Pauline Kael and "Open Form"

A major strand in Pauline Kael’s governing aesthetic is the “open” approach to the movie frame. This is not an original observation. Louis Menand, in his “The Popist: Pauline Kael” (included in Menand’s essay collection American Studies, 2002), lists a number of movies that Kael cherished (e.g., Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game, Shoeshine), and says:

The technical term for the quality many of these movies … share is “open form.” The camera directs its gaze with equal empathy at every facet of the world viewed. Ordinary things are not scanted or rushed over, since the gods, if there are any, are probably in the details; but grand things are not put into quotation marks, or set up to be knocked down, either, since great emotions are as much a part of life as anything else. The door is opened onto the world “as it is,” without scrims or stage directions; and the world is left at the end, in the same condition, unarranged, and unboxed by moral resolution.

Craig Seligman, in his Sontag & Kael (2004), notes that Kael’s “dislike of being told how to respond was a constant in her criticism, and this was her principal objection to Shoah.” In support of his point, Seligman quotes the following passage from Kael’s great essay “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 20 & 27, 1971; included in Kael, Mankiewicz and Welles’ The Citizen Kane Book, 1971):

In the thirties, Jean Renoir had been using deep focus (that is, keeping the middle range and the background as clear as the foreground) in a naturalistic way. The light seemed (and often was) “natural.” You looked at a scene, and the drama that you saw going on in it was just part of that scene, and so you had the sense of discovering it for yourself, of seeing drama in the midst of life. This was a tremendous relief from the usual studio lighting, which forced your attention to the dramatic action in the frame, blurred the rest, and rarely gave you a chance to feel that the action was part of anything larger or anything continuous.

Seligman also quotes from Kael’s reviews of Harlan County, U.S.A., and Comfort and Joy. But neither Menand nor Seligman mention what I think is Kael’s clearest statement of her “open form” preference. I’m referring to the following passage in her magnificent review of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (see “Alchemy,” The New Yorker, March 18, 1972; collected in Kael’s Deeper Into Movies, 1973, and For Keeps, 1994):

The period details are there – a satin pillow, a modernistic apartment-house lobby, a child’s pasted-together greeting to Grandpa – but Coppola doesn’t turn the viewer into a guided tourist, told what to see. Nor does he go for a lot of closeups, which are the simplest tool for fixing a director’s attitude. Diane Keaton (who plays Michael’s girl friend) is seen casually; her attractiveness isn’t labored. The only character who is held in frame for us to see exactly as the character looking at her sees her is Apollonia (played by Simonetta Stefanelli), whom Michael falls in love with in Sicily. She is fixed by the camera as a ripe erotic image, because that is what she means to him, and Coppola, not having wasted his resources, can do it in a few frames. In general, he tries not to fix the images. In Sunday Bloody Sunday, John Schlesinger showed a messy knocked-over ashtray being picked up in closeup, so that there was nothing to perceive in the shot but the significance of the messiness. Coppola, I think, would have kept the camera on the room in which the woman bent over to retrieve the ashtray, and the messiness would have been just one element among many to be observed – perhaps the curve of her body could have told us much more than the actual picking-up motion. The Godfather keeps so much in front of us all the time that we’re never bored (though the picture runs just two minutes short of three hours) – we keep taking things in. This is a heritage from Jean Renoir – this uncoercive, “open” approach to the movie frame. Like Renoir, Coppola lets the spectator roam around in the images, lets a movie breathe, and this is extremely difficult in a period film, in which every detail must be carefully planted. But the details never look planted: you’re a few minutes into the movie before you’re fully conscious that it’s set in the past.

As an approach to movie-making, I can’t see how “open form” can be improved on. Yet, even today, we see directors constantly forcing our attention to the dramatic action in the frame, always telling us what we should be feeling, seeing, and thinking.

Credit: The above portrait of Pauline Kael is by Edward Sorel; it appears in The New Yorker (October 20, 2003) as an illustration for David Denby’s “My Life As A Paulette.”