Pauline Kael (14 page)

She had also grown weary of the station management’s continued prodding of their unpaid commentators to make on-air pitches for donations and to recruit new subscribers:

KPFA’s management was stunned by this public airing of grievances, although it was really no different from what she had long been saying to them directly. Relations between Pauline and Trevor Thomas deteriorated until finally she decided she had had enough, and on her March 27, 1963, broadcast, she resigned over the air. She calculated that she had delivered around one million words over the station’s airwaves, and she had come to the conclusion that “a million words delivered without remuneration is a rather major folly.” After considering the matter, she had decided that “if KPFA is not a station where we can have open discussions of station policy and get answers to questions, then I see no reason to donate my time.... If they want me back on the air, they can pay me. . . . After a million words for love, I think I should turn professional.”

The response from listeners was overwhelming; Thomson received so many canceled subscriptions and angry letters accusing him of suppression that he had to send out a form letter, assuring subscribers that Pauline had not been fired, “although some of her charges made that an attractive possibility.” Thomas went on to assure listeners that Pauline was welcome to return to the station anytime she liked.

 

In 1963 Pauline applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation to support her during the writing of a book she had been contemplating for some time. She planned it as a serious look at the state of contemporary movies, with special emphasis on the audience’s response to them—a particular interest of hers—and what that response said about the way the culture was changing. In spite of the fact that she had regularly badgered him in her essays, she lost no time in contacting
Esquire
’s Dwight Macdonald for a letter of reference. Although Pauline considered herself the better writer of the two, she was fond of Macdonald; their frequently opposing views of many of the new movies had not derailed their mutual respect for each other. (Macdonald’s son Nick had also developed a crush on Gina.) In the fall of 1963 Macdonald wrote to Pauline, “Despite your implacable harassment of me in print, I have, as a good Christian atheist, turned the other cheek and written a fulsome recommendation of your project to the Guggenheim people.” He told her that he hoped she got the fellowship because her project was “one of the best I’ve read in many years of (mostly unsuccessful) recommending people for Gug-genheims. Maybe THE best.” In his letter to the Guggenheim Foundation, Macdonald wrote that Pauline was right when she said in her application that “the most urgent task for American film criticism” was to provide “a rationale for . . . Critical practice.” He felt that Pauline’s proposed book was desperately needed in order to show that “cinema has become, in the last five or six years, the liveliest and most interesting of the arts.” He urged that the Guggenheim award her as large a grant as possible, because his impression was that “Miss Kael has little income independent from what she earns by her pen.”

In March of 1964 Pauline wrote to Macdonald thanking him for his assistance: The Guggenheim grant had come through. Immediately she began making plans to travel, for although she had been writing for several years about foreign-language films, she had never visited Europe. That summer she returned to New York for the first time in years. staying with an old friend, the film writer and psychoanalyst Dan Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt had a floor-through apartment on Patchen Place in Greenwich Village, which delighted Pauline with its bohemian character. He was also well connected with the management of the New York Film Festival, which was set to open in the fall of 1963, and suggested that it should include some substantive panel discussion along with all the screenings. The result was an evening at the Donnell Library on East Fifty-third Street, moderated by Rosenblatt and featuring three provocative critics—Pauline, Dwight Macdonald, and John Simon. Pauline respected Simon’s formidable intellect but was wary of him, feeling that many of his opinions were needlessly sadistic and abusive.

For his part Simon was far from an unqualified admirer of Pauline. He recognized her writing ability and respected her sharp wit and her gutsiness as a critic. “She had a style that appealed to a lot of people: those who loved to read, ignorant movie buffs, other critics,” he said. “Even critics who didn’t agree with her had to admit that she had a real style. And not many people have such a style.” But Simon was disturbed by her acceptance of so much that he considered vulgar and lowbrow; he felt that as someone who aspired to be a critic of the first rank, she should hold to a higher aesthetic standard.

Simon also found her problematic on a personal level. “Her main trouble was, of course, that she did want to be a force in the field, an influence, someone you had to reckon with, no matter what,” he observed. “In other words, a kind of arrogance.” Simon was always suspicious of Pauline’s lust to become a powerful player in criticism; to him, this degree of ambition was something that threatened to compromise or even undermine a writer’s critical judgment. For most of their careers Pauline and Simon would keep a careful distance from each other, and she didn’t go out of her way to denounce him in print. “She felt that it would make me more important than I am,” said Simon.

The panel discussion by Pauline, Macdonald, and Simon at the Donnell Library made for a lively and provocative evening, with much of the debate centering on two 1963 releases,
Hud
and
8½.
The discussion of
Hud
, in particular, pointed up some of the ideas about audience reaction that would intrigue Pauline throughout her career. She felt that the movie had “marvelous ambiguity and split in the content.” The audience, she felt, was completely on the side of the heel-hero, “enjoying Hud’s anarchism, his nihilism, his rejection of the role of the government.” The movie caught her completely by surprise with its ending, in which Hud isn’t redeemed for his coarse, self-centered behavior: Instead of cleaning up his act, as he would have done had the movie been made a few years earlier, he rapes the family housekeeper, Alma (played by Patricia Neal).

Macdonald dismissed her concerns about the division between audience and critical reaction by arguing, “That’s sociology. That’s not criticism.” Simon, for his part, said, “I am worried about Pauline Kael’s position. What she says identifies her in my mind hopelessly not only with the audience, which is bad enough, but with a kind of audience that loves movies so indiscriminately that it is not merely content to accept almost anything that comes its way gratefully for what it is, but will even work overtime inventing a rationale which will somehow justify the inadvertencies and the shortcomings and in some cases even the stupidities of what they see.” He also accused her of being one of the critics who imposed an idea on the film that was unjustified simply “to assuage their own boredom.” Pauline laughed. “I’ve never been bored, John, except sometimes, you know, caught by lecturers.”

