Kael v. Kracauer

Pauline Kael (Photo by Jerry Bauer)

Stuart Jefferies, in his “Human Spanner” (London Review of Books, June 17, 2021), a review of Jörg Später’s Kracauer: A Biography, mentions that Pauline Kael panned Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960). He quotes Kael’s “Is There a Cure for Film Criticism?” (included in her 1965 collection I Lost It at the Movies), and says, “Kracauer was worse than a pedant, she said, he was a lunatic to take cinema so seriously. Perhaps Kael was the lunatic for making her own career out of writing about a medium she couldn’t take seriously.” Sorry, I can’t let that pass without pointing out that (1) Kael didn’t say Kracauer was a lunatic to take cinema so seriously; she said he was a lunatic because his aesthetic rejected art; and (2), saying Kael couldn’t take movies seriously is like saying Wayne Gretzky couldn’t take hockey seriously. Come on! She wrote some of the best movie criticism ever written: see, for example, “Bonnie and Clyde” (The New Yorker, October 21, 1967); “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1971). Stuart Jeffries, you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.