“Hollywood, 1969. I wish I had lived it!!” read one of the promotional phrases for ‘Once upon a time in Hollywood’, the novel that Quentin Tarantino wrote in 2021 based on his 2019 film of the same name. One of the most influential people in assessing that New Hollywood was the critic Paulina Kael.who contributed to the weekly ‘The New Yorker’ between 1969 and 1991 and was the maximum defender of the angry, rabid and virulent cinema of Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma, whom he turned into banners of that new, more indomitable cinema cooked at the end of the 60s. He went so far as to call them to the disobedience of the studios, that they cut all relations with the big production companies to carry out their most personal projects. Schrader, who was then shaping his script for ‘Taxi Driver’ between drug use and Calvinist doubts, has always said that Kael was like his second mother to him.
In ‘Cinema Meditations’, Tarantino’s book that analyzes all that time and that the filmmaker will come to present in Barcelona on April 9, Kael occupies a place of honor. The director of ‘Pulp fiction’ writes about Kael who was able to recognize in what for her was a fascist film, ‘Dirty Harry’, his aesthetic values and skill in making, and his ability to describe Clint Eastwood’s antagonist, the psychopathic Scorpio –inspired by the Zodiac killer– without ever mentioning the name of the character or the actor who plays him. Tarantino also speaks of the followers of Kael’s critical line as “the Paulettes” –great defenders of Jonathan Demme’s cinema long before he became famous with ‘The Silence of the Lambs’– and always puts her first in his preferences when reading about movies.
Well, the great mystery of American cinema in recent years has finally been revealed. Tarantino had announced long ago that after making a tenth feature film he would leave his job as director. He talked about many projects, from a third installment of “Kill Bill” to a movie in the “Star trek” franchise. Nothing at all. Finally, Tarantino has opted for the most unexpected, neither more nor less than a kind of ‘biopic’ by Kael. It will be the first film in history centered on a person who is dedicated to film criticism.
They will recognize that as a film in itself and as a ‘Tarantinian’ farewell to the filming sets, ‘The movie critic’, the title with which the project is announced, has many incentives. Rob Garver made the documentary ‘What she said: The art of Pauline Kael’ in 2018. Criticism elevated to art. Oscar Wilde had already written it many years before in his memorable essay ‘The critic as artist’ (referring to art and literary criticism).
The influence on his cinema
Tarantino has gone so far as to say of Kael that he has been as influential to him as any filmmaker, and the director of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ has been influenced by a few. Kael described as few (and few) the concerns, doubts and contradictions of that New Hollywood that completely changed the face of hegemonic cinema between the late 60s and early 70s, a turbulent era (the Vietnam War, the movement of civil rights, the Black Panthers, the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bob Kennedy, the Woodstock festival, the events of Altamont, the conversion of Cassius Clay into Muhammad Ali, the Nation of Islam, the Manson clan, the national convention of the Democratic Party of 1968, the Wartergate scandal) that had its echo in the new cinema. But Kael also came to wonder if this American cinema, the best of recent times, was suggesting that the only sensible recourse for the people of the country was to get high, in relation to the appearance in a chain of films like ‘Panic in Needle Park’, ‘Lenny’ or ‘Joe, American citizen’. Sex, drugs, violence and little rock’n’roll.
Kael, who died in 2001 at the age of 82, led a more or less bohemian life between New York and Berkeley, where she organized artistic evenings before dedicating herself to criticism.. She wrote some theatrical pieces, had a daughter with the experimental film director James Broughton, questioned the supposed objectivity of the critics, wrote many in the first person introducing personal experiences, collaborated on radio programs, programmed an alternative room in Berkeley, was also a critic of the women’s magazine ‘McCall’s’ and the first to claim ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ in an excellent text that opened the doors for her at ‘The New Yorker’, where for a time she alternated the review section with another woman, Penelope Gilliatt, quite influential also. Kael generated more than one controversy both because of her style and because of the cinema that she defended or attacked. But none of her texts would be more controversial than the essay on the paternity of the script of ‘Citizen Kane’, denying it to Orson Welles and attributing it to Herman Mankiewicz. Many of her disputed her theory, but ‘Mank’s’ David Fincher subscribed to her.