Pauline Kael (12 page)

Robert Duncan often turned up at Oregon Street. Gregarious and uninhibited, he added a lot to the parties, despite his disconcerting habit of scratching his rear end in front of other people. Perhaps because he had developed an enviable reputation as a poet, she seemed to have mixed feelings about her old friend. For years she had harbored a strong prejudice against almost anyone who came from the world of academia; she professed to believe that most literature professors were second-rate, affected hacks who made their living off the work of real writers. One night Duncan arrived at Oregon Street, having just come from the home of Thomas Parkinson, the noted Berkeley English professor with a keen interest in the avant-garde. When Duncan announced where he had been earlier in the evening, Pauline lit into him with a vengeance, asking him how he could possibly associate with people like Parkinson, whom she considered a mediocre academic. And many other times, she would snipe about Duncan as soon as he wasn’t around. “She started damning his poems,” said Gutierrez. “Here’s someone she seemed to approve of, and then as soon as he was out the door, she was slamming him. I thought,
Well, if she said that about him, what would she do to me?
It developed a distrust on my part.” It seemed much easier for her to extend generosity to her younger friends, the ones who were struggling to find their way.

Around this time, Pauline enjoyed some of the benefits of a widening reputation. In 1958 Ernest Callenbach was approached to become editor of a new, California-based magazine,
Film Quarterly
. He declined and suggested Pauline to the magazine’s founder, August Fruge. But when Pauline and Fruge spoke, it was clear that they didn’t agree on matters of editorial content. Pauline told Fruge that she would accept the post only if she could be guaranteed no editorial interference of any kind, an assurance Fruge refused to give. In the end, Callenbach did accept the job, which he held from 1958 to 1991.

Gina benefited from Pauline’s marriage to Edward Landberg in that there were now funds available for the heart surgery that had been put off for so many years. (Pauline’s niece Dana Salisbury, believed that getting the money for the operation was Pauline’s principal motive in marrying Landberg.) It was delicate surgery, but it was successful, and Gina proceeded through a long and difficult recovery period with Pauline looking after her every minute.

Even though she was still a young girl, Gina was usually not excluded from the parties. She was bright and precocious, although still remarkably small for her age. Guests got used to her coming downstairs in her pink bathrobe, watching the movies that Pauline was screening and taking in the heady conversation that was swirling around her. Gina was a student at Bentley, a reputable private school in Oakland. Pauline monitored her education carefully and, critical of teachers as always, decided that her daughter wasn’t being taught properly. After a tremendous row with one of Gina’s instructors, Pauline removed her from Bentley and home-schooled her until she was eighteen. She claimed that it was designed to give Gina a more substantial education, but Anne Wallach always believed that the break had come because Pauline loved to stay up late and didn’t want to be bothered getting Gina off to classes.

It was a dramatic move that shocked many of Pauline’s friends and relatives, and they worried that Gina was being deprived of a normal childhood. Gina herself had extremely conflicted feelings about being removed from school. While she was accustomed to having a close relationship with her mother, she missed the camaraderie of her classmates. Pauline’s involvement with her daughter could also be unpredictable. “Her attention to Gina would go on and off like a searchlight,” said Stephen Kresge. “There would be a boom, giving Gina an overwhelming amount of attention, and the next minute, Pauline was off on the next thing. This happened not just with Gina but with others, and they weren’t too thrilled. They loved it when the spotlight was on them and were miffed when it wasn’t. But that was Pauline. Whatever she was doing, she was doing with all of herself, and she wasn’t about to waste time.”

Landberg and Pauline had become increasingly incompatible, and neither one had much difficulty reaching the decision to separate. Since their working relationship had been mutually beneficial, they saw no reason not to continue it, and Pauline assumed management of the theater while Landberg, though still nominally in charge, went to Los Angeles to take filmmaking courses at UCLA.

