Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (70 page)

There is not one conclusion, but two. Films are getting bigger and smaller, cheaper and more expensive, both at once. While mass-marketed blockbusters dominate the market, independent directors have the ability to make their own films almost by hand. Digital techniques are crucial to both trends. Will the future belong to Star Wars clones made with Toy Story techniques? Or to films made in the tradition of the early Chaplin quickies (some shot in a day), the Cassavetes-inspired independents, and the Blair Witch technology? It belongs to both, I think. Which will be interesting.

SEPTEMBER 4, 2001

etter than anyone else, Pauline Kael communicated the immediate, sensual, voluptuous experience of seeing a great movie. She was known for her harsh judgments, but it was in her praise that she stood alone, as the most influential American film critic-maybe the most influential critic of any art form-of her time.

When she died Monday, her spirit and passion were still being echoed in the words of a generation of film critics she influenced. She changed the way we talk about the movies. Eyes flashing, hair tossing, talking back to the screen, she wrote not from theory or ideology but from her own personal feelings. I Lost It at the Movies, she said in the title of her first book, and the more you thought about those words, the more you understood the transformational power the movies can have for some people.

After earlier years spent in San Francisco, writing program notes, contributing to film magazines, broadcasting on the local public radio stations, Kael emerged nationally in the r96os, just a few years in advance of what became known as the Film Generation. She praised the best of the new movies from Europe, but wasn't a sucker for "art films," some of which she found phony and pretentious. She had an eye out for native art, for the new winds in American cinema.

After false starts at McCall's and the New Republic, she settled in as the film critic of the New Yorker under William Shawn, and championed a new generation of American directors. She hailed Bonnie and Clyde when it was generally dismissed, and wrote decisive early articles on Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola-she spotted them all right out of the gate. Her long article on Scorsese's Mean Streets essentially launched his career. Week after week she bashed Hollywood frauds and stuck up for the directors with distinctive styles.

"Sometimes people don't really seem to draw a line between the movies that really enlarge their experience, and the movies that simply work them over," she said in 1975 in a lecture at the Arts Club of Chicago. "When a great movie like Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller comes along, one of the functions I felt as a critic was to discuss the ways in which the movie was new, and the wonderful things Altman was doing in it. But then when people are moved, and deeply moved, by trash like The Trial of Billy Jack, then perhaps the critic can help by explaining the ways in which trash can manipulate your responses, can work over your emotions in unworthy and dishonest ways."

She liked feelings in the movies better than ideas. She suspected message pictures, because she felt the best way to communicate messages was through the senses-through feeling, not preaching. She liked the way "Altman's movies are made up of moments that affect us in ways we can't fully understand-unconscious moments."

"Responsible artists," she said, "try to affect you sensually in a way that enlarges your experience. Altman, for example, has raised the sound track to a whole new level. He hears more perceptively than other directors. He hears Americans talking, and we talk more than any other nation in the world. When you come out of an Altman movie, you hear your environment in a new way.

"And sometimes directors can achieve a sensual affect that simply can't be explained. In Coppola's Godfather II, for example, after the scene where Robert De Niro, as the young Don Vito, kills the landlord, the extortionist, he walks down the street in such a way that the scene becomes incredibly moving and powerful-everyone I've talked to who has seen the movie was affected by that scene, and yet there's no way to explain why. I think Coppola got the power for that scene out of his own unconscious. I don't know if he could explain it, either."

In print she was a power, and in person she was a dynamo. I met her right at the beginning of my career as a film critic, at the 1967 New York Film Festival. She was open, friendly, and generous to me, and to many other new critics of that time-there was not a drop of snobbery in herand I found myself invited along for the ride, crammed into booths in the back room of the Ginger Man, across from Lincoln Center, debating the films we'd just seen. There were late nights of talk in her apartment, and noisy dinners, and excited phone calls. And at screenings, where critics were not supposed to vocalize their feelings, there'd be Pauline's "Oh! Oh! Oh!" at something she detested. She wasn't expressing an opinion, but defending herself against a personal affront.

She gathered around her a salon of the new directors and writers. Wherever she went, she was surrounded. People loved to hear her talk. One night in the lobby bar of the Algonquin, she introduced me to a new director and his star: Brian De Palma and Robert De Niro. I'd never heard of them. She had. Another night, there was an Italian dinner with Pauline, De Palma, the writer Paul Schrader, and myself. Looking around the table, I realized Pauline was out of work (she'd been fired by McCall's), De Palma was broke after his first two indie films, and Schrader was a struggling screenwriter. I had a paycheck from the SunTimes, so I grabbed the bill. Leaving the restaurant, Pauline was shaking with laughter. "You dope," she said, "Schrader just sold a screenplay for $450,000!"

Kael's reviews changed movie history. Her praise of Altman's Nashville was reprinted, word for word, in a double-truck ad in the New York Times. Her review of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris helped open the way for a new sexual frankness in the movies.

She blasted the prudishness of Jack Valenti's new MPAA ratings system, saying, "The problem for younger moviegoers is that the rating system has meant that kids haven't been free to go to the best pictures, unless their parents take them. How can they develop an appreciation for movies if all they're allowed to see are those dreadful, boring movies that are aimed at them? The best pictures are mostly those with the R ratings, and there have been pictures that got the R because of one forbidden word-when all you have to do is listen to kids talking today and you realize no fourletter word is going to come as news to them. In terms of the intelligence and invention that goes into them, the Saturday night shows on TV are a lot better than most G or PG movies."

While the MPAA wanted to protect kids in an artificially prolonged childhood, Pauline championed movies that would help them grow up. She lost it at the movies, and they should, too.

She wrote some of the most merciless pans of her time, but she was best writing about what she loved. "The critic's power is mostly positive, not negative," she told me once. "We can't stop the expensive trash with the millions of dollars behind it, but what we can do is help a good little film get shown, and direct attention to the best new directors, the ones who are fresh and exciting. John Leonard said the other day that critics were lice on the body of art. But art would never reach the public without the critics. I don't feel like a louse."

Playing with the sensual relationship Kael had with the movies, the titles of her books continued the sexual connotation of I Lost It at the Movies. They included Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Going Steady, Deeper into Movies, Reeling, When the Lights Go Down, Movie Love, Taking It All In, Hooked, and 5001 Nights at the Movies. Only State of the Art wasn't suggestive-maybe. She retired from the New Yorker in 1991, and in 1994 edited a vast collection of the best writing from all of her books. It was titled, suitably, For Keeps.

INTRODUCTION

These are musings about the job. It is a curious job. Critics are asked every single day how many movies they see in a day/week/month/year. "No matter what your answer is," Gene Siskel said, "they believe you." We are asked if we see them more than once (usually not, but if time has passed since a festival screening, I always try to see them again). We are asked if we ever change our minds about a movie (see above). The strangest question is surprisingly frequent: "Do you actually see those movies you write about?"

Of these pieces, two are not by me. Richard Corliss, a lifelong friend, wrote the 199o article for Film Comment in which he lamented the directions he saw film criticism taking. I defended our television program, while agreeing with many of his laments. The wise Andrew Sarris stepped in to adjudicate. This may be a good time to observe that the giants of film criticism when I began- Sarris, Stanley Kauffmann, Manny Farber, Donald Richie, Pauline Kael, Arthur Knight-were unfailingly friendly and open. No snobbery toward new kids. Maybe going to the movies for a living makes you into a small-d democrat.