[lbo-talk] great writers on movies . . .

magcomm magcomm at ix.netcom.com
Tue Feb 21 16:26:39 PST 2012



> Pauline Kael. Her best long stuff stuff is on all the New Yorker online archives, sorted by movie.

While I usually agree with Michael, who is a discerning cinephile, I must say that Pauline Kael is not the route I would recommend.

I would suggest:

Robin Wood (any of his works -- especially the later compilations after he came out of the closet and moved to Canada)

Andrew Britton (Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton edited by Barry Keith Grant - a gay Marxist critic whom I often disagreed with, but who possessed a deep understanding of movies)

Gilberto Perez (The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium)

Andre Bazin (get the new translations from Canada and not the ones from the University of California which are cut and often inaccurate)

Dave Kehr (When Movies Mattered -- also check out davekehr.com where possibly the finest discussion of films -- both old and new -- occur on a regular basis. Full disclosure: I post there).

Jonathan Rosenbaum (any of his collections -- and check out his website which he updates weekly with his reviews from the past without any firewall or other pay mechanism).

Andrew Sarris (any of his collections)

J. Hoberman (recently let go after decades of writing for the bar rag known as The Village Voice. His collections are wonderful and he has a new work to be published this year about film in the 21st century)

There is some jargon at times in all of these writers, but there is also a deep love of film and knowledge of its history. By reading them on movies, you can get a sense about both the possibility of what a movie can be and how it fits into the medium's history. Kael is free of jargon, but also free of almost any insight into film in terms of form and content. Her reviews are generally riffs on what she felt as she watched, but rarely grounded in the actual facts of the films. You learn more about her than the art work. The fact that she was proud that she never saw a movie twice says a lot about her approach to criticism. Kael on Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS:

"Alfred Hitchcock’s amatory thriller stars Ingrid Bergman as the daughter of a Nazi, a shady lady who trades secrets and all sorts of things with American agent Cary Grant. The suspense is terrific: Will suspicious, passive Grant succeed in making Bergman seduce him, or will he take over? The honor of the American is saved by a hairbreadth, but Bergman is literally ravishing in what is probably her sexiest performance. Great trash, great fun."

Compare that with Dave Kehr writing on the same film:

Notorious for example, could be considered an exercise in the artful variation of points of view, as created through camerawork that is, with one conspicuous exception, almost entirely objective. As he would do 14 years later in “Psycho” (1960, and perhaps the film most closely related to “Notorious” in the Hitchcock canon), Hitchcock begins the film with a kind of journalistic detachment, offering a precise dateline (“Miami, Florida. Three-Twenty P.M., April the Twenty-Fourth, Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Six ...”) and inviting the audience to share the predatory curiosity of the reporters and photographers waiting outside a courtroom for the “notorious” Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman), the beautiful and loose-living daughter of a Nazi spy who has just been convicted of treason. (full at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/movies/homevideo/hitchcocks-notorious-rebecca-spellbound-on-blu-ray.html)

In his work, Kehr attempts to show how a movie operates, while Kael looked to see if a movie was great trash -- her highest acccolade. Anything challenging such as Kubrick, Cassavetes, Resnais, etc was deemed too intellectual by her. Below is a link to the closest thing to a manifesto that she ever published. A key observation: "When you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them. The wellspring of their art, their greatness, is in not being respectable." Understanding movies in terms of form and content was the respectable approach that Kael decried.

http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/trashartandthemovies.html

Brian



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list