Pauline Kael Research Articles

More Human Than Human: The Exile in Blade Runner

More Human Than Human: The Exile in <i>Blade Runner</i>

Acting and Race in Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Acting and Race in <i>Night of the Living Dead</i> (1968)

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

Fragments and Fury

Fragments and Fury David Greven (bio) Bruce Isaacs. The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $39.95 paperback. I have often considered my critical stance on Brian De Palma an anomalous one. While I consider Alfred Hitchcock the greatest of classical Hollywood directors (a placeholder description given his transatlantic career), I consider De Palma the greatest postclassical Hollywood director. Important critics of De Palma, such as Adrian Martin, Terrence Rafferty, Thomas Leitch, Pauline Kael, and especially Robin Wood, have defended his aesthetics, and specifically defended his work against the dread charge of “ripping-off Hitchcock,” but not very many critics have written from a position of partisanship for both directors. (Kael famously angered Andrew Sarris and others by perversely proclaiming De Palma the infinitely greater director, but Eyal Peretz essentially follows suit in his book on De Palma, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses [Stanford University Press, 2008].) In The Art of Pure Cinema, Bruce Isaacs has, more than any other critic I have read, shed light on the peculiar and heady relationship between Hitchcock and De Palma, and in so doing has produced a thrilling account of De Palma’s aesthetics that illustrates its singular force and overlaps with Hitchcock’s. Isaacs also sheds revelatory light on Hitchcock, who, while not the sole focus of this book, is treated with ample rigor. Perhaps most thrillingly of all, Isaacs stages— and ably inspires—a bracing conversation among Hitchcock and several of his “imitators”: De Palma and the giallo [End Page 146] directors Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci. This is a book I have long waited for, and it exceeds my expectations in its finesse, rigor, insightfulness, and—most notable of all—committed demonstration of the art of close reading and textual analysis in this era of detachment and distance in Film Studies, characterized by what we can call archival hegemony. Isaacs brilliantly breaks new ground by covering the seemingly well-covered terrain of Hitchcock’s theory of “pure cinema.” Excavating the meanings of this term, how Hitchcock got to it, and what it means for his cinema and its disciples is Isaacs’s foundation. He points out that a desire to create “a cinema unaffiliated with earlier artistic forms” was not unique to Hitchcock but a goal shared by many early twentieth-century aesthetic modernists (15). “Pure cinema . . . was a European avant-garde movement that emerged during the mid-1920s in Paris,” incorporating elements of German expressionism and Soviet montage and exemplified by the work of filmmakers Henri Chomette and Germaine Dulac (16). The latter was particularly relevant to Hitchcock’s early development as a film theorist, as was, of course, F.W. Murnau, the great German expressionist director whose filmmaking Hitchcock observed first-hand (The Last Laugh, 1924). Isaacs discusses connections between Murnau’s and Dulac’s views on pure cinema, which coalesced in Hitchcock’s thought. Isaacs makes sure to clarify that Hitchcock did not take an active interest in Dulac’s writings and films; instead, “his aesthetic development occurred in relative proximity to the emergence” of the pure cinema movement that Dulac led (18). Isaacs contends that Hitchcock’s cinema is one in which “narrative and representational form is increasingly distilled into the abstraction of cinema’s pure formal and phenomenological elements: relations within space, movement, time (and thus duration), perception, affect, and intensity” (23). No wonder the giallo artists found his work so resonant! An early section of Isaacs’s book includes a remarkably fresh and detailed look at the scene in Frenzy [End Page 147] (1972) when the murderer Rusk takes the deeply likable Babs, his unfortunate next victim, up the stairs to his flat, saying she is really “my type of woman,” before Hitchcock’s camera ominously backtracks into the street, where the ambient street noises slowly engulf the soundtrack. Isaacs painstakingly analyzes this sequence in order to demonstrate Hitchcock’s negotiation, tethered to the impact of the tracking shot, of realist and anti-realist techniques, and he emphasizes a new excessiveness in the director’s style, excess being a key linkage among Hitchcock and his adrenalized...

