On Film

...their quarrel focused on substantive questions of evaluation...

...Since his piece already was set in type when Adler's review appeared, he responded to it only in a brief footnote that failed to answer most of her specific points...

...one need only to think of the formalist art criticism of the '60s, or the structuralism or deconstructivism rampant in literary circles today...

...It was "What did you think of Renata Adler's article on Pauline Kael...

...Back then, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa were at the height of their powers...

...She has never admitted a mistake, and she has never revised an opinion...

...The frame for Adler's critique consisted of some esoteric remarks about the war between reviewers and feature writers at the New Yorker, and some rather silly ruminations about the relative value of the "staff critic" (who provides "a necessary consumer service") versus the "serious intermittent critic" (who "writes only when he is asked to or genuinely moved to, in limited ways and for only a period of time...

...And the crucial point is that most reviewers' answers are simply no longer to be trusted...

...Pritchett, Cyril Connolly and Stanley Edgar Hyman had to say...

...Today, as always, it must be asked: What films are worth seeing, and on what grounds...

...Ultimately, the issue turns on movies and our evaluation of them...

...It is the correctness of her judgments, though, not her rhetoric, that is important...

...For those of you who have been away, or who pay little attention to the internecine squabbles of the Manhattan literati, let me briefly set the stage...

...The unfortunate effect of all this is to push critics with integrity, like Simon and Kauffmann, into the role of nay-sayers, deflating the balloons that have been unreasonably inflated by hyperbolic, untrustworthy reviewers...

...Second, and more important, the outpouring of filmmaking talent that marked the same period has not been matched in recent years...

...Sarris' swipes were in the context of a rather garrulous reminiscence of his personal and professional relationship with Kael over nearly two decades...

...It has indeed been through rhetoric that Kael especially-but also Sarris and the various epigones of both-has created an atmosphere in which films that are at best minor are announced as major breakthroughs...

...Why all this sound and fury...

...Nobile added little besides secondhand interviews (Kael did not cooperate...

...Well, says Adler, Kael's "whole verbal apparatus promotes, and relies upon, an incapacity to read...

...She concludes: "What really is at stake is not movies at all, but prose and the relation between writers and readers...

...they were "movies themselves...

...But as Hilton Kramer noted recently in another context, "it is from the vitality of living art that criticism derives its authority, after all, and not-As some mistaken critics have believed-the other way around...

...In the past, battles among reviewers were equally heated, but they were not about-or not only about?their respective opinions (or collected opinions...

...to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence...

...Shortly thereafter, in theTvew York Review of Books, Adler condemned the volume at great length as "worthless...

...As a result, critics have been forced -or have forced themselves-into what Sarris has called "a career corner...

...In fact, it was probably because she was so enthusiastic a booster of "trash" (her word, not mine, although she means it as an honorific)-including Convoy, Eyes of Laura Mars, Jaws, The Fury-that she became a flack for hire...

...To which I cannot help asking, is the "particular greatness" of The Rules of the Game or / Vitelloni or The Gold Rush or Jules and Jim based on their power to "affect" our senses...

...Lacking good works to evaluate, criticism has begun to feed on itself, and by exaggerating the importance of this kind of narcissistic controversy, by granting it an unearned legitimacy, everyone involved has only contributed to the aggrandizement of the reviewer at the expense of the object of his review...

...The two polemics quickly provoked an all-out war...

...With regard to those films, Adler is, for once, right on target: When Kael contends that her acquaintances' "distrust" of her recommendations is merely "fear, disguised as taste," she is trying to bully her audience...

...Kael claims the negative reaction is "a rejection of the particular greatness of movies: their power to affect us on so many sensory levels that we become emotionally accessible, in spite of our thinking selves...

...Although Kael is great when it comes to attacking films, her praise is literally incredible...

...When Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic and John Simon in The New Leader argued over Anton-ioni, they were not concerned with each other's mode of discourse...

...Piling example upon example (such as 26 instances of allegedly meaningless rhetorical questions), Adler charged that Kael's language-And hence her criticism-is "out of control," that its "brutality and intimidation" are "blunt devices to marshal a constituency...

