Pauline Kael Biography Quotes 14 Report mistakes

Early Life
Pauline Kael was born on June 19, 1919, in Petaluma, California, the daughter of Jewish immigrants who ran a chicken ranch in the region. She grew up between rural life and the cultural magnetism of the Bay Area, and as a teenager she began haunting repertory houses where she saw silent comedies, European imports, and studio features. At the University of California, Berkeley, she studied subjects such as philosophy and art but left without a degree, drawn more to the arguments around art than to academic credentialing. In the 1940s and 1950s she supported herself in a patchwork of literary and arts jobs while immersing in film culture. She had a long relationship with the poet and filmmaker James Broughton; their daughter, Gina, was born in 1948, and Kael raised her largely as a single mother. Those years taught her resilience and sharpened the skeptical, independent streak that would define her criticism.

Finding a Voice in Film Culture
Kael began broadcasting movie reviews on KPFA, the Berkeley-based Pacifica radio station, in the early 1950s, developing a conversational, combative style that made the movies feel immediate and alive. She also managed and programmed art-house cinemas in the Bay Area, including the Cinema Guild in Berkeley, where she curated series and introduced screenings. The work gave her an education in audience reactions and in the material conditions of film exhibition, a grounding that later distinguished her from ivory-tower approaches. Her first major collection, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), became an unexpected bestseller, proof that pungent, personal film writing could reach beyond cinephile circles. She contributed to magazines, including McCall's and The New Republic, and became known for fearless verdicts; a notorious pan of The Sound of Music contributed to her dismissal from McCall's, a setback that paradoxically cemented her reputation for independence.

Rise at The New Yorker
Her breakthrough at The New Yorker arrived with her fervent defense of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, a review that helped alter the film's critical fortunes and signaled a generational shift in American moviegoing. Editor William Shawn soon brought her on as a regular critic; beginning in 1968 she alternated with Penelope Gilliatt, and later became the magazine's principal film critic. From that perch she championed new American directors such as Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Sam Peckinpah, arguing that their nervy, modernist energy matched the times. She also wrote exuberantly about Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris, while often resisting the reverential consensus that formed around certain auteurs; Stanley Kubrick, for example, struck her as chilly and overdetermined, a view that sparked ongoing debate. Her 1971 New Yorker essay Raising Kane asserted the central role of Herman J. Mankiewicz in the authorship of Citizen Kane, provoking vigorous counterarguments from Orson Welles partisans and exchanges with figures like Peter Bogdanovich. Her collection Deeper into Movies won the National Book Award in 1974, a landmark for film criticism as a literary enterprise.

Critics, Filmmakers, and Feuds
Kael relished argument. She famously disputed Andrew Sarris over the auteur theory, notably in her essay Circles and Squares (1963), contending that a reductive emphasis on directorial signatures neglected the instinctive, collaborative mess of moviemaking. She mixed enthusiasm and scorn with unapologetic gusto, and her pieces read like letters from an astute friend with perfect pitch for the way movies feel. The force of that voice drew a cohort of younger admirers, sometimes dubbed the Paulettes, among them writers such as David Denby, James Wolcott, and Michael Sragow, who absorbed her vernacular vigor while pushing their own views. Renata Adler later launched a scorching critique of Kael's methods in The New York Review of Books, an exchange that symbolized the broader culture wars within criticism about taste, evidence, and rhetoric. Roger Ebert, a contemporary with a different temperament, frequently engaged her judgments in print and on panels, even as both championed the idea that film criticism could be a popular art.

Hollywood Interlude and Return
In 1979 Kael briefly left The New Yorker to work as a consultant at Paramount Pictures. Friends in the industry, including actors and producers she had supported in print, encouraged her to test her sensibilities inside the studio system. The experience was short-lived. She returned to criticism within months, concluding that the compromises of development culture did not suit her temperament and that her independence mattered more than any influence she might wield from an office on a lot. The episode intensified periodic accusations of logrolling, but Kael maintained that her judgments remained her own, forged in the dark of the theater and on the page.

Style, Books, and Working Method
Across collections such as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Reeling, When the Lights Go Down, Taking It All In, State of the Art, Hooked, and the career-spanning anthology For Keeps, she refined a style at once intimate and combative. She quoted dialogue with the precision of a playwright, relished throwaway bits of acting business, and wrote about sex, violence, and comedy as linked energies in American movies. Her office at The New Yorker became a salon of sorts, where filmmakers and critics visited to argue and listen. William Shawn protected her long, essayistic reviews, and Penelope Gilliatt's alternating tenure created a counterpoint that kept the magazine's film pages lively. Even when she erred or overreached, her sentences carried the crackle of a live debate.

Later Years and Legacy
Kael retired from The New Yorker in 1991 after symptoms of Parkinson's disease made weekly deadlines difficult. She spent her later years in Massachusetts, near Great Barrington, surrounded by books, screenings, and the correspondence that never ceased. She died on September 3, 2001. She was survived by her daughter, Gina, who had often helped manage the logistics of her demanding work life. By then her influence was woven into the fabric of American film culture: she had helped normalize the idea that an individual critic could shape the reception of a movie; she had argued, sometimes quixotically, that pleasure and intelligence are not opposites; and she had made the New Hollywood an intellectual subject without making it a museum piece. The battles with Andrew Sarris and Renata Adler, the sustained enthusiasms for filmmakers like Robert Altman and Brian De Palma, the uneasy admiration and skepticism she aimed at star power from Warren Beatty to Marlon Brando, and the enduring controversy around Raising Kane all attest to a career lived in public, sentence by sentence, with the stakes of art and entertainment never far apart.

Our collection contains 14 quotes who is written by Pauline, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Justice - Art - Never Give Up - Movie.