Dirty Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash JoeStreet. University Press of Florida, 2016.

Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash Joe Street. University Press of Florida, 2016.Astonishingly, Clint Eastwood was not the first casting choice for Don Siegel's Harry (1971), but after Frank Sinatra, Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, and John Wayne (among others) turned it down, Eastwood would transform into a role that would be his most iconic of a sixty-plus-year career. In four sequels (Magnum Force [1973], The Enforcer [1976], Sudden Impact [1983], and The Dead Pool [1988]), the character's wisecracks became catchphrases (most notably, Go ahead, make my day). Indeed, Harry Callahan remains one of the most (in)famous characters in Hollywood history. Audiences loved him, even as some critics (such as Pauline Kael) pointed to the character's not-so-subtle fascist tendencies and attitudes. In Harry's America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash, surprisingly the first dedicated monograph devoted to the landmark film, Joe Street examines the political climate that birthed a film like Harry and how the titular character became a near-perfect representation of modern American conservatism (136).Street first details the specifics of the EastwoodSiegel collaborative partnership, as Siegel helmed four other films with Eastwood as his lead. The first two chapters cover Eastwood's arduous rise to stardom before briefly addressing the genres and cinematic movements that made a film like Harry possible. Street also sets the film in sociocultural context, especially in how it reflects Californian politics of the 1960s, while confronting the associated with its Bay Area milieu. Harry's commonsense approach to crime, in addition to expressing a greater concern for the rights of victims over the rights of criminals, partly explains his appeal to conservative viewers. This is not to say that Harry can appropriately be labeled right-wing propaganda, but the film was suspicious of bureaucratic liberalism and the counterculture. Harry's city, San Francisco, was especially emblematic of where culture had gone wrong: Dirty Harry, then, reveals that the conservative backlash responded not only to liberal lawmaking but also to urban transformation and the perceived problems brought to the cities by the counterculture which itself emerged in part as a consequence of social liberalism (90). Consequently, Street devotes an entire chapter to how San Francisco functions as a character, including a scene-by-scene textual analysis of the film, scrutiny that never grows tedious. …

FILM CRITICISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE

FILM CRITICISM IN THE DIGITAL AGE Mattias Frey and Cecilia Sayad, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2015, 273 pp.If Roland Barthes's seminal 1968 pronouncement of the "Death of the Author" helped give birth to postmodern literary theory, it is our own digital age that has led to the crashing fade-out of the professional-and even semiprofessional-film critic. Over the last decade, we have read a litany of postmortems, ranging from the snide "good riddance" to elegies invoking the ghosts of Pauline Kael, James Agee, Andrew Sarris, and other pre-digital critical auteurs.Although there has been a flurry of online articles underscoring this seismic shift, Film Criticism in the Digital Age ambitiously bills itself as "the first book-length study of its kind" (13). To that end, coeditors Frey and Sayad assemble both academic and popular analyses on the dearth-perhaps death-of the working film critic, caught up and rubbed out in the brave new World Wide Web of bottomless blogs and 140-character tweets. Refusing a simplistic "thumbs-up/thumbs down" approach, this useful if fitful anthology merits several stars, at least because it has the audacity to deliver its content in the old-school, contemplative, and tactile platform of print.Frey's introduction provides a valuable recap of recent reports on the demise of film criticism-which, unfortunately, has not been exaggerated by those men (and a few women) who have remained standing since journalistic ink started running red in the 1990s. Frey cites the Salt Lake Tribune's Sean Means, who lists over fifty film critics purged from 2006 to 2010-including such stalwarts as David Ansen of Newsweek (itself now out of print) and Variety's Todd McCarthy. From these opening shots, Frey focuses in on the book's main debates: for example, the relationship between the critic and his or her audience; the effect the new media forms have on criticism itself and the critic as occupation; and perhaps most Orwellian, whether "evaluation" should be the purpose of film criticism any longer in an age of cultural fragmentation and relativism. (To the latter, we might also add the morphing of popular film and TV into cultish mass constructs-Hunger Games or Game of Thrones anyone?)Contributors to the book, from noted scholar Thomas Elsaesser to controversial critic Armond White, primarily discuss the anarchic state of Anglo-American film criticism; however, also included are several globally oriented studies that will be of less interest to US readers. Threading through many of the essays are thoughts on the deeper debate regarding the culture and practice of the Internet itself. With no editorial "gatekeepers" anymore, nor the necessity of a media infrastructure per se, now anyone truly can be a critic (or, for that matter, an anonymous, toxic "troll"). As a result, this hyper-democratized explosion of popular voices has not only leveled the critical playing field but largely paved it over, engendering an equivalence of sorts between onetime elite (and discretely exclusive) print publications and the amateur "citizen journalist" writer. An upstart reviewing site can appear in a Google search within spitting distance of, say, the New York Times or Variety (especially if it is addressing an offbeat film or topic), and popular aggregate film sites such as Rotten Tomatoes tend to squish all the quoted reviewers together in one visual and evaluative field. Recently, Rotten Tomatoes has even begun grafting in audience comments, mutating into even more of a weedy, Franken-site hybrid.In the shrinking big picture of professional journalism in the age of Craigslist and Facebook, film criticism is only a small, if more battered, back page. Although Frey and Sayad competently treat the narrow issues, they tread lightly around the elephant in the (chat) room: the "free" and uncontrolled nature of Internet content that makes most for-profit news, arts, and culture sites slavishly dependent on (generically derived) advertising revenue, which is only a trickle compared to the streams that once flowed in print's heyday. …

