Pauline Kael: America’s Most Influential Film Critic
Pauline Kael (June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. She was one of the most influential American film critics of her era, known for witty, biting, and sharply focused reviews that often defied the consensus of her contemporaries.
Early Life and Education
Kael was born in Petaluma, California, the fifth and last child of Isaac Paul Kael and Judith Kael (née Friedman), Jewish immigrants from Poland who ran a chicken farm. When Kael was eight, her parents lost the farm and the family moved to San Francisco, where she attended Girls High School. Her early exposure to cinema came through her parents, who took her to silent films. She later wrote that D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) was “the greatest movie ever made” and that Renée Falconetti’s performance in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) was “the finest ever recorded on film.”
In 1936, Kael matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied philosophy, literature, and art. She worked as a teaching assistant, grading papers for multiple professors and offering advice to students. She dropped out in 1940, having intended to pursue law school, but instead moved to New York City with poet Robert Horan. Three years later she returned to Berkeley, where she led a bohemian life writing plays and working in experimental film. In 1948, she had a daughter, Gina James, with filmmaker James Broughton, whom she raised alone.
Career and Achievements
From her late teens through her thirties, Kael supported herself and her daughter through various odd jobs—nanny, cook, seamstress, violin teacher, advertising copywriter, and manuscript editor—deliberately choosing less time-intensive work to preserve energy for her own writing. In 1952, Peter D. Martin, editor of City Lights, overheard Kael arguing about films in a coffee shop and asked her to review Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight. Her dismissal of the film as “Slimelight” marked the beginning of her regular publication of film criticism in magazines.
Kael developed a distinctive critical voice that rejected what she called “saphead objectivity.” She incorporated autobiography into her reviews, famously describing her emotional response to Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) in a way that blended personal experience with film analysis. She broadcast many early reviews on Berkeley’s alternative public radio station KPFA. From the later 1950s onward, she made her living as a critic, and in 1955 married Edward Landberg, owner of the Berkeley Cinema-Guild and Studio. Landberg paid for her daughter’s heart surgery and made Kael the cinema’s manager, where she programmed films for the two-screen facility.
Notable Events and Milestones
Kael joined The New Yorker in 1968 and remained there until 1991, a tenure during which she championed international cinema and New Hollywood directors. She brought sustained critical attention to European and Asian filmmakers including Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Among American directors, she championed Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Mazursky, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola. Roger Ebert wrote in her obituary that Kael “had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades.” He noted that her approach was entirely personal, with “no theory, no rules, no guidelines, no objective standards.”
Awards and Honors
Kael’s critical writings were collected in The Age of Movies, published by the Library of America. Ebert wrote in a blurb for the collection that, like George Bernard Shaw, Kael “wrote reviews that will be read for their style, humor and energy long after some of their subjects have been forgotten.”
Additional Resources
Readers seeking more detailed information about Pauline Kael’s life, career, and critical legacy can consult her biography on Wikipedia and the Library of America edition of her collected writings. Her influence on American film criticism and cinema culture remains substantial, and her reviews continue to be studied by students of film and journalism.
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