Kael Critical Essay (Revision)

By John Flemming

Pauline Kael is often regarded as one of the most influential film critics of her time and perhaps of all time.

Fellow critics, like Francis Davis, suggest that Ms. Kael was revolutionary because she possessed “the nerve – to go to bat for a good movie that’s been given up for dead by its distributors” (p. 25). Renata Adler concedes that in her earlier work, Ms. Kael “seemed to approach movies with an energy and a good sense that were unmatched at the time in film criticism” (p. 327).

It has also been suggested that Ms. Kael, in her critiquing of films, produced an art form of her own characterized by her outspoken voice, intellectually sound prose, and enthusiasm for the medium she critiqued. This idea of critics creating their own art that stands alone from the reviewed work resides in Oscar Wilde’s intricate argument found in The Critic as Artist.
But for all of the high praise given to Ms. Kael, it seems as though as the years passed, people overlooked her increasing arrogance and tendency to be unoriginal.

To create art requires a degree of improvisation. It requires that the artist produce something from almost nothing, or at least from the readily available materials at hand. The problem with art or improvisation is that the artist, focusing solely on one medium, can only produce original works of art for so long. After a while, it seems impossible for the artist to avoid becoming repetitive and stale.

Renata Adler in her essay House Critic argues that no critic can devote himself or herself exclusively to reviewing one body of art; for though they may begin their careers writing at the “highest level…what happens after a longer time is that [they] settle down” (p 326). And this is exactly what happened to Pauline Kael. Her later works became as Adler described them, worthless.

For decades, Kael returned to the same mannerisms hundreds of times over to the extent that they became clichés. Her apparent extensive knowledge and what Adler describes as “knowingness” started to come off as rather pretentious with far-fetched allusions, which only explicably served to show off her prowess: “It’s true that one remembers the great scenes from the nineteenth-century Russian novels…there’s a consistency of vision in Turgenev or Dostoevski or Tolstoy” (p. 336). Kael seems to have written unnecessarily long pieces to demonstrate her movie knowledge (and general knowingness) and these frequent transgressions into the realm of “indescribably reflections on ‘art’ and ‘artists’” detracted quality from her work.

Ms. Kael arrived at a point in her career as a critic where she wrote about everything except what she was reviewing. She used her column as a stage to demonstrate the abuse of rhetorical devices, which serve only to “enlist [the reader] in a constituency” (p. 335). Another of Ms. Kael’s plethora of annoying faults was her insistence on using words such as “we” and “you” – words that aspiring critics are taught to vehemently avoid, words, that when used by Kael served to illustrate her growing arrogance: it was either submission to Kael’s self-proclaiming infallible opinion or to be the misguided dissenter.

At one point, Ms. Kael arguably produced works of substance. However, as Alder has pointed out, her act became old and fostered a miasma of self-indulgent righteousness that is insulting to the art of criticism. Ironically, in Afterglow, Ms. Kael states, “you tend, when you improvise, to go back to the same themes. You talk around the same subjects, and it’s often not as fresh as you imagine it is” (p. 69). The problem was that her boundless, self-delusional imagination severed ties to reality long ago.