Pauline Kael: Trending quotes

“In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.”

Pauline Kael

Newsweek (1973-12-24).

Art

“It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.”

Pauline Kael

"The Perils of Being Pauline" http://wrt102summer2005.blogspot.com/2005/07/pauline-kael-new-yorker-interview.html, interview with Francis Davis, The New Yorker (October 2001).
Interviews

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Pleasure , School , Art , Parting

“Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Art

“I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

Pauline Kael

John F. Kennedy, address at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts (1963-10-26).
Misattributed

Art , Future , Country

“Audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at "good taste" of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it’s a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses. Patrons of burlesque applaud politely for the graceful erotic dancer but go wild for the lewd lummox who bangs her big hips around. That’s what they go to burlesque for.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Behavior

“The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn’t have much to do with art — the expressive use of techniques — it probably doesn’t have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Art , Box

“I regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”

Pauline Kael

"Replying to Listeners" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/replylisteners.html, broadcast on KPFA (January 1963).

Age , Art , Thinking , Country

“Before seeing Truffaut's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid — I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity — a poetic comedy that's really funny.”

Pauline Kael

Review of Small Change, from When The Lights Go Down (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980, ISBN 0-030-42511-5).

Children , Nature , Change , Childhood

“I still don't look at movies twice. It's funny, I just feel I got it the first time. With music it's different. People respond so differently to the whole issue of seeing a movie many times. I'm astonished when I talk to really good critics, who know their stuff and will see a film eight or ten or twelve times. I don't see how they can do it without hating the movie. I would.”

Pauline Kael

"The Perils of Being Pauline," interview with Francis Davis, The New Yorker (October 2001).
Interviews

Hate , People , Music , Feeling

“It would be very convincing to say that there’s no hope for movies — that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level. And there’s plenty of evidence, such as the success of Alien. This was a haunted-house-with-gorilla picture set in outer space. It reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach; it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn’t mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they’d felt something: they’d been brutalized. It was like an entertainment contrived in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World by the Professor of Feelies in the College of Emotional Engineering.”

Pauline Kael

Taking It All In (1983), Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers (1980-06-23)

People , World , Hope , Way

“People who are just getting "seriously interested" in film always ask a critic, "Why don’t you talk about technique and 'the visuals' more?" The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn’t very interesting.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

People

“In movies, the balance between art and business has always been precarious, with business outweighing art, but the business was, at least, in the hands of businessmen who loved movies. As popular entertainment, movies need something of what the vulgarian moguls had — zest, a belief in their own instincts, a sentimental dedication to producing pictures that would make their country proud of their contribution, a respect for quality, and the biggest thing: a willingness to take chances. The cool managerial sharks don’t have that; neither do the academics. But the vulgarians also did more than their share of damage, and they’re gone forever anyway. They were part of a different America. They were, more often than not, men who paid only lip service to high ideals, while gouging everyone for profits. The big change in the country is reflected in the fact that people in the movie business no longer feel it necessary to talk about principles at all.”

Pauline Kael

Taking It All In (1983), Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers (1980-06-23)

Love , Men , People , Art

“If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous.”

Pauline Kael book Hooked

"Ersatz," review of Stand By Me (1986-09-08), p. 197.
Hooked (1989)

Feeling

“Though she came from the theatre, Barbara Stanwyck seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the fluid physical movements that work best on camera; perhaps she had been an unusually "natural" actress even onstage. This was her first big hit in the movies. Under Frank Capra's direction, she plays a tough "party" girl (euphemism for call girl) who poses for a wealthy young artist (Ralph Graves); he sees in her the spirituality that she attempts to deny. The story is a museum piece of early-talkies sentimentality, but, in a way, that only emphasizes Stanwyck's remarkable modernism.”

Pauline Kael

"Ladies of Leisure," p. 403
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Way , Girl , Understanding , Nature

“Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it — not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Pleasure , Knowledge

“Goodman: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
Kael: I hate it. It is very creepy being imitated.”

Pauline Kael

Interview with Susan Goodman, Modern Maturity (March/April 1998) http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/modernmaturity.html.
Interviews

Hate

“In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture — turning it into Pop art and camp — had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures — and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.”

Pauline Kael book State of the Art

"A Bad Dream/A Masterpiece," review of The Moon in the Gutter (1983-09-19), p. 48.
State of the Art (1985)

Life , Art , Past

“The small triumph of "The Graduate" was to have domesticated alienation and the difficulty of communication, by making what Benjamin is alienated from a middle-class comic strip and making it absurdly evident that he has nothing to communicate — which is just what makes him an acceptable hero for the large movie audience. If he said anything or had any ideas, the audience would probably hate him.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Hate , Communication , Idea

“Movies make hash of the schoolmarm’s approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money — and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the "artist’s intentions" you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Money , Way