One evening in the spring of 1961, the Cinema Guild had the most celebrated visitor in its history. Jean Renoir had been invited by Berkeley’s Council of Regents to occupy a chair, an appointment that had turned out to be a mostly pleasant experience for the veteran director. Renoir was cheerful and outgoing; he had a good rapport with the Berkeley students and was heartened by their enthusiasm for film. Almost immediately it was clear to him that the Cinema Guild was part of the reason for the high level of expertise among the young local movie buffs, and when Pauline programmed his 1951 film
The River
, he attended the screening and the after-party at Oregon Street. The evening had its bumpy moments: Renoir nearly became apoplectic when one of the guests asked him if he edited his own films; he angrily responded, “Does a poet edit his own poetry?”

Throughout the night, however, Pauline was in a state of bliss. “She was overwhelmed in his presence,” remembered Donald Gutierrez, “so that she didn’t bother to introduce me.” David Young Allen recalled that Pauline was in a state of high anxiety preparing for Renoir’s visit. “She got Gina and me out of the house,” Allen said. “She didn’t want interference. She came down with lipstick on and sort of a nice chartreuse sweater. She took the trouble to look nice.” Renoir was quite heavy at the time, and when he sat down on one of the good-quality chairs that Pauline had picked up in an antiques shop, he went right through it. But she was too ecstatic in the great man’s presence to care in the least.

In the end Pauline’s success with the Cinema Guild turned out to be too much for Landberg. After his sojourn in Los Angeles, which he followed up with a trip to Mexico, he returned to Berkeley in late 1961. When he discovered how Pauline had essentially taken over the Cinema Guild by signing the program notes, he was furious, accusing her of stealing all of the theater’s publicity. The two of them quarreled bitterly over the issue of the copyright on the notes, and Landberg announced that she was to cease and desist in all matters of programming; he was going to regain control of his own theater. He accused several of the Guild staff members of treason, causing them to resign on the spot. In 1962 Pauline ended her association with the Cinema Guild. Eventually Landberg had a dispute with the landlord, who now wanted him to pay rent plus a percentage. He refused and wound up letting the Cinema Guild fold. He had acquired another theater, the Cinema, on Shattuck Avenue, and eventually he astounded local audiences by playing the Japanese epic
Chushingura
there for forty-three consecutive weeks. But his Cinema Guild audiences felt abandoned: A great institution had come to an end.

O
nce again Pauline was left without a steady source of income. As her fame had grown locally, she had appeared more and more frequently on KPFA. She continued to lobby hard for payment—cofounder Lewis Hill and the station manager, Trevor Thomas, calmly listened to her demands and refused. She was writing critical pieces for
The Partisan Review
and
Film Quarterly
, but her work yielded minimal income. She petitioned
The San Francisco Chronicle
for a reviewing job, but nothing came of it. She fretted over money, wondering how she was going to provide for Gina and if she would ever be able to build a proper, functioning life for herself.

It wasn’t only KPFA’s refusal to put her on salary that made Pauline feel antagonistic toward its management. It was what she considered their middle-of-the-road editorial voice. She felt that the station had something in common with
Sight and Sound
and other film journals: While they prided themselves on their liberal point of view, and their editorial content, which was superior to the commercial norm, they were in fact stodgy, predictable, and drearily well-intentioned. She constantly criticized the station—sometimes on the air—for its self-congratulatory attitude and lack of programming flair. (KPFA, trying to maintain a proper atmosphere of free speech on the airwaves, did little to protest.) Pauline found the station’s lack of response to suggestions and any criticism of their programming policies an adequate explanation of the fact that after thirteen years, it had a total of only eight thousand subscribers.

She also encouraged her colleagues to rebel whenever possible. “She was kind of a champion of mine in times when I was in a little bit of trouble at KPFA,” remembered the station’s music director, Alan Rich. On his weekly music review program, Rich’s critical arrows were often aimed at the San Francisco Symphony. Unfortunately, several of the Symphony’s major donors were also viewed by KPFA’s management as potential patrons of the station, and from time to time, Lewis Hill made his objections known to Rich. “I remember running into Pauline on Telegraph Avenue,” said Rich, “and she, at the top of her lungs, started yelling about how good I was, and how dare they give me a hard time.”