Epicentre of an Earthquake: The Literary Sources of Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Though Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket was highly praised by critics and audiences when it opened in 1987, it has been somewhat neglected in the years that followed: far less studied in comparison with other films by Kubrick, maybe underestimated, or possibly misunderstood. The common perception of the film is exemplified by what Pauline Kael wrote: ‘after the first part reaches climax, the movie becomes dispersed, as if it had no story. It never regains its forward drive; the second part is almost a different picture’. But apparently, this is what Kubrick deliberately attempted: ‘The thing I’d really like to do’, he said, ‘is explode the narrative structure of movies. I want to do something earthshaking’. Where is Full Metal Jacket’s deep focus, then? Making extensive use of material from the Stanley Kubrick Archive – including books in Kubrick’s personal library, the numerous drafts of the screenplay and a wide set of handwritten notes – this article explores the crucial initial stage of production when the director worked on the narrative structure of his film. The literary and historical sources that Kubrick used to concoct his Vietnam movie are revealed here for the first time, in addition to the well-known sources of Gustav Hasford’s novel The Short-Timers, and Herr’s chronicle Dispatches. Influences from several other novels and reports about the Vietnam War have been backtracked, and their effect on distinct scenes, characters, and even lines of dialogue in the finished film is finally brought to light. By strictly focusing on what Kubrick wanted to do, and actually did, this article will show how Kubrick’s ‘method was to capture the visual equivalent to language’, as co-scenarist Michael Herr wrote.

Towards a Politics and Art of the Land: Gothic Cinema of the Australian New Wave and Its Reception by American Film Critics

This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode.

