Word: kael
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Rarely has this been more apparent than at Kael's April 16 appearance at Leverett House. (Of course, the new style of Harvard audience -- spruced up and ready to kiss ass - almost insured the result.) Ms. Kael was introduced by a fellow in a three-piece suit who uttered some innocuous pleasantries about how disappointed he and the others were when Leslie Fiedler and not Kael dominated the podium at a recent PMLA convention. Two hours later, as Kael finished answering questions from the film buffs and cognoscenti who surrounded her, the more skeptical among us wondered what...
...Kael mostly spoke about the rareness of integrity in film work, and relied heavily on the shared liberal assumptions of her listeners to persuade them that individual honor in a decrepit industry is worth anything. (Besides, she's been beating that same dead horse for years). Her talk boiled down to a celebration of herself. As a self-styled grand protector of the true, heart-felt way of seeing movies, Kael urged her audience to protect their "individual responses" to films; she said that critics should be read as interference-runners for filmgoers, helping audiences to better appreciate "new kinds...
...Pauline never explained what the nature of an "individual response" is, or what is a "new kind of film". In fact, like a self-conscious frontierswoman, she used the words "new" and "individual" as conundrums. It soon became clear that Kael is a dyed-in-the-sawdust anti-intellectual. The "experience" of a movie, for Kael, is both dramatic, and visually, sensually evocative. But, while standing on the line which divides those who look to narrative art for a structured vision of the world from those who just like movies for the fun of it, Kael comes down hard...
...Leverett House audience merely followed where Kael led. Remarks which were not only irrational, but implicitly racist were skimmed over. At one point, Kael claimed that the best films of the next two decades would come from blacks. When pressed to reconcile this with the mediocrity of previous black films, Kael answered that cultures other than Western white ones, which did not possess structured literary traditions, could use film to find "exciting" new ways to express their sensuality. A black friend of mine then hissed. Kael got upset, and asked for the objection to be verbalized. So another friend inquired...
...Pauline Kael's transformations are upsetting not only because of her influence, but because of what some of us once felt Kael herself could have become. If the early '60s, when she wrote for small film journals, literary quarterlies, and an occasional Atlantic or Harper's, she seemed one of the few writers since Agee able to avoid the occasional literary pretensiousness of Eastern critics, the self-justifying defenses of Hollywood hacks, and the gassy theorizing of academics. However, especially since her third book (Going Steady) appeared in 1970, she has become an established New Yorker commodity, and increasingly self...