Word: kael
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...polities and social reality) can often be fairly judged by the crates they keep. When Stanley Kauffman seizes on The Graduate as one of the most significant films ever made, you know something is amiss. Similarly when the press does chorus kicks for James Simon Kunen. Or when Pauline Kael hails Wild in the Streets. Scorecards or who likes what are less important when dealing with art works with little contemporary social content. Time thinks Persona is a masterpiece, but doesn't know why and it doesn't matter. But when film is discussed as the pleading voice of vouch...
...politics and social reality) can often be fairly judged by the critics they keep. When Stanley Kauffmann seizes on The Graduate as one of the most significant films ever made, you know something is amiss. Similarly when the press does chorus kicks for James Simon Kunen. Or when Pauline Kael hails Wild in the Streets. Scorecards of who likes what are less important when dealing with art works with little contemporary social content. Time thinks Persona is a masterpiece, but doesn't know why and it doesn't matter. But when film is discussed as the pleading voice of youth...
...accurate representation of life, another step towards "objectivity." The line between life and art was supposed to dissolve, and there would in the end be no difference between the way things were "out there" and their representation in the work of art. ". . . you get the impression," Pauline Kael has written, "that such cinema theorists think that Griffith shot The Birth of the Nation while the battles were raging, that Eisenstein was making newsreels, and that Rossellini and Bunuel were simply camera witnesses to scenes of extraordinary brutality...
...commercial narrative, concerns are conveyed chiefly through genre films: westerns, war films, science-fiction and detective melodramas, among many others. The critical consensus has always been that genre restricts, an attitude shared still by condescending, if blind, people like Pauline Kael or Bosley Crowther. But for all the mediocre westerns churned-out which reaffirm genre as tantamount to cliche and formula, we have Hawks's Rio Bravo or Ford's The Searchers, both of which use genre background as a means of allowing their protagonists the fullest range of individual expression. For all the cheap detective thrillers, we have Lang...
Perhaps the biggest present-day threat to the movies, thinks Pauline Kael, is television. The movie directors who get their start on TV are too careless of detail and too enamored of closeups. The old movies shown on TV are truncated, miniaturized versions of the real thing. Growing up on a diet of TV, she is convinced, has put college kids in the habit of walking in and out of movies "as if they were providing their own commercial breaks." And no one who walks out of a good movie is a friend of Pauline Kael...