Shakespeare in America: an anthology from the Revolution to now

The history of Shakespeare in America, writes James Shapiro in his introduction to this groundbreaking anthology, is also the history of America itself. Shakespeare was a central, inescapable part of America s literary inheritance, and a prism through which crucial American issues revolution, slavery, war, social justice were refracted and understood. In tracing the many surprising forms this influence took, Shapiro draws on many genres poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, letters, movie reviews, comedy routines and on a remarkable range of American writers from Emerson, Melville, Lincoln, and Mark Twain to James Agee, John Berryman, Pauline Kael, and Cynthia Ozick. Americans of the revolutionary era ponder the question to sign or not to sign; Othello becomes the focal point of debates on race; the Astor Place riots, set off by a production of Macbeth, attest to the violent energies aroused by theatrical controversies; Jane Addams finds in King Lear a metaphor for American struggles between capital and labor. Orson Welles revolutionizes approaches to Shakespeare with his legendary productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar; American actors from Charlotte Cushman and Ira Aldridge to John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, and Marlon Brando reimagine Shakespeare for each new era. The rich and tangled story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own is a literary and historical revelation. As a special feature, the book includes a foreword by Bill Clinton, among the latest in a long line of American presidents, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, who, as the collection demonstrates, have turned to Shakespeare s plays for inspiration.

Filling up the glass: A look atthe historiography of screenwriting

Abstract This article covers the historiography of screenwriting over the past 60 years, discussing whether there has developed a critical mass of scholars, writers, and publishers in the area. It begins with writings in the fifties, sixties and seventies by such writers as Pauline Kael and Richard Corliss, then spends time with the author’s experiences in writing about the history of screenwriting, and the problems he faced dealing with publishers. From there, the article moves on to the development of books about the history of screenwriting and screenwriters. There is a brief history of the rise, death and revival of Creative Screenwriting, which started as an academic journal and evolved into a magazine. The article notes that non-American academics got into the field earlier and in more depth than the Americans. The reasons American academia avoided the study of screenwriting are discussed, as is the recent growing involvement of American academics in the field.

Pauline Kael and the western genre as critical displacement of self &amp; nation: Metaphorics and affects of ‘taste’ in American film criticism

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) is one of the most influential American film critics of the second half of the twentieth century. Many people are writing on her presently, with at least half an eye to her future cultural, political and historical importance. Certainly the full impact of Kael’s work, both within and beyond the borders of cinema (however defined), has not yet been established. This article unpacks the mechanisms and operations of ‘taste’ in Kael’s writings by using two notions drawn from Roland Barthes’ observations about another key figure of current cultural critique: Julia Kristeva. The comparison of Kael with Kristeva is not dwelt upon; instead, the article focuses on how Kael used the concepts of ‘taste’ and ‘dis-taste’ to draw her readership into a field of what might be termed ‘permanent dissent’. This article concludes by sketching out why Jewish-American Kael’s taste might endure, through the dual transition she occupies from a Cold War to a post-Cold War period, and from an era when cinema was the supreme, undisputed, screen artform, to the rise of the myriad screen technologies of the networked, Internet age.

