What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
I feel like Pauline Kael would take the majority of the “critics” and bloggers writing about movies nowadays to the work shed, were she alive now. I include myself in that group. I’d welcome her criticism. There’s a glaring blindspot in my reading of critics when it comes to reading her writing that Rob Garver’s documentary has me wanting to rectify as soon as possible. Hearing her talk, hearing her words read throughout this film, and discussed by other writers, is inspiring, even if I don’t always agree with her views on certain films. That’s how you know it’s good film criticism.
Kael was retired in 1991, before I had really gotten into movies, and a few years before writing about movies for the first time, so, in that respect, it makes sense I never read her work. Roger Ebert was still working at that time, so when I started writing about films, he was someone I looked to for inspiration. The only time I had really gotten a chance to read Kael’s thoughts on films, in her own words, were from a 1998 interview she gave Newsweek in conjunction to the AFI “100 Years, 100 Movies” list being released. Her words did speak to me; the brief thoughts she had on recent films I had loved like “The Whole Wide World” and “Conspiracy Theory,” as well as something she said about film critics that I’ve tried to remember in my own discussion on films. I’m curious how she would feel about the state of both film, and film writing, nowadays.
The documentary Garver has made is a very standard-issue look at the life of its subject; it doesn’t have the emotional heft of a great documentary that feels of the moment, but a dry, “here is this person’s life” perspective that will happen when that person is no longer around to tell the story. It’s interesting because I’m interested in Kael, and hearing the perspectives of her daughter, Gina James; fellow critics and writers; filmmakers; and seeing archival footage of her in interviews, and hearing her words, as spoken by Sarah Jessica Parker, helps bring me a bit closer to understanding who she was, how she viewed film, as someone who wasn’t entirely familiar with her work before, but knew her name. I was highly entertained by “What She Said” as an introduction to Kael; now to go read it for myself.
