Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael

182 Pages·2009·1.13 MB·English

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Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael:
The Duel For the Soul of American Film Criticism

By Inge Fossen
Høgskolen i Lillehammer /
Lillehammer University College

Avdeling for TV-utdanning og Filmvitenskap /
Department of Television and Film Studies (TVF)
Spring 2009

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For My Parents

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”When we think about art and how it is thought about […] we refer both to the practice of art and
the deliberations of criticism.”
―Charles Harrison & Paul Wood

“[H]abits of liking and disliking are lodged in the mind.”

―Bernard Berenson

“The motion picture is unique […] it is the one medium of expression where America has
influenced the rest of the world”

―Iris Barry

“[I]f you want to practice something that isn’t a mass art, heaven knows there are plenty of other
ways of expressing yourself.”
―Jean Renoir

“If it's all in the script, why shoot the film?”
―Nicholas Ray

“Author + Subject = Work”
―Andrè Bazin

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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements p. 6.

Introduction p. 8.

Defining Art in Relation to Criticism p. 14.

The Popular As a Common Ground– And an Outline of Study p. 19.

Career Overview – Andrew Sarris p. 29.

Career Overview – Pauline Kael p. 32.

American Film Criticism From its Beginnings to the 1950s –
And a Note on Present Challenges p. 35.

Notes on Axiological Criticism, With Sarris and Kael as Examples p. 41.

Movies: The Desperate Art p. 72.

Auteurism – French and American p. 82.

Notes on the Auteur Theory 1962 p. 87.

"Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris" – Kael's Rebuttal p. 93.

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Raising Kane: Kael As Film Historian p. 112.

Sarris As Film Historian: Directors and Directions Part One :The Rankings. p. 125.

Directors and Directions Part Two: Toward a Theory of Film History p. 135.

Final Thoughts p. 153.

Conlusion – What Has Been Done? p. 165.

Bibliography p. 168.

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Preface and Acknowledgements

A while back, my undertaking to write this thesis seemed permanently stalled. I am grateful to my
supervisor Søren Birkvad, who essentially gave me the same advice that Andrew Sarris had been
given by his editor while he was writing his last book: “One can never finish. One can only stop.”
The twin subject of Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael had been in the back of mind long before I put
pen to paper. In my late teens, I saved up to buy a Laserdisc-player. (It is a nostalgic reminder of
my advanced years that I came of age cinematically in an era before DVD, VOD and High
Definition.) My friends and I would devour the films of the New Hollywood filmmakers and
discuss performances, sequences, camera placement, and themes. I guess in some ways I owe this
thesis to Ole Jacob Rosten, Jarle Øverland and Trond Ola Wiigen, with whom I have shared so
many movies and discussed so many stylistic epiphanies—to use a phrase Sarris is fond of.
I can still remember vividly the elation I felt the first time I saw Mean Streets, in a
widescreen Laserdisc transfer. I did not realize it at the time, but my friends and I were actually
applying Sarris’s critical methods to the films Kael adored and fought for. Not only that, we were
responding to what she saw as the particular greatness of movies. As a freshman, I discovered not
only the writings of Sarris and Kael, but also fell in love with the old Hollywood movies to which
Sarris has dedicated his career. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.
Many people have shaped this thesis in profound ways. I would like to thank Kristin
Sandvik for going above and beyond the call of duty to get the source material I needed, or in some
cases, simply thought I needed. I also extend my heartfelt thanks to Geir Neverdal and Kari
Bjølgerud Hansen, without whom I could have never written a text of this magnitude and
complexity in what is for me a second language. Thanking your therapist strikes me as a uniquely
American thing to do, but since this is a thesis about American film criticism, it seems appropriate.
So, thank you, Hilde Johanne Aafoss. Our discussions of everything in my life during the past few
years (including this thesis) have been an inspirational factor in simply getting the thing done. On a
similar note, I also thank my brother Roald Fossen for technical assistance when it seemed my
computer was about to give in. Ane Faugstad Aarø and David M. Smith have served me well as
proof-readers.
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My friend and fellow student Håvard Berstad has read the manuscript throughout and has
been unstinting with his perceptive comments. I should go on record to thank Pauline Ann Hoath at
the University of Bergen for her insights on pop art and the cultural climate in the 1960s.
Most of all, I would like to thank Stèfan Snævarr. Although his direct involvement in this project
has been less than nominal, his intellectual keenness and unwavering generosity have influenced it
in more ways than I can remember, much less mention. You have all made this work possible. Its
faults are of course entirely my own doing.
Inge Fossen, April 2009, Uppsala

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Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael: Analogies and Contrasts in
the Duel for the Soul of American Film Criticism

Introduction

In his book, The Function of Criticism (1984), Terry Eagleton makes the following
statement, which I find rather depressing because substantially true:

[C]riticism today lacks all substantive social function. It is either part of the public relations branch of the
literary industry, or a matter wholly internal to the academies. […] The contradiction in which criticism finally
runs aground is one between inchoate amateurism and socially marginal professionalism.1