Book Review: Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow

Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark. Brian Kellow. New York, NY: Viking Books, 2011. 360 pp. $27.95 hbk. $18 pbk.Pauline Kael has been described as the preeminent film critic of the twentieth century. If this is hyperbole, it is right in synch with her style, both personal and on the written page. With the ranks of film critics being decimated, as they frequently are among the first to be cut from the editorial staffs of struggling publications, Brian Kellow's illuminating biography, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, seems almost like a relic of a distant age. It is also an irresistible read.It was one of those harmonic convergences of luck and timing (and more than a little talent) that brought Kael to The New Yorker in 1967, at a time when American movies were crawling out from under the strictures of the Production Code and into a renaissance of filmmaking that lasted until the conglomerates, which now owned the studios, brought in a new and for the most part soulless age to motion pictures.Although Kael had written for other publications, her career really got rolling with a long takeout on the film Bonnie and Clyde running in the Oct. 21, 1967, issue of the magazine. She never looked back. The New Yorker might not have been her first choice of publications, but editor William Shawn gave her the one thing she truly craved: space, and lots of it. Shawn's editorial policy included his non-interference with his writers, and Kael's reviews ran as long as she cared to make them. And she wrote and wrote and wrote. Kael had a consuming passion for the movies that lasted until she died. In fact, it seems to have been the one consuming passion of her life. Although she had one daughter, Gina James, she never married, and many of her relationships were with homosexual and bisexual men, one of whom was Gina's father.A film critic, and one as controversial as Kael proved to be, might seem an outre subject for author Kellow, who is the features editor for Opera News, and whose previous books include biographies of Ether Merman, Eileen Farrell, and the acting Bennett family. But his treatment of Kael is even-handed and his writing is fluid and comprehensive. She was, after all, a diva. In his acknowledgements, he cites almost 150 interviews and the bibliography lists over ninety books, including all thirteen of Kael's own.The book is organized chronologically, beginning with Kael's childhood on a Petaluma, California, chicken ranch, where her Polish immigrant Jewish parents figured they could make a life for a growing family. Just before the stock market crash in 1929, her father lost the ranch and the family moved to San Francisco. Her West Coast roots never lefther and provoked in her a kind of intellectual defensiveness and a reflexive dislike of the New York publishing establishment, even though her career and influence were solidified at that most East Coast establishment publication, The New Yorker.In her reviews (and in conversation), she could be arrogant, self-serving, mean spirited, and in print as scatological as the proper gentleman editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, would let her be. In fact, her taste for the audacious and trashy and her desire to goad Shawn led to shouting matches between them that lasted for decades. She was a bully, but unlike most bullies, she never backed down. When she found directors she truly admired (Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Paul Mazursky), she would turn them into drinking buddies, often offering advice on scripts and casting, essentially trouncing the accepted boundaries of the critic-filmmaker relationship. But she could as easily turn on them and cut them out of her life either for some perceived personal slight, or the seeming loss of that director's particular gifts. She had favorite actors: Streisand, Debra Winger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brando, DeNiro, but was also quick to write exactly what she thought of them when they failed to live up to what she thought their performances should be. …

Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study (review)

Reviewed by: Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study Leonard Engel Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study. By John L. Simons and Robert Merrill. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. 232 pages, $40.00. Do we need another book on Sam Peckinpah? A resounding "Yes" if it is as original and provocative as Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns is. None of the previous books on Peckinpah has focused so intensely on tragic action, specifically, on "the tragically irreversible nature of time" in his films (1). Concentrating on five Westerns and acknowledging how each is different from the others, John Simons and Robert Merrill define their chief task as honoring and explaining "these differences even as we pursued the features which make our five tragic Westerns tragic" (1). This is a novel approach. Excellent studies of Peckinpah's Westerns have been made by Jim Kitses, Michael Bliss, David Weddle, and Paul Seydor, among others, but none has so closely followed the major characters' pathways to "disastrous ... tragic conclusions" (2). Peckinpah, the authors conclude, "is the only tragedian among the major Western directors" (2); none of them possessed his tragic vision. These are bold statements and, no doubt, will be vigorously debated, but Simons and Merrill provide solid arguments and cogent examples to support their views. While exploring Peckinpah's tragic vision in chapter 1, the authors render an extensive survey in which they discuss the nature of tragic action, from its classical origins to the present, and apply it to well-known and little-known Westerns (this may be the best chapter ever written on the subject). Then in the remaining five chapters they discuss each of Peckinpah's tragic Westerns: Chapter 2—"The Double Vision of Tragedy in Ride the High Country," 3—"Noon Wine: A Tragic Pastoral," 4—"The Tragedy of Love in The Wild Bunch," 5—"Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Tragedy of Pat Garrett," and 6—"Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: The Revenger's Tragedy." Time and space do not permit comment on each of these chapters, but a brief word about chapter 5 is necessary. In addition to providing a thorough analysis of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, including extensive comment on the various versions that have appeared since the theatrical release in 1973, Simons and Merrill critique the key elements of the other major Billy the Kid films (especially The Left-Handed Gun, director Arthur Penn, 1958) and show not only how these films influenced Peckinpah, but how he subtly nuanced scenes and dialogue to achieve his own artistic designs. This chapter is an amazing tour de force in film criticism. As Peckinpah's admirers know, most of his films have engendered controversy, some of it volatile (recall Pauline Kael's famous statement in a New Yorker review about fascism in Straw Dogs [1971]: "the first American film that is a fascist work of art" [vol. 47, no. 50, January 29, 1972, p. 84]), but the three films examined in the latter three chapters, Wild Bunch [End Page 224] (1969), Pat Garrett, and Bring Me the Head (1974), have also been at the storm center of heated debate on numerous occasions. In their penetrating analysis and meticulous research, Simons and Merrill integrate their own incisive exploration with the major issues raised by critics, and they also provide a valuable guide to the filming and postproduction of the films. Anyone wishing to learn about the various versions of each film, the cuts made, the material restored, followed by more cuts, and then more restorations (and, of course, the interminable battles Peckinpah had with the Hollywood money men) need go no farther. It's all here: in the discussion and in the many footnotes—a masterly piece of research, rendered in highly readable prose. Paul Seydor is probably the foremost scholar of Peckinpah, the one who has written most extensively, persuasively, and passionately about his Westerns. In their examination of the nature of tragic action and the tragic hero, Simons and Merrill have gone beyond Seydor; their analyses have opened up these five films and have provided new, in some cases stunning, insights. They have helped us see and understand how Peckinpah "transformed" the...

