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Pauline Kael
Andrew Sarris
In the recent discussions of issues raised by the Eddie Campbell essay “The Literaries,” the subject of the auteur theory of film has come up. I thought it would be of interest for people to hear what Pauline Kael (1919-2001), arguably the United States’ most prominent film critic, had to say about it.
In the Spring 1963 issue of Film Quarterly, Kael published a lengthy, detailed attack on auteurism and its proponents titled “Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris.” The essay was primarily a rebuttal of the Andrew Sarris article “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” which had appeared in the Winter 1962 issue of Film Culture. Kael also took on a number of other peers who reflected Sarris’ thinking and articulated her views on criticism in general. The essay was reprinted in her 1965 collection I Lost It at the Movies. Truncated versions of the piece have also been published in a number of film-criticism anthologies. It’s essential reading for anyone interested in film criticism, and I personally think it’s one of the key pieces of English-language arts criticism of the last century.
Unfortunately, the full essay is not particularly easy to come by these days. I Lost It at the Movies has long been out of print in the United States. (A British edition is occasionally available, although usually at a premium. [Note: The British publisher, Marion Boyars, went out of business in 2009, but not before their backlist inventory was purchased for distribution. Copies, for a time, are more or less in print in the U. S. right now. See comments.]) The article was not included in either of the two career anthologies to date of Kael’s work, For Keeps (1994) and The Age of Movies (2011). It may have been omitted out of deference to Sarris. Kael didn’t meet him until a few years after the essay was published. She found that he carried a grudge over it and didn’t want anything to do with her personally. They were able to come together on some professional matters–among other things, they helped co-found the National Society of Film Critics in 1966–but they never reconciled. This reportedly bothered Kael a good deal. When asked about him in interviews, her practice became to say that while they had different tastes and disagreed about many things, she enjoyed his writing and greatly respected his passion and perceptions. She also chose not to reprint the essay in the For Keeps collection. Whether the editor of The Age of Movies left it out to respect her wishes, I do not know.
The audiofile below, which runs almost 55 minutes, is a recording of a lecture Kael gave at San Fernando Valley State College in 1963. After some introductory statements, the speech is a reading of the complete “Circles and Squares” essay.
Pauline Kael on the Auteur Theory (mp3)
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16 Comments
“. I Lost It at the Movies has long been out of print in the United States.”
Doesn’t Amazon have 10 copies in stock?
Maybe it’s back in print?
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-at-Movies-Pauline-Kael/dp/0714529753
It looks like you can find some used copies at reasonable prices through bookfinder.com too.
That’s the British edition you linked to at Amazon. That’s the lowest price I’ve ever seen for new copies of it. I’ve seen them retail for up to $30.
It looks like Boyars has improved their American distribution since I last checked. Barnes & Noble is selling the book for a price comparable to Amazon:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/i-lost-it-at-the-movies-pauline-kael/1101060255?ean=9780714529752
Scratch the first part of that last comment. Boyars went out of business in 2009. It looks like someone got a hold of the inventory, which would likely explain why the book and the others they published by Kael are easily gotten in the U. S. right now. When those copies sell out, that’ll probably be it.
Out of print of not, having the text read out loud was a great way to experience it. I, for one, had never heard Kael’s voice.
I can understand why Sarris felt he could not reconcile with her after this. Kael’s reading of auteur theory is not without its own blind spots, but I just love the way she navigates her own value judgments (good pictures, mediocre pictures) with perfect confidence. She respectfully mentions Agee but here and elsewhere, it is Dwight Macdonald she reminds me of.
In the acknowledgements for I Lost It at the Movies, Kael wrote, “And I wish to express my admiration and respect for Dwight Macdonald, who despite my hectoring him in print, has, personally, returned good for evil.”
I believe he was the biggest immediate influence on her.
I was avare of the connection, not of the quote. Thank you for that as well!
A detailed take-down of the noxious and massively-overrated Kael: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1980/aug/14/the-perils-of-pauline/?pagination=false
Mike–
Adler actually speaks well of Kael’s work during her pre-New Yorker period, which was when the anti-Sarris piece was written. Adler also says Kael’s writing was intermittently quite good during her first few years at the magazine. The thesis of Adler’s argument is that regular reviewing on a single field for too long a time ultimately has a decadent effect on good writers: their worst tendencies come to the forefront while their best qualities recede. She felt Kael illustrated this in spades.
The attack is focused on Kael’s sixth review collection, which collected her work from the latter half of the 1970s. I’m not sympathetic to the vehemence of Adler’s tone, but I and probably all Kael admirers are generally of the view that Kael’s best days were clearly behind her by that point. She had become repetitive and mannered, and there wasn’t much in the way of fresh insights, although she was still more worth reading than probably any of her contemporaries. I don’t think that particular collection is “worthless,” either; it includes her articles on Cary Grant, Bertrand Blier, Taxi Driver, and The Deer Hunter, which are all quite strong.
I found it quite ironic that Dan Nadel, of all people, linked to this article yesterday at TCJ. For whatever reason, he’s been on something of a pro-auteurism/anti-Kael kick lately. I think it’s probably because he recognizes, at least on some level, that auteurist values are what he’s promoting for comics, and their dominance makes things very congenial for him. If Kaelist values dominate, he’s going to lose a lot of status. He may have arrived at the simplistic formulation that anything anti-Kael must be good. I’m not sure he read Adler’s article, or if he did, what she wrote didn’t really register. Adler, or at least the perspective she displays in that article, would take one look at his parochialism and Heather-Number-One act and view him like shit on the bottom of her shoe.
My anti-Kael piece is here, if folks are interested.
Thanks! Delightful, nicely skewering many of Kael’s favored tropes.
It’s hardly a review written by a decadent.
I mean Noah’s review above. The ending of Kael’s essay is incredibly adaptable to comics criticism.
I’ve only had the For Keeps collection, which inexplicably contained what Kael should’ve considered her most embarrassing piece, “Raising Kane,” but not “Circles and Squares,” so I’m glad that I was able to order the early collection. And thanks for this link. (“Raising Kane” might be seen as a good argument for where anti-auteurism can lead. The smell of dead authors was in the air.)
It’s fascinating (to me at least) to note that Pauline Kael is a big influence on Quentin Tarantino’s movies.
I get the impression from this article he sort of pulled what he like out of them and used them as a springboard to think about movies in a different way:
http://larywallace.blogspot.com/2010/01/on-quentin-tarantino.html