Her views on
8½
were even more controversial. Critics had lined up to applaud Federico Fellini’s view of the fantasy life of a bored, creatively stymied director. Unlike nearly all of her major critic colleagues, Pauline hadn’t warmed to Fellini’s
La Dolce Vita
, which had been released to immense worldwide success in 1960 but which had struck her as a work that “wants to be a great film—it cries out its intentions.” While admiring its cleverness, she felt that Fellini had misstepped in using Rome’s beautiful people as stand-ins for the aimlessness of modern life, and she was temperamentally unresponsive to any attempt to dramatize the anxieties and fears of a creative artist who had the good fortune to be rich and famous. She found
8½
alienating as well, because it was “surprisingly like the confectionary dreams of Hollywood heroines, transported by a hack’s notions of Freudian anxiety and wish fulfillment.
8½
is an incredibly externalized version of an artist’s ‘inner life’—a gorgeous multi-ringed circus that has very little connection with what, even for a movie director, is most likely to be solitary, concentrated hard work.”

She was likewise troubled by the art-house audience’s enthusiasm for two other movies released in 1961: Antonioni’s
La Notte
and Alan Resnais’s
Last Year at Marienbad
, both of which explored the angst of modern times, the futility and ultimate failure of human intimacy. While many critics found them daringly experimental and intellectually thrilling, Pauline thought them stultifying and empty—all surface posing and no real substance. “And isn’t it rather adolescent to treat the failure of love with such solemnity?” she asked, with the rhetorical question that had become one of her stylistic trademarks. “For whom does love last? Why try to make so much spiritual desolation out of the transient nature of what we all know to be transient, as if this transiency somehow defined our time and place?”
Marienbad
, in particular, was offensive to her: “Enthusiasts for the film,” she wrote, “start arguing about whether something happened last year at Marienbad, and this becomes rather more important than what happens on the screen in front of them—which isn’t much. The people we see have no warmth, no humor or pain, no backgrounds or past, no point of contact with living creatures, so who cares about their past or future, or their present?” She criticized all three films in a persuasive essay titled “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties,” which
The Massachusetts Review
published in the winter of 1963.

In this viewpoint, she often found herself pitted against her colleagues. Colin Young, an editor at
Film Quarterly
and later head of UCLA’s film school, used to tangle with her often, particularly on the subject of Antonioni. “Pauline had her blind spots,” said Young. “I remember once being at an Academy screening of foreign-language nominees, and in the toilet after the screening of
La Notte
, I overheard two guys who were peeing. They were saying, ‘What’s the matter with this guy? He’s good-lookin’, he’s got a good job, he’s got a beautiful wife, a mistress—why the fuck is he so miserable all the time?’ Pauline would have said ‘Here here’ to these guys. She couldn’t stand all this agonizing. She was a frontier plainswoman.”

D
uring the early 1960s Pauline’s reviews had drawn a devoted and gradually growing following among readers of film criticism. The numbers were modest: Her work had appeared only in small-circulation publications and listener-supported radio broadcasts. She was a little like the flickering beacon from a lighthouse far off on the West Coast, only dimly perceived in the east. She needed either a major platform or a major critical piece to raise her visibility. Very soon, she got both.

The critical piece was “Circles and Squares,” a lengthy polemic that she finished early in 1963 against the auteur theory. The premise of auteurism was that the strong, individual personality of a talented director was always visible in his films, and that it was necessary to examine how that personality provided crucial links in his entire oeuvre. Even if the film in question happened to be a routine product of the Hollywood studio system, the auteurists held that a good director’s signature could be found if one knew how and where to look for it. The greater the talent, the clearer the indication of a powerful sensibility and characteristic visual style. Directors such as Jean Renoir, Max Ophuls, Robert Bresson, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and John Ford were all heroes to the auteurists, because their films displayed distinctive themes and stylistic traits. The rise of auteurism was a significant development in the gradual rise of the director in the general public consciousness, and many previously overlooked artists—including such figures as Phil Karlson and Joseph H. Lewis—who had languished in the shadows of the all-powerful stars were delighted to have attention refocused on their own efforts.

A prime example of an auteur hero is Douglas Sirk, the gifted German director who turned out a series of highly polished tearjerkers in the 1950s. The scripts assigned Sirk to direct were often clichéd romantic dramas, but he brought a striking edge to them. He considered the American family corrupt and unhealthy, and his films displayed a tension and pessimism that made many other directors’ portrayal of family life seem utterly fraudulent.

In 1962 auteurism attracted major notice in the United States when Andrew Sarris, then film critic for
The Village Voice
, wrote an essay about it for the Winter 1962–63 edition of
Film Culture
. “Notes on the Auteur Theory” laid out Sarris’s criteria for directors to achieve auteur status: the display of technical competence of a high order, a recognizable personal style or voice that could be traced from one film to another, and a powerful ability to convey interior meaning. As Sarris later said, “The strong director imposes his own personality on a film; the weak director allows the personalities of others to ran rampant.” He believed that the auteur theory was a crucial tool for understanding film history in that it allowed for the revelation of a kind of directorial autobiography, and the essay brimmed with affection for many little-known, overlooked, and misunderstood films. In his book
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929–1968
, Sarris wrote, “Ultimately, the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude, a table of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography. The auteur critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and artist. He looks at a film as a whole, a director as a whole. The parts, however entertaining individually, must cohere meaningfully. This meaningful coherence is more likely when the director dominates the proceedings with skill and purpose.”