Accessible art

For Pauline Kael, the legendary film critic, a good movie makes her feel great and she believes “good movies do that for people." Starting from early childhood, Kael has always expressed her love of the movies, both good and bad, and her writing of these movies reflects such an enthusiasm. Her ability to capture the reader’s attention with her words, tone and insights reflects the influential status that she has had as a film critic on today’s society.

Unlike today’s film critics, Kael did not pursue her writing career from the start, despite her childhood love of movies. Earning her philosophy major from UC-Berkley, Kael worked a range of different jobs in her early adulthood in order to make ends meet. Such jobs included anything from a cook to a seamstress, an ad copywriter to a bookstore clerk. This diverse background gave Kael her insight into how to approach her everyday reader with her words. Instead of using “academic English” when writing about the movies, Kael preferred using the language that they were created in – “the language of movies.” In her opinion, not to do so was “an attempt to elevate movies…it denies them what makes them distinctive.” It is the language that everyday people would speak when they would leave the theater and this is what she wanted to capture – something familiar and attainable.

Her language sets a scene and a tone for the reader, whether or not it was about the movie. Often it was said that she wrote so vividly about the experience of seeing the movie, sometimes even more so than writing about the actual movie. In her essay, Renata Adler criticizes Kael’s use of “we,” “you,” “we feel/know/needs,” etc. in her writing as she believes that this is manipulative. However, for Kael, this is an effective way of making the movies accessible for her audiences. She writes her pieces on a personal level and by using “we” or “you,” she addresses the reader directly, engaging them and convincing them in her argument.

Kael was not afraid of addressing the issues that everyone else tried to avoid in particular movies. In her review of “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” instead of focusing on the acclaimed movie itself (which she does for all of a couple paragraphs), Kael critiques the broader implications of such an “art house” movie on its viewing audience. Moreover, she believed in championing the best that movies had to offer, finding meaning in some of the worst movies. For example, she wanted to do a review of “Deep Throat” and not because it was a good movie but because of the social implications involved in such a movie. She felt that “not to deal with all that [eroticism] in its most naked form was to shrink part of what’s involved in being a movie critic.”

As Francis Davis describes in his book, Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael, it was Pauline Kael who “established the movie review as a form of literature with the potential for social commentary.” Through her provocative writing style, she could sharply uncover faults as easily as she could crown a new piece of art. Her influence lies in her belief that “art happens in the real world and that it should be an instrument of pleasure.” This belief has become a governing principle in writing about rock and pop today – art that can be accessible and attainable by everyone, not just the highbrows.