...Much has changed since the late '50s and early '60s...

...Much worse is her practice of applying unacceptable standards (favoring visual impact, for instance over coherence)-whether based on theory or derived from intuition, whether ad hoc or a priori...

...Both Adler and Sarris complain that Kael has failed to support her pronouncements with theory...

...one can't believe it because it is unprincipled-that is, willful and therefore dishonest-not because it is rhetorically intimidating...

...Greil Marcus published an impassioned defense of Kael in Rolling Stone, Philip Nobile wrote a gossipy account of the Kulturkampf for New York, and John Leonard leaped into the fray in his inaugural "Critic's Notebook" in the New York Times...

...As Eric Severeid once observed of a Pentagon general with a map and a pointer, she may be in error, but she is never in doubt...

...This kind of "imperial criticism" is scarcely confined to films, of course...

...In the intervening years there have been those one-shot "small," serious movies that somehow continue to get made (Breaking Away or Angi Vera, to take a recent domestic and a recent foreign example), as well as the films of the "independent" (free from the traditional Hollywood machine) American directors, but there has been no "wave," no larger movement to command critical attention...

...He further complained that Kael has "never published a story about herself in which she has come out second best...

...Since then, not only have some of her reviews been printed as full-page advertisements, but she has actually worked as an "executive consultant" for Paramount...

...Who could forget her comparing the opening of Last Tango in Paris to "the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed...

...and a tradition of realism was being discovered in England (by Jack Clayton, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, John Schlesinger) and surmounted in Italy (by Vittorio De Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini...

...Pauline Kael's latest collection of New Yorker pieces, When the Lights Go Down, met with generally favorable notices upon publication this spring...

...Nor is Sarris much better...

...He did not address the substance of Adler's criticisms, nor was it his intention to do so...

...the New Wave (Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette) was sweeping across France to the United States...

...an inability] to detect and follow a genuine critical argument...

...Several weeks ago, however, Andrew Sarris wrote a blistering attack on it in the Village Voice...

...Marcus, who was forthright enough to acknowledge his friendship with Kael, rather overheatedly characterized Sarris' assessment as "an attempt at character assassination" and "repulsive sexism...

...Or her rave review of Nashville based on an uncut version of the film months prior to its opening...

...A decade or two ago, film critics had something to argue about: films-Albeit varying in quality-of considerable esthetic and historical interest...

...Sarris declared that "The key to Pauline's critical insincerity is her unwillingness to come down from her magisterial mountain of moral superiority into the valley of confessional candor...

...Adler, in her grinding graduate school fashion, catalogued Kael's rhetoric as "bullying, presuming, insulting, frightening, enlisting, intruding, dunning, rallying...

...Ten years ago, Kael argued that except for "a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers...

...Yet the issue is not so much financial independence as critical credibilty, and Kael's was in question years before she "went Hollywood...

...First, the critics who emerged at that point are, naturally, older today, and no new voices or theories of any significance have come along in the interim...

...Although I have no interest in becoming a third party to a discussion that is already three times removed from films, the ostensible object of inquiry, I do think the fact that it has taken on a disproportionate importance-even among numerous self-acknowledged nonmoviegoers-is worthy of comment...

...Nonsense...

...He would have provided a greater service by identifying as her disciples ("Kael clones" I have heard them called) not just Gary Arnold, the movie critic for the Washington Post, but also such young men on the make as James Wolcott, the television reviewer for the Voice...

...If anything, the overzeal-ous polemics triggered by Kael's book say a lot about the current state of the cinema and the role that critics play in it -A matter ignored by all parties to the dispute...

...To put it bluntly, since roughly the mid-'60s, there has been a vacuum waiting to be filled by new filmmakers and critics, and that vacuum is sucking out what remains of the intelligence of the audience for both serious movies and writing about them...

...Leonard quite easily disposed of Adler's simple-minded dismissal of "staff critics" by pointing out that their number included Shaw, Hazlitt, and Addison and Steele, among others, and that regular reviewing had scarcely diminished the worth of what Irving Howe, V.S...