Pauline Kael | Trash, Art, and the Movies - The Diigo Meta page

• 02 Sep 15
  

  ajhuggins
• 20 May 15
  

  cyarron
• 06 Mar 14
  

  Lenny Stastny

  ediated interactions have now beensuggested to be very important to NQO2 ligand recognition. Substrates and inhibitorsof NQO2 contain planar aro matic moieties that place to the active site andpile to the isoalloxazine ring of the flavin cofactor. For imatinib this role isperformed by the 4 pyri dyl 2 a

  peptide coupling

• 03 Sep 13
  

  Hans Petter Ellingsen

  criticism film

• 18 Aug 13
  

  shanucore

  But the big change is in our habits. If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the movies we want something good, something sustained, we don’t wan

  criticism art appreciation familiarity trash film

• 17 Mar 13
  

  JaneJ
• 28 Dec 11
  

  Michael Merry
• 20 Jun 10
  

  russellink

  This longer essay can be found in Kael’s collection Going Steady.
  Trash, Art, and the Movies
   
  
  I   
  
          Like those cynical heroes who were idealists before they discovered that the world was more rotten than they had been led to expect, we’re just about all of us displaced persons, “a long way from home.” When we feel defeated, when we imagine we could now perhaps settle for home and what it represents, that home no longer exists. But there are movie houses. In whatever city we find ourselves we can duck into a theatre and see on the screen our familiars—our old “ideals” aging as we are and no longer looking so ideal. Where could we better stoke the fires of our masochism than at rotten movies in gaudy seedy picture palaces in cities that run together, movies and anonymity a common denominator. Movies—a tawdry corrupt art for a tawdry corrupt world—fit the way we feel. The world doesn’t work the way the schoolbooks said it did and we are different from what our parents and teachers expected us to be. Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons. Because we feel low we sink in the boredom, relax in the irresponsibility, and maybe grin for a minute when the gunman lines up three men and kills them with a single bullet, which is no more “real” to us than the nursery-school story of the brave little tailor.
          We don’t have to be told those are photographs of actors impersonating characters. We know, and we often know much more about both the actors and the characters they’re impersonating and about how and why the movie has been made than is consistent with theatrical illusion. Hitchcock teased us by killing off the one marquee-name star early in “Psycho,” a gambit which startled us not just because of the suddenness of the murder or how it was committed but because it broke a box-office convention and so it was a joke played on what audiences have learned to respect. He broke the rules of the movie game and our response demonstrated how aware we are of commercial consider

