Background
Pauline Kael was born on June 19, 1919, in Petaluma, California, United States. She was the daughter of Isaac Paul and Judith (Friedman) Kael.
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
Pauline Kael
University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States
Kael attended the University of California at Berkeley.
(The intelligent person's guide to the movies, with more t...)
The intelligent person's guide to the movies, with more than 2,800 reviews Look up a movie in this guide, and chances are you'll find yourself reading on about the next movie and the next. Pauline Kael's reviews aren't just provocative-they're addictive.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009WVJSJC/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i1
1982
(A comprehensive collection of the best reviews and other ...)
A comprehensive collection of the best reviews and other writings on movie from a respected film critic offers more than 275 chronologically arranged reviews, all with her unique, witty, and knowledgeable touch.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525938966/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i3
1994
(A master film critic at her witty, exhilarating, and opin...)
A master film critic at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in a career-spanning collection - the first new selection in more than a generation.
https://www.amazon.com/Age-Movies-Selected-Writings-Publication-ebook/dp/B006N57P86/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Pauline+Kael&qid=1583267663&s=books&sr=1-1
2011
Pauline Kael was born on June 19, 1919, in Petaluma, California, United States. She was the daughter of Isaac Paul and Judith (Friedman) Kael.
Kael attended the University of California at Berkeley.
After leaving the University, Kael wrote plays and worked in an experimental film. Because of the poor health of her daughter, Kael also worked a series of such menial jobs as cook and seamstress, along with stints as an advertising copywriter.
Her first film review, entitled "Slimelight," covering Chaplin's Limelight, was published in City Lights magazine in 1953. Thereafter, her reviews began to appear in national and international journals: Film Quarterly, Film Culture, Moviegoer, Sight and Sound, and Partisan Review. After her first collection of movie reviews became a surprise bestseller, Kael moved to New York and freelanced for Life, Mademoiselle, McCall’s, and the New Republic, before assignments came at the New Yorker in 1968, from which platform she became "the country’s most influential reviewer".
Kael left her position as a full-time reviewer in 1991 because of ill health and died, a decade later, at the age of eighty-two at her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on September 2, 2001. As critic, Kael played favorites and championed selected stylish directors such as Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, and Brian De Palma, but she did not play favorites with Steven Spielberg or Oliver Stone.
(A comprehensive collection of the best reviews and other ...)
1994(The intelligent person's guide to the movies, with more t...)
1982(A master film critic at her witty, exhilarating, and opin...)
2011Kael was an opponent of the auteur theory, criticizing it both in her reviews and in interviews. She preferred to analyze films without thinking about the director's other works. Kael's opinions often ran contrary to the consensus of her fellow critics. Occasionally, she championed films that were considered critical failures, such as The Warriors and Last Tango in Paris.
Quotations:
"Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them."
"A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is."
"Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do."
"The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes."
"Her only flair is in her nostrils."
"The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again."
"An artist must either give up art or develop."
"...When the bespangled Miss Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around [Fred] Astaire, she can be forgiven everything—even the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically."
"When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture."
"An artist must either give up art or develop. There are, of course, two ways of giving up: stopping altogether or taking the familiar Hollywood course - making tricks out of what was once done for love."
"where there is a will there is a way."
Kael was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa.
Pauline Kael was both a great talker and a great listener.
Kael and the filmmaker James Broughton had a daughter, Gina James, whom Kael would raise alone.