Pauline Kael: The Critic as Cultural Force

Pauline Kael, the longtime film critic of The New Yorker, is often considered the pre-eminent American film critic of the twentieth century. Her influence is felt, even after her death by the legions of her disciples such as A.O. Scott and Roger Ebert who fill the rank of film critics throughout American media. Unlike critics such as Andrew Sarris or Francois Truffaut, Kael did not formulate film concepts but rather attempted to throw out any pretense of being objective and wrote in the vernacular so that the public at large could more easily understand her. Kael’s criticism continues to be historically important and her work is more interesting, independently of the films that she describes, than most of her contemporaries though she is also guilty of a sometime didactic in her views and a later propensity for advancing movies that she creative input into or that were associated with friends of hers. Kael was at least consistent in her dislike of figures such as Clint Eastwood or David Lean.
Kael has made an indelible mark upon both film critics and filmmakers and her contentious reviews for The New Yorker brought the film critic a larger place in the cultural consciousness and made it possible for critics such as Roger Ebert or Gene Siskel to gain the amount of cultural cache that they have been able to. For example, Kael’s review of Bonnie and Clyde helped that film to accelerate and eventually revolutionize the way that movies were made in Hollywood. The critic was here not just reacting to films but actually influencing the way that they were being created. In fact her enthusiasm for Bonnie and Clyde is emblematic of one of what Renata Adler in her piece House Critic refers to as Kael’s “frissons of horror; physical violence depicted in explicit detail” (Adler, 329). This is opposed to Kael’s avowed dislike of what she termed “Fascistic” films such as Dirty Harry and Straw Dogs. Where Kael derided the vigilante violence of the aforementioned films, she engaged in what Adler describes as “physical sadism” in her journalistic prose. This violent prose can possibly be attributed to Kael’s intent to make the language of her reviews speak more the common moviegoer than to the intelligentsia but it also provides some psychological insight into her fascinations.
Lastly, Kael in her own review of Alain Resnais’ film “Hiroshima Mon Amour” lays out the high expectations for the film and then proceeds to present her own pan which culminates in her hypothetical statement “I have never understood why writers assume that repetition creates a lyric mood or underlines meaning with profundity” (Kael, 30). This is intriguing because it is precisely in Kael’s own reviewing corpus, that she utilizes repetition to underline her reception of a film. In fact, her review excoriates the “liberal intellectuals” who champion the film as much as the film itself. She includes an illustrative line of dialogue “They make movies to sell soap, why not a movie to sell peace?” (Kael, 32). This is the strongest point of Kael’s argument against Resnais’ film: Even though this is an art film, it is selling its message just the same and is no less of a commercial vehicle. This is the essence of Kael’s reviewing: while you may not agree with her opinion of a film, she challenges our understanding of the film and allows to perhaps appreciate it even more deeply and certainly in a new way.