The upcoming release of Alain Resnais's classic Last Year at Marienbad on Blu-ray DVD reminds us that Marienbad was one of the many formally ambitious films released in the 1960s that popular critic Pauline Kael simply didn't "get." Blind to its visual beauties, indifferent to its innovative stylistic strategies, she dismissed Resnais's masterwork as pretentious drivel.
She also didn't "get" Antonioni's Blow-up.
And she didn't "get" Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In short, Kael didn't "get" the '60s.
Kael began the decade by pissing on the auteur theory (a theory she later embraced in practice, if not in name, by championing such '70s auteurs as Altman, De Palma, and Spielberg). She ended the decade with a book-length monograph, Raising Kane, based on the ridiculous premise that the primary source of Citizen Kane's lasting greatness was the talent of screenwriter-for-hire, Herman J. Mankiewicz.
It's not difficult to understand Kael's appeal. She was a lively writer, and some of her insights were on the mark. (Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.) In opposition to gender stereotypes, she liked films that were sexual or violent or some combination thereof. She made it OK for New Yorker-reading intellectual wannabes to like "popcorn movies" so long as they didn't take such "trash" seriously.
America has had a long tradition of populist anti-intellectualism, and Kael was very much a part of that tradition, arguably one of its finest flowers. Her entire career was based on the false dichotomy between popular entertainment and art. She never seemed to realize that one could like both, or how frequently the two categories overlapped.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Klueless Kael
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20 comments:
Hey, don't be too mean to Kael. She championed Last Tango in Paris, didn't she?
I've struggled with watching Marienbad myself, for it's profoundly lacking in that thing that Americans are so used to having their Art served with humor. As Lady MacBeth once put it, appear the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it. Marienbad is all flower. Or wait, is it all serpent? Either way, you should read my review over on my acidemic blog for it may shed no light whatsoever.
Well, I'm still struggling with "2001" as well. Though I think it is fair to say that the 60s were not Kael's favorite decade (she did like Godard and other French New Wavies, though).
Her entire career was based on the false dichotomy between popular entertainment and art. She never seemed to realize that one could like both, or how frequently the two categories overlapped.
This assessment I must very respectfully challenge as a bit glib. It's true that Kael smugly tokenized terms like "trash art" and very frequently pitted high and low-brow cinema together in some sort of unnecessary cock fight in her reviews. But she also used the paradox as a springboard for very fecund analysis -- in her essay on "Don't Look Now" she points out that the film is both an "artistic masterpiece" AND "trash" at the same time, and further describes how the film would not have been nearly as successful without balancing both sides. For all her effrontery, I honestly think, as somehow who has poured over nearly all of her output, that she was trying to create some kind of middle ground between art-house and populist cinema -- she just wasn't all that great at mediating.
And don't forget, she didn't have much of a stomach for Resnais or Buñuel, but she was pretty fair to Bergman and Antonioni ("L'Avventura" was her #1 film of 1960). I will admit that her scorn for fans of "Hiroshima Mon Amour" still smarts a bit, however...
Jon - you make a good point about Kael's Don't Look Now review which I didn't recall. Still, I bridle at her characterization of the popular entertainment elements of Don't Look Now or any other film as "trash," something to be condescended to. As if there were any form of art that didn't have its roots in popular entertainment. Therein lies the problem of Kael's meaningless dichotomy - if "art" is too intellectual, and popular entertainment is "trash," what's left?
Erich - I have responded to your comments over at the acidemic blog.
Therein lies the problem of Kael's meaningless dichotomy - if "art" is too intellectual, and popular entertainment is "trash," what's left?
That's basically the most convincing argument against Kael at the moment, but couldn't it also be an issue of semantics? In other words, that Kael isn't using the term "trash" quite as vindictively as one's knee-jerk response expects? Most people I talk to about Kael cringe when they hear the term "trash art," but what about Kael's working definition in her manifesto of sorts, "Trash, Art and the Movies"? She says:
...movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.
