In Memory of Pauline Kael (1919-2001)

And yet, I feel like she was almost a personal friend of mine. As a film buff, I was a late bloomer. I was already in college, an incredibly naive and idealistic English major, when I began, almost over night, to conceive of films as an art form. A friend took me to see Antonioni's Blow-Up, and I was enthralled. Subsequent viewings of Mike Nichols's The Graduate and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey confirmed my new passion for the film and opened up an entire world to discovery and exploration.

As a student at a small southern liberal arts college, I considered that the best of literature and drama reflected life in all its complexity, sorrow, sadness, and joys. I believed that in some measure, all true art entailed a discovery of self, a journey inward toward knowledge and ultimately, hopefully, to wisdom. These three films met all of my artistic criteria; they spoke to me in a very personal way and hinted at profound depths of mind and art. I felt in seeing them a passionate joy of the kind I had only felt before in reading the most brilliant literature—the novels of Dostoevsky, the plays of Ibsen.

I began at that time also to see film criticism as an honorable occupation. While I occasionally read short film reviews or synopses as a strictly practical, non-aesthetic matter, I usually relied upon my friends as the ultimate arbiters of taste in films. Partly because we had no real art theatres, I am afraid that we perceived of our small southern town as a cultural backwater.

I had read no film criticism before I wrote an impassioned and rather long review of Little Fauss and Big Halsey (with Robert Redford and Michael J. Pollard), and gave it to the editor of my school's student newspaper. Unfortunately, he promptly lost my review. While this was to me at the time a terrible loss, I got over it. Anyway, I told myself, my review could not have been published before the film left town.

I'm not sure what I saw in the film then (directed by the prolific if unremarkable Sidney J. Furie), nor could I ever recapture that flood of emotional and intellectual zeal that caused me to write that review in the first place. I now have no recollection of the article's content, except that it was written in a white-hot passion, and that it somehow referred to Theodore Ziolkowski's wonderful book on the novels of Hermann Hesse. (Ziolkowski's book I still retain, with its mute testimony that a long-dead dog of mine also regarded this book as the worthy object of a youthful chewing frenzy.)

As for the films that began my love affair with film, I remember especially my reaction to The Graduate—still one of my all-time favorite movies and the first film I actually purchased as a VHS videotape. The Graduate has always held a special meaning and poignancy for me. The film touched me deeply because I was the hapless boyfriend of a young woman whose father, for some unknown reason, detested me. Perhaps he was simply angry that his little girl was growing up, and I was a serious threat for her favors, a person who might even marry her and carry her away. The depth of his dislike became clear to me, one afternoon, after an unfortunate drive-in movie date where we both fell asleep. He was furious at me for bringing his daughter home so late. And of course, he was certainly right to be angry—but just not that angry. On the next afternoon, following the night when all hell broke loose, I found myself staring down the wrong end of a gun barrel. Something I said must have penetrated his myopic rage, however, because he finally left without further violence.

It wasn't until I started graduate school that I fell completely under the spell of Ms. Kael's abundant talent. Movies were for me, at that time, almost an escape, and I enjoyed them immensely as entertainments and a respite form the coldly intellectual approach of the majority of my graduate professors. (It has always amazed me that men in gray flannel suits with argyle socks, who went about the corridors discussing the stock market, could really be literature professors. I remembered fondly and sadly my undergraduate professors from New York and California, who were, compared with these minions of the status quo, impassioned radicals.)

I purchased a paperback copy of Ms. Kael's second collection of film reviews, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968). I fell in love with the magic of Ms. Kael's words, with the wonderful fluidity and sharp rhetorical skill with which she wrote. Most importantly, however, she had something to say about film, something to communicate. I know of no one else who has written so passionately, so movingly, and with such brilliant style about film.

Because of Ms. Kael, I subscribed off-and-on to The New Yorker for over two decades. I saved her reviews in notebooks and used them whenever I could in my college teaching. I would like to say that I still retain these notebooks filled with yellowing pages containing her reviews, but, whenever I could, I bought her subsequent books of collected criticism and purged the notebooks. (They now contain yellowing articles and film reviews by other, less fortunate film critics.)

To be completely truthful, I must confess that in her later film criticism (like the later criticism of John Simon), she was often angry, crotchety, and infuriatingly, broodingly negative. To the extent that this dark brooding quality entered her art, it became increasingly less enjoyable to read her essays. I often find myself using her books as reference sources because they can tell me, as no other source can, what were the issues and the films that made up a significant part of my intellectual and artistic life from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Whether in absolute agreement with her about Hollywood's deleterious affects on film in general or in profound disagreement with her, as in her wrong-headed but interesting and well-publicized arguments with Andrew Sarris, I still use her essays as a touchstone and a time machine that transports me instantly to earlier worlds.

As forcefully as she did in the past, she speaks to me today as surely and resonantly about my life and the life of my mind as do the lyrics of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Cat Stevens. In some of her best criticism, as in her brilliant advocacy of The Godfather, Parts I and II, she is utterly, absolutely convincing. From that time also, I can date my love of Beethoven. For me, in her best writing, with its flow and life, its brilliant style and mellifluous beauty, I can hear echoes of the Choral of the Ninth.

Apart from my very personal feelings about the positive value and service of her film criticism to my own life, I believe she was one of a kind, one of a few in a generation who profoundly change in a very positive way how we look at a work of art. You could say, in a very real sense, that Ms. Kael freed a generation to write about film from the heart. She was often opinionated, caustic, and, in a sense, ruthless, but she always wrote about film with absolute conviction, as if it really mattered to her, and with the implication that we, her readers, should also care about film as passionately as she did.