You will search Kael’s collected work in vain for a theory, a system, or even a consistent set of principles.—A.O. Scott, “Mad About Her: Pauline Kael, Loved and Loathed” (with Manohla Dargis), The New York Times, October 14, 2011
Kael’s attraction to the art of the mass audience—the audience that includes our family and our neighbors—is about as far as you can get from Sontag’s prostration before the exalted and the disaffection from the mass audience it entails. Kael was wary of anything as humorless as exaltation. She was wary of anyone who took himself too seriously—such as Sontag’s adored Bresson, whom she charged with “inhuman pride.”—Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Counterpoint, 2004
Bloggers and the writers who turn out well-crafted pieces on their own Web sites are free to write what they want. The best of them, such as Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule or Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun or Farran Nehme Smith at The Self-Styled Siren, give public voice to the way movies function as private obsession. Their film knowledge is broad and deep, but they wear that knowledge lightly. They understand that the true appreciation of any art begins in pleasure (and not in the “work” of watching movies). To read them is to read people grounded in the sensual response to movies, in what the presence or look of a certain star, or the way a shot is lit stirs in them. —Charles Taylor, “The Problem With Film Criticism,” Dissent, Fall 2011 (available on the internet to subscribers only)
Reading long, detailed arguments about a difference of millimeters in the aspect ratio of a new Blu-Ray disc, the only shrinking millimeters I’m aware of are those of my open eyes narrowing.— Taylor, Dissent
When the writer Dan Kois advanced the heretical notion in the New York Times that he couldn’t pretend to enjoy movies he found boring, the reaction he got made it seem as if he had said movies could never deviate from convention and audiences should never try anything new. The film historian David Bordwell even used the word “philistinism.”—Taylor, Dissent
In college, a friend demanded to know what kind of idiot I was that I hadn’t yet watched Tarkovsky’s “Solaris.” “It’s so boring,” he said with evident awe. “You have to watch it, but you won’t get it.”
He was right: I had to watch it, and I didn’t get it. I had to watch it — on a laserdisc in the university library — because the intimation that there was a film that connoisseurs knew that I’d never heard of was too much to bear. I didn’t get it because its mesmerizing pace was so far removed from my cinematic metabolism that several times during its 165 minutes, I awoke in a panic, only to find that the same thing was happening onscreen as was happening when I closed my eyes. (Seas roiling; Russians brooding.) After I left the library, my friend asked me what I thought. “That was amazing,” I said. When he asked me what part I liked the best, I picked the five-minute sequence of a car driving down a highway, because it seemed the most boring. He nodded his approval. —Dan Kois, “Eating Your Cultural Vegetables,” The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 2011
The reaction to Kois was a sustained example of bullying masked as erudition.—Taylor, Dissent
What is interesting is the impression of a giddy, widespread abdiction of all time-consuming enterprises, from building an argument to watching a movie, and the accompanying implication that anything beyond an immediate gut-level response is suspect. Sometimes the abdication and the uses to which it is put are “market driven,” sometimes angst-ridden, sometimes politically cunning, and sometimes, as in Kois’s case, gleefully nonchalant. “My taste stubbornly remains my taste,” writes Kois as a summary statement: this is not film criticism, but rather its gleeful renunciation.—Kent Jones, “That was SO THEN, This is TOTALLY NOW,” Film Comment, September/October 2011 (Print only)
[Branded To Kill is] also a movie of rain and shadows, and Mr. Suzuki’s use of angular, minimalist 20th-century-modern interiors to convey blankness and isolation makes you wonder why anyone ever consented to be bored by Michelangelo Antonioni’s coffee-table anomie. —Charles Taylor, “New DVDs To Warm Your Toes By,” The New York Times, October 28, 2011
Images from Blow-Up (with Jeff Beck, 1966), Zabriskie Point (with Daria Halprin, 1970), The Passenger (with Maria Schneider, 1975) and Identification of a Woman (1982), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.
errmmm - is the "Razzie Watch" something to actually GET agitated about? Everyone's humor MMV, but it reads to me like a deliberate parody of EW-style 'Oscar Watch' blather. Then again, right now I'm more down with the classic rock kittens...
Posted by: Jaime | November 05, 2011 at 06:05 PM
Jaime: Yeah, I guess maybe the Razzie Watch thing is a parody after all, but it's pretty easy to read it and see only the Clint diss, at least the first time through. The only obvious humor to me is the part where it says Kois will be giving a seminar on bad screenwriting at a Lady Foot Locker (which I didn't see until I re-read it).
So in that case, I'll revise my annoyance with Kois to include lame humor at the expense of a fine director.
Posted by: jbryant | November 05, 2011 at 06:27 PM
Well, I always arrive late to these parties, fashionably or otherwise.
Revisiting the discussion upthread a piece, somehow "flag-planting" sounds dirtier than "monkey fucking," and I'm not sure I'd ever want to do either in polite company. Or otherwise. But damned if -- in Francis Davis' sorta slight interview transcription with La Pauline after she retired, AFTERGLOW -- La Pauline pretty well aligned with my assessment of both AMERICAN BEAUTY and of critics who extolled that egregiously manipulative swing-and-a-miss at der zeitgeist. That latter assessment, briefly, goes something along the lines of: fuck's'a matter with you? Though, yes, Ms. Bening was robbed.
I took advantage of my renewed unemployment to run over to Barnes & Noble and read the new Dissent (BTW, WTF's up with their AWFUL logo? Did Gary Panter's assistant on Pee-Wee's Playhouse make it on a Video Toaster in 1989, waiting for the right moment to spring it on Irving Howe?) featuring Mr. Taylor's essay while ingesting alot of caffeine I couldn't really afford. I invite you to tell me what he's on about, much less why Dissent felt the need to run this head-scratcher. Something about the sick soul of film-critical practice with the death of traditional journalistic models in advent of the internet era, a pitched battle between two camps/sensibilities (and two camps, only) -- those marching under the banner of noted sensualist and carnivore Dan Kois and the pleasureless goosestepping to the pronouncements of arid meanie, Chairman Boardwell?
It is, as is sometimes said, a notion. I wonder why Mr. Taylor thought it had any bearing on what is actually transpiring on the planet Earth, where, say, Mr. Boardwell's site and Senses of Cinema aren't exactly racing up the Alexa charts, even in the narrow cinephile demographic. Sure seems like there's a whole lotta strata of film critique covered in the flyover between Harry Knowles and Chris Fujiwara -- enough, from my cheap seat, to think the overall binary thrust of Taylor's argument's crackers, where not deliberately reductionist.
Boy, he sure showed us, though, by finally popping that gaseous Antonioni bubble, didn't he? Silly, anhedonic sapheads...what WERE we thinking?
Posted by: James Keepnews | November 06, 2011 at 01:57 PM