Pauline’s weekly broadcasts, meanwhile, were covering many of the new European movies that were catching on with American art-house audiences. One of the most exhilarating movements in world cinema then was the Nou-velle Vague (New Wave). The many champions of the New Wave during the late 1950s and early ’60s prized its style of looking at movie storytelling—a more complex, relaxed, intuitive means of portraying characters and situations onscreen. Those at the forefront of the New Wave carried on loudly about the stagnation and lack of imagination that had blighted French cinema since the end of the war, arguing that it had never moved ahead in any innovative way, having been crippled by the hard financial times that cast a pall over the postwar years.

New Wave filmmakers were not too concerned with plot symmetry and conventional narrative technique; they wanted to get at the absolute truth of a situation, often in jagged and allusive ways. If the final result challenged or even puzzled the audience, so much the better. Among the notable characteristics of the New Wave was a preference for location shooting over studio-made sets, a sense of the absurd, an overall feeling of cinema verité—an attempt to portray life as it really was, not as moviegoers had grown accustomed to seeing it manipulated. There was some irony in this, since many of the New Wave directors—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, among others—had begun their careers by writing for the French film magazine
Cahiers du Cinéma
, a scholarly journal that consistently paid homage not only to the Italian neorealist movement, but to commercial Hollywood studio product. The
Cahiers
critics were at the forefront of the new movement of auteurists, intent on reevaluating the achievements of many screen directors they considered underrated, and linking their films to one another in terms of style and theme. They elevated the works of studio directors such as Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk to a level of appreciation that Americans had not shown them. The
Cahiers du Cinéma
group revered directors who left a conspicuous visual “signature” on their movies, and, like police detectives trying to connect a disparate set of clues, they loved searching for visual links among the directors’ films. John Ford, with his painterly instinct in depicting the Old West, and Alfred Hitchcock, the most unapologetically commercial director of all, were held up by the New Wavers as cinema geniuses par excellence.

In 1959, the crucial year for the New Wave, three films premiered at the Cannes Festival and went on to tremendous international success. The first, Marcel Camus’s
Black Orpheus
, with its relentless impressionistic score by Luiz Bonfa, was by no means a characteristic New Wave effort, but the other two, Alain Resnais’s
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
and François Truffaut’s
The 400 Blows
, were landmark events in world cinema. These films had unexpected rhythms, perversities of editing, scenes of great complexity, ambiguity, and beauty.
The 400 Blows
, in particular, was full of unforgettable sequences, with Henri Decae’s camera impassively observing the characters in long, fluid takes. The lack of a conspicuously controlled and controlling directorial tone struck audiences as wildly exciting—even liberating.

Pauline was intrigued by many of the New Wave efforts; their discarding of traditional storytelling structure greatly appealed to her. But on general principle she was not about to give her wholehearted embrace to any trendy new movement, and was meticulous about examining each of the New Wave films individually, believing that they differed wildly in their merits. To her,
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
fell far short of being a significant piece of work. She argued against the film in a provocative article called “Fantasies of the Art-House Audience,” which she published in the Winter 1961–62 issue of
Sight and Sound
. “I would like to suggest that the educated audience often uses ‘art’ films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood ‘product,’ finding wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism,” she wrote. (She added that she used “large generalizations in order to be suggestive rather than definitive.”) She was instinctively suspicious of the acclaim heaped on
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
by the American press—notably
Esquire
’s critic Dwight Macdonald, who compared Resnais with Joyce, Picasso, Berg, Bartók, and Stravinsky. To her, the praise that greeted
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
amounted to “incense burning.” She was determined to let her readers know that she was one critic not taken in by the repetitive, stilted dialogue, written by the experimental novelist Marguerite Duras, and the movie’s controlled, self-consciously hypnotic tone, which she found not at all profound, merely irritating. Most of all, she was troubled by the educated audience’s reverence for the film: “audiences of social workers, scientists, doctors, architects, professors—living and loving and suffering just like the stenographer watching Susan Hayward. . . . It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both), and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.”