I looked up some of Pauline Kael's reviews and critic's reviews of her, and an interview with her:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/movies-1/why-paulin-kael-never-saw-a-mo.html
Scan down to the video frames if you don't want to read through. Kael made the 50s city-lights beat scene, and later early KPFA scene and finally went to NYC where the money was.
If you look around there is plenty of NYC critical chatter from the period. Although these battles are a fun quick read and interesting history, like the great art dual between Greenberg and Rosenberg. What do they really tell us about art, film, novels, etc?
I often agree with those immediate, usually opinionated critical impressions. Ebert was right about Kael. She operated on the immediate impression, the fun or disappointment of a movie. To be good, painting, movies, novels, music, you have to climb that first barrier right away. But there also has to be more, a lot more. Why do some people (like me) wear out their favorite records? My Jansen The History of Art is completely falling apart and separating from its well crafted hard binding. I've watched The Third Man so many times I forgot to count. I stopped for awhile because I was beginning to memorize it. Same with Beethoven and Bach. A lot of art needs a long rest, long enough to change the inner and outter world to go back and see something almost new.
I reach a point where I can see the internal structures or elements and then leave off and let them sink in to do their magic. This is the world that I think most criticism of almost any variety misses.
Last night I found a very good review of Pauline Kael that also matched her to the periods she live and wrote, roughly late 60s to mid-80s. It covers enough of my own criticism of criticism, so read the better version.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/10/24/111024crat_atlarge_heller
In the fall of 1965, a season that brought movies as distinct as
"Alphaville" and "Thunderball" to the screen, Pauline Kael came to dinner at Sidney Lumet's apartment, in New York. Lumet was then a prolific young director, having just finished shooting his tenth feature, "The Group," for United Artists. Kael was a small-time movie critic who had recently arrived from Northern California. Her hardcover début, "I Lost It at the Movies," had appeared that spring, to critical and popular acclaim, but she had never been on staff at any publication, and had only recently begun to write for major magazines. Lumet liked Kael's work. Over the previous few weeks, he had allowed her on his set as a reporter, hoping she would learn something about shooting technique. Also present that night was the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, and after a few drinks-actually, after quite a lot of drinks-Hirschfeld and Kael started quibbling about the uses of movie criticism. Finally, Hirschfeld asked her point-blank what she thought critics were good for. Kael gestured toward Lumet. "My job," she said, "is to show him which way to go." The evening ended soon afterward. Lumet later explained, "I thought, This is a very dangerous person."
Lumet had invited Pael to his sets, so she could see how movies were made, hoping to teach her something about craft. The details and elements of craft seem off the table for most critics. That is somehow too high brow...
CG http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/10/24/111024crat_atlarge_heller#ixzz1n33T9U1r