Note that she identifies both "great art" and "great trash," implying not only a distinction between those two categories but between "poor art" and "poor trash" as well. It's less condescending if you view the Kael/trash rubric as its own sliding scale apart from that of "art" or "intellectual entertainment".
So to Kael, "L'Avventura" might be "great art" whereas "Marienbad" is "poor art", but still possibly considered "art" of some kind (ie, the "art house" cinema). Likewise, the films of Brian DePalma would probably be "great trash" and a film like "Midnight Express" would be "poor trash". And it's not all so stratified either, as "Don't Look Now" succeeds as both trash and art. I'm not saying I agree with these assessments or quite even with the schematic, but I see where she's coming from.
I guess it just surprises me when folks take exception to Kael's use of the word "trash" because she seemed to use the term "art" more scurrilously. She perhaps could have chosen a better term than trash (it's fairly blunt), but if you look closely it's more a reaction to the stuffiness of academic analysis than it is truly cinematic condescension. Also from "Trash Art and the Movies":
"...they were not intended solemnly, that they were playful and inventive and faintly (often deliberately) absurd. And what’s good in them, what relates them to art, is that playfulness and absence of solemnity."
That's more or less her definition of "great trash". Perhaps she failed to point out explicitly that truly "great trash" isn't trash at all, even if it isn't art.
Wow! This is exactly how I've always felt about Kael. I'm glad somebody said it.
Agree with this post. The level of smugness & dismissiveness in Kael's writing was appalling. Not the mark of a good critic.
It's totally possible to dislike "Marienbad" or to think that Kubrick totally lost his mojo after "Lolita" and still get the 1960s. People do it every day.
I loved Kael's enthusiasm, especially when something really struck a chord with her: "Last Tango," "Mean Streets," "Nashville," "Shampoo," etc.
I loved her opinions even though I didn't always agree with them. I read and reread her piece on Godard's "Weekend," for example, long before I ever saw the movie, which actually turned out to be little more than a two-hour Excedrin headache. Yet it's a sterling, inspiring piece of writing.
One of the British film magazines--"Sight and Sound", I believe--interviewed George Coulouris and Bernard Herrmann about the whole "Raising Kane" mess. Herrmann's contempt for Kael's scholarship methodology almost burst through the page; it was my first glimpse of his legendary dudgeon.
So yes, she did some good.
Kael was ahead of her time in that her brand of hipsterism is THE brand nowadays - ironic, smug, and full of one-upsmanship. You think it's trash? No! It's good trash! You like art films -- no! you're pretentious!
Couldn't agree more with the anti-intellectualism comment. Irony used to be effective before it was absorbed into the mainstream, just like satire.
That's a beautiful image from Marienbad.
I'm not sure why we should be horrified that Kael didn't praise Last Year at Marienbad, Blow-up, and 2001. A critic's job is not to validate our own preferences, nor to validate what's become canonical. Otis Ferguson disliked Citizen Kane, but that doesn't lessen his status as a critic or mean his review wasn't insightful anyway--the same goes with Kael.
Kael's initial argument against the auteur theory was in the elevation of even "bad" films by an auteur simply because they bore his stylistic signature. Though she would later champion directors like Altman, Scorsese, Peckinpah, and DePalma, it didn't mean that she praised or cared for each of their works. And it should be said that while Kael overstated Mankiewicz's share in the script of Citizen Kane, she more than once said that without Welles's direction the film surely would not have achieved greatness.
What Kael says in "Trash, Art and the Movies" is that trash and art were essential, always present aspects of movies that had to be appreciated together, and the art in American movies often did have its roots in popular entertainment--hence her great love for the 30s films, which rose from an industry mostly devoted to producing trash. The categories are not separate but perpetually linked--being able to appreciate trash means being able to appreciate art. She wanted to preserve both as essential.
For those reasons, I think dismissing Kael as little more than an anti-intellectual philistine is itself a somewhat anti-intellectual move, since in dismissing her work usually means caricaturing it. Kael certainly deserves her share of criticism--for her frequent neglect of technique and form, her shrinking attention to foreign film during from the mid-70s onward, her desire to see a film only once, her increasing valorization of "popcorn movies," and so on--but over-emphasizing her supposed rigidity isn't the most fruitful plan of attack.
