some­times myself.

WIDE SCREEN: It’s inter­est­ing, from the account in your book, it seems that if Andrew Sarris hadn’t taken Kael’s writ­ing about his writ­ing so per­son­ally, their feud, such as it was, might have gone differently.

BRIAN KELLOW: Well, yeah. A few people have men­tioned in print, she’s not the one that kept bring­ing it up. It wasn’t really a feud. It was kind of a one-shot out of the can­non. I inter­viewed him for the book, very nice man. And I felt that I’d been keep­ing him maybe a little too long. And I finally said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I just have a few more ques­tions, do you mind if we just con­tin­ue for 10 more minutes?” He said, “No, no, no; let’s get it done. I don’t want to have a con­ver­sa­tion about her again!”

WIDE SCREEN: Clearly you’d have to say that Kael was power­ful. And that she sensed her­self as being power­ful. She was angri­est at Andrew Sarris, not because of his the­or­ies but because, for example, he would refuse to cham­pi­on Last Tango in Paris. She felt she was going to be at the advance of cham­pi­on­ing these movies she thought were great and every­body had to fol­low. By the same token, I think today’s film crit­ics look at cer­tain of the more fam­ous anec­dotes: Sitting in the back of a limo with Otto Preminger and Andrew Sarris and telling them that Hurry Sundown is a piece of shit. Or Schickel’s account of how she des­troyed the ego of David Lean so that he couldn’t work again. Clearly the real­ity of David Lean’s case has more to do with money than Pauline Kael des­troy­ing his ego. So in terms of actu­al power, does she rep­res­ent a sort of high-water mark that’s nev­er going to hap­pen again? Or is there a cer­tain amount of just per­cep­tion involved in this thing? Or do you merely look at the situ­ation and say, well, this was a dif­fer­ent era?

BRIAN KELLOW: Sure. I think that’s the whole point. I think it was a very spe­cif­ic time in movie his­tory and cul­tur­al his­tory. It’s not going to come again. That,great dia­logue between the audi­ence and the screen that she talked about, it was really hap­pen­ing then, in a way that, to my mind, it has nev­er happened since. Movies don’t have that hold on the cul­ture that they did. I can remem­ber as a col­lege stu­dent going to everything. I wanted to see even the stuff that I had a hunch wasn’t going to be very good. I was sort of in an Andrew Sarris archival-interest mode. And there were a lot of us who felt that way back then. This would have been in the middle, late ’70s. I just think it was a once in a life­time thing. I think it was pain­ful for her to see — because she was right in the vor­tex. I think she was right about a lot of the reas­ons it faded away. America did become much more of a money cul­ture. It still is. And dif­fer­ent things were driv­ing the movies. 

WIDE SCREEN: Sure. A lot of it’s tech­no­lo­gic­al. Cinephilia has become kind of privat­ized. And the con­ver­sa­tion as a res­ult is dif­fer­ent. It’s migrated to the Internet.

BRIAN KELLOW: Yep.

WIDE SCREEN: Robert Warshow wrote, at the end of the day, you have to admit that a man is in a theat­er and you are that man. And that was her approach to writ­ing: “the imme­di­ate exper­i­ence.” But some might say she adhered to that idea almost to a fault, cit­ing her ostens­ible refus­al to watch a movie more than once. What I see is not so much a dis­in­clin­a­tion to watch films more than once, but a pas­sion, almost approach­ing a mania, to get her imme­di­ate response down on paper. 

BRIAN KELLOW: Absolutely. Because she thought that was the truest response.

WIDE SCREEN: Let’s talk about that in terms of an actu­al crit­ic­al eth­os. How do you feel that worked for her in terms of the lar­ger body of work, and what do you think the liab­il­it­ies for that approach were? It has to be exhaust­ing to write from that per­spect­ive so much of the time. Or do you feel like she had so much energy that this was just her default mode?

BRIAN KELLOW: I think it was. She had an amaz­ing amount of vital­ity. This was what drove her. The fact that she didn’t have the found­a­tion of the­ory that a lot of oth­er crit­ics have had is one thing. But I think the great gift of doing cri­ti­cism the way she did it was to the read­er. And of course she was ter­ribly con­cerned about her read­er. The way she wrote for the ear, the way she had to read it out loud because she wanted to make sure it had that cer­tain imme­di­acy, and that cer­tain sex­i­ness and drive and pulse — I think that’s very endear­ing. I wish that more crit­ics thought about their read­er­ship, frankly. That was the great bene­fit of her doing it the way she did. We picked up on that first rush of excite­ment, on that ini­tial response.

The oth­er thing you have to say is, it wasn’t like she was 21 years old. She was estab­lished; her intel­lect, her taste level, her aes­thet­ic, whatever you want to say, it had all coalesced very nicely by the time she sat down to write her first movie review. So it wasn’t like she was going to be learn­ing, learn­ing, learn­ing, and gram­mat­ic­ally chan­ging her mind about a lot of big things. I first star­ted read­ing her when I was very, very young. It was like a great per­form­ance in the theat­er, when you feel that the act­or or the sing­er or who­ever it hap­pens to be is per­form­ing dir­ectly to you, speak­ing dir­ectly to you. I felt cer­tain that she was talk­ing right to me. And I’ve nev­er come across that same thing in any oth­er movie critic.

WIDE SCREEN: Going through her work over the years, it’s inter­est­ing to see how on and off she was in her pro­nounce­ments per­tain­ing to what a film said about the zeit­geist. It’s inter­est­ing to see her try and bal­ance her own imme­di­ate response to a lar­ger social view. And some­times it’s a little weird. She comes off as weirdly prig­gish when, in her review of Breathless, where she’s talk­ing about how Michel and Patricia are the youth of the day and they don’t care about any­thing. And then she’ll seem to be excited about some­thing almost not in spite of but because of an amor­al­ity going on there. And also her tend­ency to cite con­tem­por­ary music. The whole urge to be cur­rent, to say, as James Wolcott related, “David Bowie” and not “John Wayne.” Do you attrib­ute this to the vital­ity you talked about?

BRIAN KELLOW: I think she was obsessed with stay­ing cur­rent. At the same time there was this oth­er side of her. Her neph­ew, Bret Wallach, told me that when he was par­ti­cip­at­ing in cam­pus demon­stra­tions at Berkeley, she was very much against it. He was stunned because he had always thought of her, I guess, as rebel­li­ous Aunt Pauline, con­stantly giv­ing the fin­ger to the estab­lish­ment. But she was not in favor of any­thing that was going to lead you to a point of ali­en­a­tion or isol­a­tion. She wanted to be in it. In the vor­tex, at the vor­tex. You can see it in a lot of her reviews of early ’70s films, like her com­ments on Joe and Five Easy Pieces. She doesn’t see the value in this point of view of drop­ping out and liv­ing a life of des­pair and noth­ing works and the government’s ter­rible and what are we going to do, except grow mush­rooms and live in the woods. She was not in favor of that at all. She was much more inter­ested in the estab­lished order.