A Passionate Voice for Film Is Quieted

Pauline Kael, who died on Monday at age 82 after a long, debilitating illness, was one of a small handful of film critics who proved by the brilliance of their work that the movies were to be taken seriously as an art form, whatever the academic establishment had originally thought.

Dwight Macdonald, James Agee and Andrew Sarris have had immense influence on the shaping of serious writing about film. But Kael, in the personal passion of her reviews, was undoubtedly the best-known and most imitated of them all. Kael once remarked that criticism wasn’t brain surgery--although directors whose work disappointed her sometimes felt after her reviews in the New Yorker as if they had been gone at with scalpels.

Hers was the most personal criticism of all, an almost stream-of-consciousness commentary on a movie from start to finish. But, by a nice irony, she was sparing of the first person singular. It was “you” not “I” who responded to a film, and the “you” somehow seemed to embrace everyone who was seeing or would ever see the film. It was, as a confident assertion of her own assured reactions, that she spoke for everyone within hearing, or reading.

It was not necessarily so, of course. But what was true and refreshing in her work was that she had a way of looking at a film that was surprising and unexpected. Agree with her or not, and it was certainly possible not to, she insisted that at very least the reader consider the film as she had responded to it. After a meeting of the National Society of Film Critics in New York several years ago, I accompanied Kael to a press screening of “Lady Sings the Blues” with Diana Ross. To my surprise, she kept up a muttered commentary on the film from start to finish, sometimes voiced as a series of questions to herself or, as I thought, an early mental draft of what she would write about the film later.

“Who was the cinematographer?” she asked accusingly. But, having challenged the film as she watched it, she eventually wrote about it very favorably.

She was a petite and attractive woman, in person quite unlike the oversized ogre that Hollywood, stung, often thought of her as being. In the ‘80s, Warren Beatty urged her to come to Hollywood and be a producer, doing a film with a New York writer, James Toback. She stayed several months, but the film was never made. The experience produced one of her most memorable lines: “In Hollywood you can die of encouragement.” Her take on films did not change, but there were signs that she had a freshened understanding of the exasperating, frustrating chaos from which, every so often, a really good movie escapes.

She was well known for championing certain films and filmmakers (although she could just as quickly turn on them, as she did with Woody Allen). Her defense of Robert Altman’s “Nashville,” well before its release, was triggered by Altman’s fears that the studio, Paramount, would force him to trim the film from its three-hour running time. She called it a masterpiece. Altman’s people asked me to look at the film. I did and told them I thought it was a beautifully original piece of work, if not a masterpiece (a word I’ve thought should be erased from the critics’ vocabulary).

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A few days later, in a Newsday interview with Joseph Gelmis, Altman complained that I had seen the film and said it wasn’t a masterpiece. “He was reviewing Kael, not the film,” Altman said. I was furious and wrote him to say so. He wrote back and said now I knew what it was like to deal with journalists. Then he added a PS: “I don’t think it’s a masterpiece either,” he said, having it both ways, or so I thought. Whether a masterpiece or not, “Nashville” is a landmark in film history. Whether the threats to trim the film were real is lost to history, but Kael had made it embarrassing for anyone to try. She had proved that the critic has power as well as influence.

Sarris, now the last of a seminal cluster of critics, often jousted with Kael over his advocacy of the auteur theory, which made the director the sole author of his work. Yet he and Kael were alike in their consuming and insatiable love of films and their excitement when, out of all the things that can go wrong with a film, they found one that matched their fondest hopes.

A friendly critic once noted with amusement that “Pauline thinks every picture is worth ten thousand words.” She did go on sometimes, although with never an uninteresting sentence and usually with dazzling precision and clarity. She created a treasury of reviews, which, agree with them or not, will be read at least as long as the films themselves can still be seen.

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Charles Champlin is the former film critic and arts editor of The Times.