"Reeling" with Pauline Kael

Reeling: Film Writings, 1972-1975 by Pauline Kael

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Pauline Kael was a 'new journalist' disguised as a film critic, disguised as a war reporter, and this gives any collection of her criticism an incredible point of view that was completely unique to her at the time, and I think in the history of film criticism. She became an artist through the back door, in the sneakiest slyest way imaginable. She used movies as a way to write little stories of her going to the movies, though you rarely if ever got personal anecdotes like you do today when a critic sees fit to tell you every personal problem they are having, and treating the movie as secondary to their neurouses. Pauline Kael treated every movie like it was the last one she might ever see again, so even if they were horrible, they were an opportunity for her to express something on her mind, because she had the uncanny ability to treat every movie like it was the first. I don't think any other critic in modern times has taken on the style of a literary movement and dressed it up as criticism, the way Kael did, and in so doing became an artist through the back door, because many of the reviews in this book are as good as seeing the movie itself, and elucidate culture, and Kael's sensibility, that they are like a fine wine, even if they are shit. I found myself enjoying glowing reviews of movies I hated, or bad reviews of movies I held as sacrosanct, and both freed me. It was great to hear someone be critical of "Sleeper," or to hear her go on about how Ingrid Bergman was like Ibsen, and wasn't contemporary at all, but kind of staid and boring for the most part.

The war quality tone of the book is clear not only from the title, but the way it is presented as dispatches from a hot field of action, :72-,'75, and what many consider the greatest era of American film, bar none. As any sports fan could appreciate, it's exciting to see Kael nailing what have become historic films and I think she was really surprised that her talents were allowed to blossom like they did, becuase part of her cleverness was that she was able to review indisputably fine films, and to see the good and bad in them, with the intent of trying to make them better, and that's where the artist in her came out over the critic. She was taking the role of critic very seriously, not just as a gossip hound bent on taking people down, or raising them up, but an actual new journalist disguised as a film critic, going to the movies for material to write about, and to elevate to the point of fiction even though it was criticism. Maybe "Reeling" was the beginning of the new criticism, where she attempted to fictionalize her criticism in a rather intellectual and round about way so that we fell in love with her mind as a moviegoer, rather than aa a character in a plot, because she took on everyone's plot as her character, and that is a very complex portrait. Part of her genius was that Kael was able to expose so much of herself without ever really telling us anything about herself, because we fell in love with her mind, not her actions, but the mind is the most erotic organ of all, so it's no surprise that one of Pauline Kael's biggest unrealized literary ambitions was to write a book about the erotic experience of going to the movies, because in a way that's what "Reeling" is. We read through dozens of reviews of some of the most canonized movies of our time in real time and not only gauge our opinion of them next to hers to see how the original stands up, but we're also able to see Pauline Kael in the theater, watching the movie alone, probably taking notes for posterity, and are amazed. We actually fall in love with her as a filmgoer more than anything, like Mia Farrow in "The Purple Rose Of Cairo," and Kael manages to make a character of herself, and for this it is a beautiful book to read.

I don't know what to say about her actual taste except that she thought the old fogey critics who thought that movies should be a black and white morality tale, were completely off base, and that movies encompassed high and low culture. Kael was such a fan that she realized you had to love bad movies, or else you'd never go to the theater, and if you stayed away then you couldn't be the world's biggest fan, and then you'd lose your character entirely. I think she thought that the Seventies movies were a real breakthrough because they strayed from formula, and incorporated elements of camp and a certain 'funkiness' that high culture abhorred, and therefore were free of the restraints of clalssic bourgeoise values, and thus free to be art, like Dadaists attacking the bourgeoise collectors in the name of being free. In that way, Pauline Kael was really a revolutionary as a critic by promoting movies that most of her colleagues hated on grounds of good taste, because I think she thought the movies were for the people, and that the people were free. Kael was essentially a pre-postmodernist wanting the movies to mix high and low culture, and to be free to be bad, or irreverent, or just plain goofy, anything but staid and dull, because at heart she didn't believe in films that made one restless in their seats, but movies that were fun, or crazy sad, but not dull, not real, but like a dream. She wanted to be swept off her feet when she went to the theater and I think it's this side that makes a reader of her work fall in love with her, and be swept off his feet with her, even if the object of attratction is the movie she's talking about, and not actually her.



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