Pauline Kael famous quotes

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

#Art #Appreciate #Littles

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

#Artist #Fool #Firsts

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

#Television #Knees #This Generation

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

#People #Tasks #Critical

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

#Doors #Feet #Want

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

#Art #School #Pleasure

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

#Art #Too Much #Enough

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

#Mean #San Francisco #Invasion

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

#Depressing #Art #Mean

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

#Taste #Culture #Reverence

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

#Movie #Mean #People

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

#Movie #Believe #Care

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

#Innocence #Corruption

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

#Funeral

Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
-- Pauline Kael

#Perfect

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

#Country #Art #Hero

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

#Art #Effort #Purpose

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

#Doors #Years #Evil

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

#Art #Independent #Bigs

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

#Reality #People #Want

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

#Art #Believe #Judgment

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

#Tvs #Television #Program

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

#Art #Pieces #Television

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

#Art #Media #Differences

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

#Stupid #Book #Reading

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

#Art #Appetite #Given

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

#Play #Hair #Kevin

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

#Art #Business #Independent

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

#Mistake #Anxiety #Judgement

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

#Talking #May #Citizens

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

#Thinking #Punching #Males

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

#Directors #Sometimes #Repetition

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

#Art #Minorities #Want

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

#Nuts #People

What is getting older if it isn't learning more ways that you're vulnerable?
-- Pauline Kael

#Getting Older #Way #Vulnerable

Her only flair is in her nostrils.
-- Pauline Kael

#Sarcastic #Flair

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

#Mistake #Worst #Movie Making

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

#Patience #Art #Waiting

I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anyone who voted for him.
-- Pauline Kael

#Believe

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

#Kissing #Italian #Saws

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

#Sex #Taste

I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
-- Pauline Kael

#Writing #Thinking #Memoir

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

#Dream #People #Romance

Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.
-- Pauline Kael

#Stupid #Believe #Dirty

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

#Book #Might #Injustice

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

#Perception #Criticism #Saws

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

#Dancing #Wizards #Want

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

#Artist #Vulgarity

A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
-- Pauline Kael

#Believe #Cities #Good Movie

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

#Artist #Television #Businessman

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

#Culture #Form #Mass

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

#Movie #Baby #Couple

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

#Movie #Art #Long

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

#Television #Tvs #Watches

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

#Movie #Finals #Desperation

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

#Dirty #Play #Righteous

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

#Country #People #World

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

#Life Affirming #Affirming

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

#Ideas #Drunk #Able

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

#Art #Twenties #Substitutes

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

#Tissues #Tests #Hollywood

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

#Art #Giving Up #Artist

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

#Movie #Art #Expression

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

#Movie #Want #Kind

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

#Addiction #Directors #Noir

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

#Loss #Car #Feelings

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

#Persons

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

#Light #People #Strange

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

#Stars #Believe #Giving

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

#Tests #Virtuous #Feels

Before seeing Truffaut 's Small Change, I was afraid it was going to be one of those simple, natural films about childhood which I generally try to avoid I'm just not good enough to go to them. But this series of sketches on the general theme of the resilience of children turns out to be that rarity a poetic comedy that's really funny.
-- Pauline Kael

#Children #Simple #Not Good Enough

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

#Home #Sunday #Night

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

#Art #Past #Zest

Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.
-- Pauline Kael

#Art #Museums #Clown

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

#Country #Strong #Couple

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

#Advertising #Life Is #Propaganda

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

#Movie

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

#Movie #Real #Order

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

#Movie #Believe #Thug

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

#Movie

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

#Art #Tendencies #Theory

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

#Patterns #Want #Hollywood

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

#Hero #Loner #Definitions

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

#Thinking #Trying #May

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

#Business #Thinking #Differences

He [Bernardo Bertolucci] has the kind of talent that breaks one's heart: where can it go, what will happen to it? In this country we encourage 'creativity' among the mediocre, but real bursting creativity appalls us. We put it down as undisciplined, as somehow 'too much.' Well, Before the Revolution is too much and that is what is great about it. Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
-- Pauline Kael

#Country #Art #Real

The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.
-- Pauline Kael

#Art #Fighting #Lightning