The Problem with Film Criticism

The debate about the state of film criticism has settled—or calcified—into two camps: traditional print critics claim the Internet has replaced expertise with amateurs, fanboys, and obscurantists. Web enthusiasts counter that we're in a new golden age of film criticism and accuse the traditionalists of jealousy, resentment, and Ludditism. In other words: idealization of the past versus idealization of the present; resolution via what Pauline Kael once referred to as "saphead objectivity."

‘A straight heterosexual film’: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in "Saturday Night Fever"

Underpinning "Saturday Night Fever"’s representation of masculinity is a seeming paradox, exemplified in Pauline Kael’s disclaimer that ‘it’s a straight heterosexual film’ despite the obvious similarities to "Scorpio Rising"’s gay bikers. While Tony Manero is represented as a sexist, homophobic, and racist heterosexual man, he also indulges in the traditionally feminizing activities of disco dancing and self-grooming. This article explores the construction of Tony Manero’s masculinity by taking a closer look at these two activities and situating their cinematic representation in the American cultural context of the late 70s. In the case of disco, a distinction between disco’s gay origins and subsequent entry into mainstream culture explains "Fever"’s hetero-normative version of disco. The article subsequently turns the attention to the film’s grooming scene, which poses less easily redeemable challenges to Tony’s machismo through intertextual and contextual references to homosexuality. I extrapolate between possible explanations, drawing on Richard Dyer’s work on representation and the discourse on the 70s men’s liberation movement. In the article’s final section, I turn the attention to the connections between masculinity and ethnicity, examining how the 70s revival of ethnicity proposed a historically specific a model of the Italian-American man, unencumbered by the requirements of new masculinities. I argue that "Fever" replicates this model to infuse into the representation of Tony Manero styles and behaviours that would have otherwise signified homosexuality.

"Common People with Common Feelings:" Pauline Kael, James Agee, and the Public Sphere of Popular Film Criticism

This essay focuses on the writings of Pauline Kael and James Agee as the leading examples of the rhetoric of American popular film criticism, which the author suggests is chatacterized by three elements: the critic's effort to distance him / herself from both other critics and the entertainment industry; to emphasize the personal and subjective nature of his / her responses; and to use his / her writing as the catalyst for a public sphere of film response.

Jean-Luc Godard: The Cinema in Doubt

Jean-Luc Godard: The Cinema in Doubt

The Žižekian Thing: A Disciplinary Blind Spot

Previous articleNext article No AccessArticleThe Žižekian Thing: A Disciplinary Blind SpotChris DumasChris Dumas Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 37, Number 2Winter 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/657292 Views: 87Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2011 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/11/3702-0003$10.00. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Rex Butler William Rothman's Vertigo, Film-Philosophy 18, no.11 (Dec 2014): 35–49.https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2014.0004

Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the “Death of the Western” in American Film Criticism