• 01 Aug 08
  

  Sam Kitonyi

  essay film criticism *toblog

  • Alienation is the most common state of the knowledgeable movie audience, and though it has the peculiar rewards of low connoisseurship, a miser’s delight in small favors, we long to be surprised out of it—not to suspension of disbelief nor to a Brechtian kind of alienation, but to pleasure, something a man can call good without self-disgust.
  • . 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. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.
  • After a time, we may want more, but audiences who have been forced to wade through the thick middle-class padding of more expensively made movies to get to the action enjoy the nose-thumbing at “good taste” of cheap movies that stick to the raw materials. At some basic level they like the pictures to be cheaply done, they enjoy the crudeness; it’s a breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses.
  • Personally, I hope for a reasonable minimum of finesse, and movies like “Planet of the Apes” or “The Scalphunters” or “The Thomas Crown Affair” seem to me minimal entertainment for a relaxed evening’s pleasure. These are, to use traditional common-sense language, “good movies” or “good bad movies”—slick, reasonably inventive, well crafted. They are not art. But they are almost the maximum of what we’re now getting from American movies, and not only these but much worse movies are talked about as “art”—and are beginning to be taken seriously in our schools.
  • It’s preposterously egocentric to call anything we enjoy art—as if we could not be entertained by it if it were not; it’s just as preposterous to let prestigious, expensive advertising snow us into thinking we’re getting art for our money when we haven’t even had a good time. I did have a good time at “Wild in the Streets,” which is more than I can say for “Petulia” or “2001” or a lot of other highly praised pictures. “Wild in the Streets” is not a work of art, but then I don’t think “Petulia” or “2001” is either, though “Petulia” has that kaleidoscopic hip look and “2001” that new-techniques look which combined with “swinging” or “serious” ideas often pass for motion picture art.
  • One of the excruciating comedies of our time is attending the new classes in cinema at the high schools where the students may quite shrewdly and accurately interpret the plot developments in a mediocre movie in terms of manipulation for a desired response while the teacher tries to explain everything in terms of the creative artist working out his theme—as if the conditions under which a movie is made and the market for which it is designed were irrelevant, as if the latest product from Warners or Universal should be analyzed like a lyric poem.
  • people who like “The President’s Analyst” or “The Producers” or “The Odd Couple” don’t seem to be bothered by their technical ineptitude and visual ugliness. And on the other hand, the expensive slick techniques of ornately empty movies like “A Dandy in Aspic” can actually work against one’s enjoyment, because such extravagance and waste are morally ugly.
  • Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials—which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures.
  • And to talk about a movie like “The Graduate” in terms of movie technique is really a bad joke. Technique at this level is not of any aesthetic importance; it’s not the ability to achieve what you’re after but the skill to find something acceptable. One must talk about a film like this in terms of what audiences enjoy it for or one is talking gibberish—and might as well be analyzing the “art” of commercials.
  • The question people ask when they consider going to a movie is not “How’s it made?” but “What’s it about?” and that’s a perfectly legitimate question. (The next question—sometimes the first—is generally, “Who’s in it?” and that’s a good, honest question, too.) When you’re at a movie, you don’t have to believe in it to enjoy it but you do have to be interested.
  • We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art.
  • Do we need to lie and shift things to false terms—like those who have to say Sophia Loren is a great actress as if her acting had made her a star? Wouldn’t we rather watch her than better actresses because she’s so incredibly charming and because she’s probably the greatest model the world has ever known?
  • Not that the works we studied in school weren’t often great (as we discovered later) but that what the teachers told us to admire them for (and if current texts are any indication, are still telling students to admire them for) was generally so false and prettified and moralistic that what might have been moments of pleasure in them, and what might have been cleansing in them, and subversive, too, had been coated over.
  • And this, of course, is what we were running away from when we went to the movies. All week we longed for Saturday afternoon and sanctuary—the anonymity and impersonality of sitting in a theatre, just enjoying ourselves, not having to be responsible, not having to be “good.”
  • because, of course, we can use poor films as easily as good ones, perhaps more easily for such non-aesthetic purposes as shopping guides or aids to tripping.
  • What draws us to movies in the first place, the opening into other, forbidden or surprising, kinds of experience, and the vitality and corruption and irreverence of that experience are so direct and immediate and have so little connection with what we have been taught is art that many people feel more secure, feel that their tastes are becoming more cultivated when they begin to appreciate foreign films.
  • But it’s understandable that it’s easier for us, as Americans, to see art in foreign films than in our own, because of how we, as Americans, think of art. Art is still what teachers and ladies and foundations believe in, it’s civilized and refined, cultivated and serious, cultural, beautiful, European, Oriental: it’s what America isn’t, and it’s especially what American movies are not.
  • if an older generation was persuaded to dismiss trash, now a younger generation, with the press and the schools in hot pursuit, has begun to talk about trash as if it were really very serious art.
  • “The Thomas Crown Affair” is pretty good trash, but we shouldn’t convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from our study of the other arts. That’s being false to what we enjoy.
  • Trash doesn’t belong to the academic tradition, and that’s part of the fun of trash—that you know (or should know) that you don’t have to take it seriously, that it was never meant to be anymore than frivolous and trifling and entertaining.
  • It’s appalling to read solemn academic studies of Hitchcock or von Sternberg by people who seem to have lost sight of the primary reason for seeing films like “Notorious” or “Morocco”—which is that they were not intended solemnly, that they were playful and inventive and faintly (often deliberately) absurd. And what’s good in them, what relates them to art, is that playfulness and absence of solemnity.
  • movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them. The kitsch of an earlier era—even the best kitsch—does not become art, though it may become camp.
  • We are now told in respectable museum publications that in 1932 a movie like “Shanghai Express” “was completely misunderstood as a mindless adventure” when indeed it was completely understood as a mindless adventure.
  • It’s a peculiar form of movie madness crossed with academicism, this lowbrowism masquerading as highbrowism, eating a candy bar and cleaning an “allegorical problem of human faith” out of your teeth. If we always wanted works of complexity and depth we wouldn’t be going to movies about glamorous thieves and seductive women who sing in cheap cafés
  • What gives this trash a lift, what makes it entertaining is clearly that some of those involved, knowing of course that they were working on a silly shallow script and a movie that wasn’t about anything of consequence, used the chance to have a good time with it.
  • The pleasures of this kind of trash are not intellectually defensible. But why should pleasure need justification? Can one demonstrate that trash desensitizes us, that it prevents people from enjoying something better, that it limits our range of aesthetic response? Nobody I know of has provided such a demonstration.
  • It’s a very strange movie and people may, of course, like it for all sorts of reasons, but I think many may dislike it as I do and still feel they should be impressed by it; the educated and privileged may now be more susceptible to the mass media than the larger public—they’re certainly easier to reach.
  • “2001” celebrates the end of man; those beautiful mushroom clouds at the end of “Strangelove” were no accident. In “2001, A Space Odyssey,” death and life are all the same: no point is made in the movie of Gary Lockwood’s death—the moment isn’t even defined—and the hero doesn’t discover that the hibernating scientists have become corpses. That’s unimportant in a movie about the beauties of resurrection.
  • Part of the fun of movies is in seeing “what everybody’s talking about,” and if people are flocking to a movie, or if the press can con us into thinking that they are, then ironically, there is a sense in which we want to see it, even if we suspect we won’t enjoy it, because we want to know what’s going on.
  • Movies like “Morgan!” or “Georgy Girl” or “The Graduate”—aesthetically trivial movies which, however, because of the ways some people react to them, enter into the national bloodstream—become cultural and psychological equivalents of watching a political convention—to observe what’s going on. And though this has little to do with the art of movies, it has a great deal to do with the appeal of movies.
  • The high school and college students identifying with Georgy Girl or Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin are not that different from the stenographer who used to live and breathe with the Joan Crawford-working girl and worry about whether that rich boy would really make her happy—and considered her pictures “great.” They don’t see the movie as a movie but as part of the soap opera of their lives.
  • It’s almost painful to tell kids who have gone to see “The Graduate” eight times that once was enough for you because you’ve already seen it eighty times with Charles Ray and Robert Harron and Richard Barthelmess and Richard Cromwell and Charles Farrell. How could you convince them that a movie that sells innocence is a very commercial piece of work when they’re so clearly in the market to buy innocence?
  • 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. Probably a large part of the older audience gives up movies for this reason—simply that they’ve seen it before. And probably this is why so many of the best movie critics quit.
  • But the big change is in our habits. If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the movies we want something good, something sustained, we don’t want to settle for just a bit of something, because we have other things to do. If life at home is more interesting, why go to the movies?
  • If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art.

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• 17 Jan 07
  

  Lawrence Li

  kael paulinekael film movie criticism culture

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