Frank Rich Remembers Pauline Kael--and the Bygone Age of Movies

In his introduction to the collection of Pauline Kael's writing The Age of Movies Sanford Schwartz wrote of Kael as "undoubtedly the most fervently read American critic of any art" in her heyday, and her departure from her job at the New Yorker a national news story--a claim Frank Rich in his piece looking back on Kael in 2011 assures us is "not hyperbole," and explains why it is not so, even as it can seem that way. Rich certainly is not oblivious to the ways in which Kael, a complex, problematic personality who damaged her own legacy in ways that have him characterizing her story as the "cautionary tale" of the self-destruction of a critic by "corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania" (evident in, for instance, her attack on Orson Welles' contributions to Citizen Kane), there were bigger issues at work in the decline of Kael's standing that left her comparatively obscure at the time of her death than the personal flaws of one individual.

As Rich observes, by the end of the century movies were already less central to contemporary culture than they were in the 1970s--because audiovisual media broadly exploded, because pop culture fragmented so that any one movie was that much less likely to be an event, because as the New Hollywood gave way to the age of the "high concept" blockbuster movies changed so that there was less for a critic like Kael to say about them that could give intelligent readers very much to think about and get excited about and argue about with each other. (I, for one, find much of value in her review of Raiders of the Lost Ark--but I also know that once one has said all that there is just not much more to say about movies of the type, one reason, I suppose, why David Walsh and his colleagues are such irregular reviewers of major theatrical releases.)

It also followed logically that with film less central in contemporary culture, so were film critics--the more in as interest in the professional critics then throve on the existence of a whole layer of critics arguing their different ideas not just about particular movies but cinema as a whole in the review pages. (Kael's rivalry with Andrew Sarris over at The Village Voice certainly a significant part of what had so many movie buffs rushing to read her reviews once upon a time.)

I am broadly in agreement with Rich here--that the kind of niche Pauline Kael occupied at her height simply disappeared, had disappeared in 2001, and has only become less plausible since. After all, if Kael thought the blockbuster had already conquered at the beginning of the 1980s, what would she, or any like-minded critic, have had to say of the state of the movies in 2019? Or 2024, in which Hollywood is fighting so ferociously to sustain the faltering blockbuster model?

With people paying less attention to film, and to film criticism, the legacy of a single past critic is that much less likely to command attention--and indeed Rich points out how these days it is only those in "cineaste circles and film-studies academia" who still read Kael. Is that fair? Rich's aforementioned piece ran in the New York Times--but I doubt I would ever have run across it had I not taken an interest in film history, and seen Peter Biskind explained her significance (and Sarris') in the world of post-war American cinema.