Pauline Kael Quotes & Sayings

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize. — Pauline Kael

Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things. — Pauline Kael

Pryor's comedy isn't based on suspiciousness about whites, or on anger, either; he's gone way past that. Whites are unbelievable to him. — Pauline Kael

The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies — Pauline Kael

If there is any test that can be applied to movies, it's that the good ones never make you feel virtuous. — Pauline Kael

Moviegoers like to believe that those they have made stars are great actors. People used to say that Gary Cooper was a fine actor probably because when they looked in his face they were ready to give him their power of attorney. — Pauline Kael

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down. — Pauline Kael

An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone
to share the giddy high excitement you feel
is enough for a friendship. — Pauline Kael

I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them. — Pauline Kael

When I see those ads with the quote 'You'll have to see this picture twice,' I know it's the kind of picture I don't want to see once. — Pauline Kael

Trash has given us an appetite for art. — Pauline Kael

Economy, speed, nervousness, and desperation produce the final wasteful, semi-incoherent movies we see. — Pauline Kael

What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism. — Pauline Kael

Nobody really controls a production, now; the director is on his own, even if he's insecure, careless, or nuts. — Pauline Kael

We read critics for the perceptions, for what they tell us that we didn't fully grasp when we saw the work. The judgments we can usually make for ourselves. — Pauline Kael

If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too. — Pauline Kael

A book might be written on the injustice of the just. — Pauline Kael

The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself. — Pauline Kael

Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium; his hair is coordinated with his teeth. — Pauline Kael

A steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation. — Pauline Kael

We may be reaching the end of the era in which individual movies meant something to people. In the new era, movies may just mean a barrage of images. — Pauline Kael

When the bespangled Miss Charisse wraps her phenomenal legs around [Fred] Astaire, she can be forgiven everything - even the fact that she reads her lines as if she learned them phonetically. — Pauline Kael

If you're afraid of movies that excite your senses, you're afraid of movies. — Pauline Kael

Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided ... — Pauline Kael

A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is. — Pauline Kael

Great movies are rarely perfect movies. — Pauline Kael

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them. — Pauline Kael

There is something spurious about the very term 'a movie made for TV,' because what you make for TV is a TV program. — Pauline Kael

Vulgarity is not as destructive to an artist as snobbery. — Pauline Kael

For a while in the twenties and thirties, art was talked about as a substitute for religion; now B movies are a substitute for religion. — Pauline Kael

Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them. — Pauline Kael

This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness. — Pauline Kael

Is there something in druggy subjects that encourages directors to make imitation film noir? Film noir itself becomes an addiction. — Pauline Kael

Kevin Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head. The Indians should have called him 'Plays with Camera.' — Pauline Kael

We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times. — Pauline Kael

In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others. — Pauline Kael

Imagining [The Wizard of Oz] without Judy Garland is a bit like dancing on wet cement: you can do it, but why would you want to? — Pauline Kael

Her only flair is in her nostrils. — Pauline Kael

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising. — Pauline Kael

In San Francisco, vulgarity, "bad taste," ostentation are regarded as a kind of alien blight, an invasion or encroachment from outside. In Los Angeles, there is so much money and power connected with ostentation that is no longer ludicrous: it commands a kind of respect. For if the mighty behave like this, then quiet good taste means that you can't afford the conspicuous expenditures, and you become a little ashamed of your modesty and propriety. — Pauline Kael

Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they're being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out. — Pauline Kael

The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you've seen. — Pauline Kael

Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons. — Pauline Kael

Tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic. — Pauline Kael

I'm frequently asked why I don't write my memoirs. I think I have. — Pauline Kael

I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know. — Pauline Kael

It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack. — Pauline Kael

A country which accepts wars as contests between good and evil is suffering from the delusion that the morality play symbolizes real political conflicts. — Pauline Kael

Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful
our own innocence. — Pauline Kael

When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture. — Pauline Kael

When a picture can't make it on its own, the producers pull in a 'controversial' message - the way a couple whose marriage is falling apart decide to have a baby. — Pauline Kael

Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably. — Pauline Kael

Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there's nothing between the public and the advertisers. — Pauline Kael

I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon. — Pauline Kael

The worst thing about movie-making is that it's like life: nobody can go back to correct the mistakes. — Pauline Kael

Boobs on the make always try to impress with their high level of seriousness (wise guys, with their contempt for all seriousness. — Pauline Kael

It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make art. — Pauline Kael

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher. — Pauline Kael

If you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets. — Pauline Kael

An artist must either give up art or develop. — Pauline Kael

If there's anything to learn from the history of movies, it's that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence. — Pauline Kael

Part of growing up is developing a bullshit detector, and kids usually do a pretty fair job of wising each other up. — Pauline Kael

Being creative is having something to sell, or knowing how to sell something, or having sold something. It has taken over what we used to mean by being "wised up" knowing the tricks, the shortcuts. — Pauline Kael

In show business there's not much point in asking yourself if someone really likes you or if he just thinks you can be useful to him, because there's no difference. — Pauline Kael

I believe that we respond most and best to work in any art form (and to other experience as well) if we are pluralistic, flexible, relative in our judgments, if we are electic. — Pauline Kael

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. — Pauline Kael

The trouble with this kind of Hegelian prose is that the reader is at first amused by what seem to be harmless metaphors, and soon the metaphors are being used as if they were observable historical tendencies and aesthetic phenomenon, and next the metaphor becomes a stick to castigate those who have other tastes, and other metaphors. — Pauline Kael

What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation. — Pauline Kael

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. — Pauline Kael

For some strange reason we don't go to charming, light movies anymore. People expect a movie to be heavy and turgid, like "American Beauty." We've become a heavy-handed society. — Pauline Kael

In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars. — Pauline Kael

There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counter-balance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films - the freedom to analyze their implications ... How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience? — Pauline Kael

Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition. — Pauline Kael

Television represents what happens to a medium when the artists have no power and the businessmen are in full, unquestioned control. — Pauline Kael

Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 a whole community saying grace made me expect the worst. — Pauline Kael

McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business; they've freed people from the shame of not reading. They've rationalized becoming stupid and watching television. — Pauline Kael

Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose-selling-that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise. — Pauline Kael

If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be? — Pauline Kael

Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts - it's when those who shouldn't, do. — Pauline Kael

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. — Pauline Kael

At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. — Pauline Kael

For perhaps most Americans, TV is an apppliance, not to be used selectively but to be turned on - there's always something to watch. — Pauline Kael

Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough. — Pauline Kael

All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for. — Pauline Kael

Sex is the great leveler, taste the great divider. — Pauline Kael

The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new — Pauline Kael

There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory. — Pauline Kael

Where there is a will, there is a way. If there is a chance in a million that you can do something, anything, to keep what you want from ending, do it. Pry the door open or, if need be, wedge your foot in that door and keep it open. — Pauline Kael

Reality, like God and History, tends to direct people to wherever they want to go. — Pauline Kael

If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. — Pauline Kael

The movies have been so rank the last couple of years that when I see people lining up to buy tickets I sometimes think that the movies aren't drawing an audience - they're inheriting an audience. People just want to go to a movie. They're stung repeatedly, yet their desire for a good movie - for any movie - is so strong that all over the country they keep lining up. — Pauline Kael

Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored. — Pauline Kael