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STEPHEN FARBER
men in films. One often reads her less for what she has to say about the
film than for her social and psychological insights ; her brief discussion
of the transience of love in relation to
La Notte
has stayed with me
longer than more laborious philosophical essays.
But to say that she is the best critic now writing is not quite the
high praise it may appear to be. In some ways Pauline Kael isn't really
a film critic at all. She loves movies, and she is almost always provoca–
tive when moving away from a film to examine a larger aesthetic ques–
tion - see, for example, her remarks on
cinema verite
in her review
of Norman Mailer's
Wild 90
(in her last collection
Going Steady).
But
others have observed that she is often more interesting when dealing
with audience responses to bad popular movies than when analyzing
works she claims to admire. She is a brilliant sociologist and pop phil–
osopher - and I don't mean that pejoratively; considering her simply as
an essayist, her articles are as pungent and stimulating as anything be–
ing written today. Her reviews are alive, but the films themselves often
elude her.
Her major virtues and increasingly obvious limitations are visible
in her long essay, "Raising Kane," that introduces ,the screenplay of
Citizen Kane
in the recently published
Citizen Kane Book.
Kael af–
fectionately evokes the period of the twenties and thirties, the spirit of
the Algonquin transplanted to Hollywood. She captures the energy,
playfulness, and irresponsibility of the talented screenwriters of the thir–
ties, and she mercilessly describes how these writers expiated their guilt
at having betrayed their promise by writing the patriotic, sanctimonious
antifascist movies of the forties. In discussing Hearst and Marion Davies
she writes devastatingly about Hollywood's simplifications of important
historical figures, and more generally identifies the distortions in most
popular myths of the rich and famous (who must be presented as un–
loved and scarred by a childhood trauma in order to gratify the mass
audience) . At times all of the historical, biographical, and sociological
material even illuminates some of the unique qualities of
Citizen Kane
- particularly the film's ambivalent attitude toward luxury and corrup–
tion. Yet in discussing the film itself, as a creative work, Kael fails to
accept its challenge.
She offers generalities about the German Expressionist style of the
film - backed up with very little analysis of the individual images–
and a great many overconfident assertions. At the beginning Kael mocks
the film scholars who talk about
Citizen Kane
as a "tragedy in fugal
form," and goes on to inform us that the film "isn' t a work of special
depth or a work of subtle beauty. It is a shallow work, a
shallow
mas–
terpiece." But if one would like to argue with that characterization,