It would not be unfair to say that this polarisation of criticism has become increasingly pronounced
in writing about film—even more so than in writing about literature. On the one hand, there are
those instantly quotable, nearly subliterate exclamation blurbs (the WOW being the extreme, but far
from unheard-of case) by more or less nondescript general interest reviewers diffused through the
various and ever-expanding channels of mass media that serve merely to prop up massive ad
campaigns.2 At the other extreme are the various branches of scholarly criticism, laden with highly
specialized jargon and totally unconcerned with issues of artistic merit.
The latter has been the case in most of what is usually labelled film theory since the mid-
sixties. At present, a somewhat similar trend is making itself strongly felt in the field of academic
film history, which is becoming less concerned with detailing the genesis of masterpieces, seminal
turning points of the medium and other canon-related questions, shifting instead to more holistic and
empirical approach—no doubt to bring film history closer in line with other branches of hyphenate
history like social and cultural history, which are older and more prestigious disciplines. I believe

1 Terry Eagleton (1984) The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism London: Verso
Books. p.7ff

2 The internet and the spread of blogging may also be the ultimate step towards making film criticism
democratic in the banal sense of being a “free for all” genre for the millions who have access. This development also
raises disconcerting questions of editorial responsibility, which, admittedly, are more pressing in other areas of
journalism.
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the very broad distinctions outlined above to be, on the whole, a quite adequate summary of the
present situation.
Sceptical and historically-minded readers may object to my thinly-veiled implication that
film theory and film history are concomitant with criticism, or even special branches of criticism at
large. I stand by this implication, which cannot be entirely original, since it is also present in the
quotation from Terry Eagleton presented in the opening paragraph of this thesis.
Regarding film history, it is my firm conviction that the only truly relevant difference
between aesthetic film history and film criticism is that the historian by definition has to deal with
the tension between change and stasis over time, whereas the mere critic may potentially disregard
the temporal aspect. Still, this a minority view, and for practical purposes I shall modify it
somewhat. It is expedient for analytical purposes to distinguish between critical film historyy and
empirical or contextual film history, and I shall do so in this thesis. I shall give a much fuller
account of the relationship between film history and film criticism in my examination of our
protagonists’ sharply divergent efforts as film historians.
Returning to Eagleton's lament and taking it at face value, I wish to compare two film
critics, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, whose bodies of work are neither socially marginal nor
amateurish. On the contrary, I believe these two to be socially substantial as well as aesthetically
significant. While Susan Sontag should probably be regarded as prima inter pares among American
critics and cultural commentators in the second half of 20th century, Sarris and Kael belong in her
company, at least, as distinctive critical essayists and accomplished belletrists. Unlike Sontag,
however, they must be counted as “dedicated no bones about it film critics.”3 They broke into print
at a very pregnant moment in the mid-fifties, a decade or so before the rising tide irrevocably broke
the dam of resistance against film scholarship in America.
In that cultural climate, film critics and reviewers working the journalistic beat in general
interest magazines and specialized, almost underground film magazines could, if they were smart
enough and bullish enough and witty enough, become instrumental in defining film as an academic
field that exploded in the culturally volatile sixties—and matter to moviegoers at the same time.
Sarris put it like this when he looked back on the sixties from the vantage point of 1973:

3 Francis Davies (2002) Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael. New York: DaCapo Press. p.62.
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While my debate with Pauline Kael in Film Quarterly attracted a great deal of attention as a squabble between
two schools of thought, it served also to propel two obscure polemicists from the little magazine backwaters
into the mainstream of the critical establishment.4

It is worth belabouring at this juncture that Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael are journalists first and
foremost. Notwithstanding the considerable amount of important interpretive news reporting, the
perceptive reader may counter by stressing that the journalistic ideal is embodied in our collective
psyche as the newshounds who simply follow and report the breaking news, without any literary or
rhetorical pretensions. I hereby submit that Sarris and Kael, by virtue of their work as film critics,
primarily belong to cultural journalism.
According to Norwegian media scholar Martin Eide, the fabled newshound is the
journalistic ideal type: a reporter who does not see himself as someone actively engaged in the
construction of narratives and the production of ideology.5 If one requires an example of this ideal,
the nominally emancipated comic book character Lois Lane strikes me as its purest distillation
imaginable in fiction, though we encounter them (the real ones) several times a day on CNN. It is
my contention that the conscious construction of narratives and the production of ideology is exactly
what the cultural journalist or critic, as opposed to the news reporter, is engaged in. When Sarris
returned from a life-changing spell in Paris, he returned, by his own admission, with “a foreign
ideology”:

As I remember that fateful year in Paris, deliriously prolonged conversations at sidewalk cafes still assault my
ears with what in Paris passed for profundity and in New York for peculiarity. I have never really recovered
from the Parisian heresy (in New York eyes) concerning the sacred importance of the cinema. Hence I returned
to New York not merely a cultist but a cultist with a foreign ideology.6

Pauline Kael's criticism, reflecting her complex attitudes about the tension between trash and art, is
of course no less ideological for being indigenously American and for revolving around a
countercultural understanding of Art and Pop. I ought to move swiftly to dispel any lingering
suspicions that the mere mention of the word ideology entails a dour Marxist exposé of American
film criticism’s false consciousness. Far from it. I feel the need to point this out, since Western

4 Andrew Sarris (1978) Politics and Cinema. New York: University of Columbia Press p. 188.
5 Martin Eide (1991) Nyhetens Interesse-Nyhetsjournalistikk Mellom Tekst og Kontekst. Oslo:
Universitetsforlaget. p. 10.
6 Andrew Sarris (1970) Confessions of a Cultist: On the Cinema 1955/1969. New York. Simon & Schuster. p.
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