The Wild One: Pauline Kael...?

Bellow I have posted my introduction and conclusion (so FAR) for a paper on (my problems with) the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael for my class on arts criticism with Professor Marx:

“The hot-pants Queen Victoria of American film criticism”, Pauline Kael is considered by many to have been rebellious for adamantly attacking mainstream values and championing alternative sensibilities in her reviews of popular cinema. Her racy and occasionally vulgar prose was shocking for many readers, which made Kael’s criticism seem defiant, even though the ideas she set forth in her reviews of movies were not radical for the time. Despite the perception of Kael as a rebel, she did not actually champion the subversive filmmakers of underground and art house cinema. Kael dismissed truly revolutionary and experimental films in favor of New Hollywood movies, which challenged the way that major studios produced movies. Kael only references the work of avant-garde filmmakers, such as Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol to strengthen her reviews of New Hollywood movies. Ultimately, Kael remains a conventional film critic because she overlooks or entirely ignores filmmakers that operate outside of the Hollywood sphere. In addition, Kael dismisses art house films because they threaten her argument that intellectualism kills the visceral pleasure of movies.

Kael disregards experimental films that are actually subversive to champion studio films that make small subversive gestures. Kael never clearly defines her idea of a “subversive gesture” and Alan Vanneman asserts, “Kael sounds like she's back in high school, where "freedom" is making some smart remark the teacher doesn't hear” (Vanneman). Kael claims that movies are successful when they make the audience feel alive, yet she overlooks avant-garde films that provoke an intense audience response. In her famous review of Last Tango in Paris, Kael’s compares the first screening of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film to the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring, at which the audience degenerated into a riot that required police intervention. Kael argues that the erotic film is a breakthrough movie and “Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form” because the movie elicits an intense response from the audience (Kael). Kael’s enthusiasm for Last Tango in Paris is elucidated in the following passage:

The closing night of the New York Film Festival, 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 (Kael 450).

Even though, the screening of Last Tango in Paris did not elicit a violent or aggressive response from any audience member, Kael still considers this a historic moment in movie history. However, Kael never mentions the screening of a film by Luis Bunuel that provoked the audience to totally trash the theatre and slash the film screen itself ( Joan Hawkins 60). Furthermore, Kael completely ignores more experimental filmmakers that provoke overwhelming audience responses, such as Jack Smith, whose movie Flaming Creatures was seized by police at its premiere and officially determined to be obscene by a New York Criminal court for its surreal, graphic depiction of sexuality.

In the end, Pauline Kael wants coherent movies, filled with wit and feeling that make little jabs at the establishment, not radical films that question the entire structure of society. Kael identifies herself with “the plain folks” who go to the movies for trashy entertainment. Watching Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures while smoking marijuana at the Charles Theatre in New York is too intellectual and primitive for Kael.

Works Cited:

• Kael, Pauline. For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies. Plume (September 1, 1996)
  
• Hawkins, Joan. Cutting edge: art-horror and the horrific avant-garde. Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (May 8, 2000)