Tag Archives: Paul Schrader

THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL

“It’s appalling to read solemn academic studies of Hitchcock or von Sternberg by people who seem to have lost sight of the primary reason for seeing films like Notorious or Morocco—which is that they were not intended solemnly, that they were playful and inventive and faintly (often deliberately) absurd. And what’s good in them, what relates them to art, is that playfulness and absence of solemnity. There is talk about von Sternberg’s technique—his use of light and decor and detail—and he is, of course, a kitsch master in these areas… Unfortunately, some students take this technique as proof that his films are works of art, once again, I think, falsifying what they really respond to—the satisfying romantic glamour of his very pretty trash. Morocco is great trash, and movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them. The kitsch of an earlier era—even the best kitsch—does not become art…

“We are now told in respectable museum publications that in 1932 a movie like Shanghai Express ‘was completely misunderstood as a mindless adventure’ when indeed it was completely understood as a mindless adventure. And enjoyed as a mindless adventure. It’s a peculiar form of movie madness crossed with academicism, this lowbrowism masquerading as highbrowism, eating a candy bar and cleaning an ‘allegorical problem of human faith’ out of your teeth.” — Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” 1969*

“Not long before she died, Pauline remarked to a friend, ‘When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture.’ That’s exactly the point. [Kael] and her foot soldiers won the battle but lost the war.” — Paul Schrader, “Fruitful Pursuits,” 2002**

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) was the film critic for The New Yorker throughout the 1970s, when American film culture—if not the magazine—was at its peak, and the country’s preeminent writer about the movies was at the height of her powers. In the obituary he wrote for his colleague, Roger Ebert said, “Kael had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades. She had no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards. You couldn’t apply her ‘approach’ to a film. With her it was all personal.”

Kael had her pet critics and filmmakers, and this coterie style of extreme subjectivity brought many detractors—most notably Renata Adler, whose 1980 takedown “The Perils of Pauline” (published in the New York Review of Books) sent shock waves through Manhattan media circles.

This week at the Newport Beach Film Fest, Rob Garver will present his documentary WHAT SHE SAID—THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL.

WHAT SHE SAID—THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL

Thursday, May 2, at 7:45 pm.

Big Newport 5

300 Newport Center Drive, Newport Beach.

*Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Harper’s, February 1969, republished in American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 2006), 337–367.

**Paul Schrader, “Fruitful Pursuits” section of “Prose and Cons,” a posthumous Kael assembly, Artforum, March 2002, 129.

Also see Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (New York: Counterpoint, 2004).

From top: Pauline Kael; Kael in Chicago with Tony Randall on the Irv Kupcinet Show, 1968; book cover image Little, Brown & Company, 1971; Kael at Cannes with Jacques Perrin in 1977; Kael.

PAUL SCHRADER AT THE AERO

The iconoclastic writer and director Paul Schrader will be at the Aero for two nights of screenings this week, engaging the audience with a discussion of his work.

On Wednesday night, Schrader will introduce two of his films from the 1990s: AFFLICTION (with Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek) and LIGHT SLEEPER (Willem Dafoe and Susan Sarandon).

The following evening the director will present his latest work, the Bresson-meets-pulp fiction tour de force FIRST REFORMED. The film’s star Ethan Hawke will join Schrader for a post-screening conversation.

“When I look back on my life and think of the various people who have befriended me, whether it be Pauline Kael or Charles Eames or whoever, obviously they saw in me a hungry, thirsty sensibility that wanted what they had to give very badly, and if you’re a decent person then you realize that this is what you are put on this earth to do…

“[Eames taught me] that the cult of personality is transient, that we are in fact all alike and that if you don’t understand how we are alike then you won’t get anything done.” — Paul Schrader, 1989*

AFFLICTION and LIGHT SLEEPER

Wednesday, May 9, at 7:30 pm.

FIRST REFORMED

Member’s screening on Thursday, May 10, at 7:30 pm.

For membership information, see: egyptiantheatre.com/join

Aero Theatre

1328 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica.

* From Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings, edited by Kevin Jackson (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 27.

From top: Ethan Hawke, poster detail, First ReformedSusan Sarandon and Willem Dafoe in Light Sleeper (1992).

PAUL SCHRADER

“My marriage fell through, and the affair that caused the marriage to fall through fell through, all within the same four or five months. I fell into a state of manic depression…

“I got to wandering around at night; I couldn’t sleep because I was so depressed. I’d stay in bed till four or five pm, then I’d say, ‘Well, I can get a drink now.’ I’d get up and get a drink and take the bottle with me and start wandering around the streets in my car at night. After the bars closed, I’d go to pornography. I’d do this all night, till morning, and I did it for about three or four weeks, a very destructive syndrome, until I was saved from it by an ulcer: I had not been eating, just drinking.

“When I got out of the hospital I realized I had to change my life because I would die and everything; I decided to leave L.A. That was when the metaphor hit me for TAXI DRIVER, and I realized that was the metaphor I had been looking for: the man who will take anybody any place for money; the man who moves through the city like a rat through the sewer; the man who is constantly surrounded by people, yet has no friends. The absolute symbol of urban loneliness. That’s the thing I’d been living; that was my symbol, my metaphor. The film is about a car as the symbol of urban loneliness, a metal coffin.” — Paul Schrader, on writing the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s film. Interview with Richard Thompson*

filmcomment.com/paul-schrader-richard-thompson-interview

Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver (1976). Image credit: Columbia Pictures.

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