I am showing the Old West as it really was . . . Americans treat westerns with too much rhetoric. -Sergio Leone (qtd. in Hi-Ho, Denaro! 57) WHEN ITALIAN DIRECTOR SERGIO LEONE'S/4 Fistful of Dollars arrived in the United States in early 1967, the American film industry and the critics who observed it were in state of ferment. Critics sense that the American cinema was changing and that its old pieties and genres, often spoken of in the same breath, were in vital sense dying out. Among them, the was perhaps the greatest barometer- the genre long seen as most uniquely American, most assuredly linked to the national character and mythology, seemed to be evolving into new, rougher beast. And for critics, Sergio Leone's films were clearly part of the problem. Leone's Dollars trilogy, starting with A Fistful of Dollars (1964, US release: January 1967) and continuing with Fora Few Dollars More (1965, US release: May 1967) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966, US release: December, 1967), was neltherthe entirety nor the beginning of the Western cycle in Italy,' but for Americans Leone's films represented the true beginning of the Italian invasion of their privileged cultural form (Liehm 186). Hindsight tempts one to simply question critics' judgment: after all, Leone's films have been vindicated by continued popular and critical interest, and their place in the now sturdy family tree of post-studio revisionist Westerns suggests their healthy influence on the evolution of the Christopher Frayling, in his noted book on the Italian spaghetti Western, describes American critical reception of the spaghetti cycle as to a large extent, confined to debate about the 'cultural roots' of the American/Hollywood Western. He remarks that few critics dared admit that they were, in fact, bored with an exhausted Hollywood genre. Pauline Kael, he notes, was willing to acknowledge this critical ennui and thus appreciate how film such as Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961) could exploit conventions while debunking its morality (39). This revisionist project, Frayling argues along with many others (e.g., Bondanella 255), was the key to Leone's success and, to some degree, to that of the spaghetti genre as whole. The term sterile debate, however, effaces the almost venomous hostility that greeted Leone's Dollars trilogy in American critical circles. Critics found the Dollars films deeply problematic on number of levels: their unusually graphic and cynical violence, their ambivalent relationship to historical and generic realism, and their relationship to the history of the genre as whole. However, film critics of the time were not merely displeased by these films' perceived aesthetic flaws: they were bitterly resistant to what they saw as an existential threat to the genre and to some extent their understanding of the American cinema as whole, for in Leone's films critics found echoes, and perhaps causes, of deeply disturbing trends in domestic film culture- trends that would later culminate in what would be dubbed the New Hollywood. However, Leone's films seem to have had uniquely distasteful element for American critics of the late 1960s beyond their place in broader shifts in American film culture, for whereas films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) split critics into hotly contentious camps, the Dollars films were simply generally excoriated. Our goal here is not to say that critics of the period were defending critical good taste against the barbarians at the gates or that they somehow didn't get it. Rather, we seek an understanding of moment in the history of the American popular critical institutions wherein critics attempted to resist aesthetic change, refused to acknowledge emerging artistic norms as legitimate, and in so doing attempted to defend the genre as an institution against Leone's illegitimate revisionism and the wider developments it typified. …

American Movies' "Closest Equivalent to Restoration Comedy"

"IT MAY BE AMERICAN MOVIES' CLOSEST EQUIVALENT TO RESTORATION COMEDY" (Pauline Kael on Bringing Up Baby) I will attempt to ascertain the accuracy of Pauline Kael's comment. It is a difficult issue, demanding a telescoping of two distinctive cultures, nations and media as well as an exploration of the concept of genre and intertextuality. In many ways Kael's assertion - written, as she herself attests 'hurriedly', being 'frequently dependent on [her] old, spotty memories'(1) - is superficial and breaks down after analysis. Her comparison is flawed in its assumptions that genres can contain such diverse works as they denote, over a fifty-year period on the one hand and a 10 year period on the other; while the idea that these genres can then be parallelled with each other is yet further problematic. Despite this, Kael's perhaps unthinking observation proves a worthwhile area to explore and...