It's not nice to talk like that about their mama, C. Jerry. Mama is always right, even when she is wrong. And she was wrong a lot. Calling 2001 the greatest amateur film of all time has to be one of the flat-out dumbest things I have ever heard a reviewer say, especially since all one has to do is watch the first ten minutes of the film to see that it is the exact opposite. Mama just didn't like anyone who might've been as smart or smarter than her. Because it usurped her authority. And that's all mama had.
For those reasons, I think dismissing Kael as little more than an anti-intellectual philistine is itself a somewhat anti-intellectual move, since in dismissing her work usually means caricaturing it.
I could not agree more, and I also quote from "Trash, Art, and the Movies" above. I'm not suggesting that we all need to embrace Kael's style nor her judgments, but we should at least approach her critical stance on its own admittedly complex terms. I have to wonder if many of the naysayers out there have read much more than Kael's most famous tear-downs...she was so much more than her reviews on "A Clockwork Orange" or "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," or her very fair if unnecessarily barbed critique of auteur theory.
Anonymous is being snarky here but I think has really hit on something in describing the Kael cult as the Cult of Mama. And yes on the 2001 quote - that's exactly right. Hard to take a critic who would say that seriously.
Kael's style revolutionized film writing, and helped create the 1970s zeitgeist with her championing of Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango, etc. She was able to feed the average film fans some real insight that they could riff off of and use at cocktail parties. Even if you disagreed with her, she got you talking.
Ultimately no critic can be right all the time unless they don't take any chances. I'd much rather read a critic like Kael than someone whose going to play it safe in the middle of the road, like Leonard Maltin. Lenny might give Taxi Driver ** (too violent!) but he's also chicken to give any but a handful of recent films ****. Kael ddidn't wait for popular opinion to chime in before canonizing or condemning, and I respect that. And her trash art concept actually HELPED a lot of Americans (such as myself) become open to these ideas, she provided the crossover voice from popular to deep deep thinking.
A personal anecdote: When my ex-wife's parents came to visit from Buenos Aires, we took them to the Metropolitan Museum (my parents came too). We were in the Egyptian wing and after an hour or two, my parents had walked through two or three sections and gone home. Her parents were STILL IN THE EGYPTIAN WING, spending a good 10 minutes with each and every piece they saw, enraptured. "Que lindo!" I couldn't take it. I had to leave.
My point is, if you're the type who can spend an hour looking at a couple of Egyptian relics, you will love Marienbad. Short attention spans may find it's like being stuck on the tarmac with nothing to read but some upscale Airplane magazine's posh hotel section.. over and over.
Erich - Some like it slow!
See: http://blog.brightlightsfilm.com/2006/10/browning-and-slow-club.html
If you can appreciate the erotic longuers of Von Sternberg - as I know you do - you may come to enjoy Marienbad.
In short, Kael didn't "get" the '60s.
Brilliant!
This piece is one of my favorite things you've written and I'll probably be stoned alive for saying so.
Every time I express my dislike of Kael I get hate mail.
Yo! CJ, I just read that piece and am remembering this one time I projected my old super 8mm reel of DRACULA accidentally on super slow to a bunch of tripping hipsters. ! I've never seen the movie the same way again. I still have that goddamned super 8mm reel. While we're on the subject of hipsters, the girls love FREAKS! Go figure.
I should find my old "What if Pauline Kael wrote for an Xtreme horror blog" article I never finished, now while you and Kimberly (et tu, Kimberly?) have her on the ropes!
P.S. Kael may not have "gotten" the sixties, but she helped create the seventies.
Though who knows how she will fare in the 10s... (here he wept, bitterly)
I knew Pauline Kael--not well, but well enough to be on a first name basis. She drank a lot. Do you think that has anything to do with the way she reviewed movies? OK, can I tell you about the frat party at Dartmouth she, Bosley Crowther, Boz Scaggs and Steve Miller were at? No. OK, I don't remember it all that well. It was the 60s.
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