Kael, a middle-aged single mother, became a best-selling pundit by championing America’s youngest, hippest film directors
, would have turned 100 last month . As part of the centenary celebrations an admiring and buoyant documentary, “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael”, was shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The film makes it clear that Kael was the most influential critic in the history of the medium. And that she always will be: no other film writer can ever have the same impact she had.
Partly this is because she was the funniest, the most combative, the most erudite and the most enthusiastic writer in the business . She expunged “term-paper pomposity” from her reviews, distancing herself from aloof “gentleman critics” by balancing her encyclopedic film knowledge with proudly subjective opinions, autobiographical tidbits, dirty jokes and remarks she overheard from other patrons in the cinema.
But 1967 was also the year when Arthur Penn’s controversially bloody “Bonnie and Clyde” was released. Most critics loathed or ignore it, but Kael was infatuated, and her 9,000-word defence of the outlaw biopic earned her a position at the. Suddenly, a generation of American film-makers was experimenting with the iconoclastic “New Wave” techniques of Europe’s auteurs—and Kael loved them.
“What She Said” may not be particularly iconoclastic, but it is a lively, exhaustively researched, and stunningly well edited tribute to an uncompromising talent. Written and directed by Rob Garver, the documentary compiles excerpts from Kael’s journalism , hundreds of film clips and snippets of interviews with figures such as Camille Paglia, Paul Schrader, Quentin Tarantino, David O Russell and others.
Just think about that: a film star praising a film critic on television and assuming that the audience would know who he was talking about. It would never happen now. In the modern, fragmented, cultural landscape, cinephiles no longer queue up to buy magazines which run 9,000-word essays by their favourite critics—they harvest opinions from countless blogs, tweets and podcasts instead.
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