A Critic’s Case Against Cinema

Before Pauline Kael was Pauline Kael, she was still very much Pauline Kael. When her first essay for The Atlantic ran in November 1964, she had not yet lost it at the movies. She had not yet become Pauline Kael, the vaunted and polarizing film critic for The New Yorker. She had not yet inspired a movement of imitators, the “Paulettes,” or established herself as one of the most influential film writers ever. But the stylistic verve, the uncategorizable taste, the flamethrowing provocation—they were all there. “There’s a woman writer I’d be tempted to call a three-time loser,” she wrote in her Atlantic essay. “She’s Catholic, Communist, and lesbian.”

The only unusual thing about this assault is that Kael does not name her target. Elsewhere in the essay, she doesn’t hesitate to do so. And no one is beyond reproach—not Luis Buñuel, not Michelangelo Antonioni, not Ingmar Bergman. She assails about a dozen notables in the course of a few thousand words, firing off zingers at machine-gun rate. Her appetite for pugilism and reservoir of snark are seemingly inexhaustible. Academics are cultural vampires. The critic Dwight Macdonald is a “Philistine.” The writer Susan Sontag is a “semi-intellectually respectable” critic who, unfortunately, has “become a real swinger.”

Kael’s Atlantic essay, which ran under the headline “Are Movies Going to Pieces?,” is a broad lament about the state of the industry and the art form, published at a moment when French New Wave and experimental art films were upending conventional assumptions about what a movie could or should be. Most audiences “don’t care any longer about the conventions of the past, and are too restless and apathetic to pay attention to motivations and complications, cause and effect,” she fretted. “They want less effort, more sensations, more knobs to turn.” In short, they’ve “lost the narrative sense.” Critics and art-house audiences weren’t any different. They’d been bamboozled into venerating pseudo-intellectual mumbo jumbo as high art. They’d come to accept “lack of clarity as complexity, [accept] clumsiness and confusion as ‘ambiguity’ and as style,” she wrote. “They are convinced that a movie is cinematic when they don’t understand what’s going on.”

Sixty years later, although Kael’s writing crackles as much as ever, much of her argument reads stodgy and conservative. She tries her best to preempt this charge—“I trust I won’t be mistaken for the sort of boob who attacks ambiguity or complexity”—and it’s true that her disdain for the new cinema is not uniform. She holds certain specimens in high regard, such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. But even so, she sometimes sounds like another old fogey grumbling about kids these days.

Her broader prognosis, though, is spot-on. In one sense at least, movies really were going to pieces. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, a gulf was opening between mass entertainment and high art, between movies and cinema. For the latter, Kael had boundless disdain. “Cinema,” she wrote, “is not movies raised to an art but rather movies diminished, movies that look ‘artistic.’” And its rise was a tragedy, a scourge that would over time kill what she loved about the form: “Cinema, I suspect, is going to become so rarefied, so private in meaning, and so lacking in audience appeal that in a few years the foundations will be desperately and hopelessly trying to bring it back to life, as they are now doing with theater.” It would become merely “another object of academic study and ‘appreciation.’”

Kael believed in movies as pop culture, believed their mass appeal was what gave them life. She wanted them to be something about which you could have an opinion without having any special expertise, something that regular people could talk about. And so she wrote about movies like a regular person—an extremely eloquent, extremely opinionated, extremely entertaining regular person, but a regular person all the same.

Whether or not you share Kael’s view that the movie-cinema schism was a disastrous development, her predictions have largely come to pass. Sixty years later, there are the films that win at the box office, and there are the films that win at the Oscars. (Not to mention the films that critics like best, which constitute a third category entirely.) Last summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon was a notable exception, but the overall trend is clear. This year, the Golden Globes codified the divide with the introduction of a new award for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement—an award reserved for movies because the standard categories now primarily recognize cinema. And Kael saw it all coming back in 1964.