My Favorite Book of 2021: Geoff Dyer's "See/Saw"

My favorite book of 2021 is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Dyer is to photography what Pauline Kael was to movies – its greatest critic. Kael’s memory was a bottomless reservoir of movie associations. She could watch, say, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and see reflections of, among other films, William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), and John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). William Shawn, in his Foreword to Kael’s superb 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), said, “It is unlikely that anyone in the world carries around in his or her head more information about movies.” The same goes for Dyer; his head is packed with photographic precedents; he looks at a picture and sees countless allusions and influences – what he calls “visual echoes.” In almost every one of See/Saw’s fifty-two essays (including the excellent Introduction), he traces the echoes. For example, in his review of a Zoe Strauss exhibition, he writes,

It’s obvious, to anyone who visits this show that Strauss is an artist with a distinctive visual style; and it’s equally obvious that this distinction is impossible to separate from the way that so many threads of American photographic history seem to have found their way into the tightly bound forms of her pictures. The tattooed girl—Monique—with a beaten face and a black eye recalls a self-portrait made by Nan Goldin after she’d been battered. There’s a lot of Eggleston—most notably a green version of his famous red ceiling—and a lot of Stephen Shore too. And there are traces of Walker Evans—how could there not be?—everywhere. No sooner have these influences—or presences—been registered, however, than one becomes conscious of how Strauss’s relationship to photography and to the world adds to or alters them. She never simply ‘does’ an Evans or an Eggleston. Take Goldin, for example. The pictures in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are frank, intimate, beautiful and profoundly narcissistic. They are advertisements for a life being led: a bohemia that was longing to be recognised, a bunch of people whose poverty was a form of indulgence, who believed they were artists—even if there was no chance of their ever creating works of art. Except they were justified in their belief after all because they ended up in works of art, in Nan’s pictures. It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia, where the poverty is as matter-of-fact as it is in an Evans photograph of rural Alabama. The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted. By the time she began ranging further afield—in Vegas, say—she was able to take this home-grown familiarity and confidence with her. As she puts it, rather beautifully, in a Facebook exchange with a friend (included in the catalogue for the Philadelphia/ICP exhibition): “I just always let everything in and keep everyone who’s ever mattered as a part of myself.” To which the friend replies, rightly: “Wow… That is a phenomenal outlook on life.” [“Zoe Strauss”]

This is quintessential Dyer. Note the move from identifying the “presences” (Goldin, Eggleston, Shore, Evans) to analyzing the differences (“It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia …”) to distinguishing Strauss’s work from Evans’s and Arbus’s (“The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted”). That delightful Facebook quote at the end is inspired!

Zoe Strauss, Monique Showing Black Eye, Philadelphia, 2006

“Zoe Strauss” is one of See/Saw’s best pieces. Another one is “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016. It blew me away then; it blows me away now. It’s an essay on a remarkable photo by Eli Weinberg called “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg December 19, 1956.” Dyer describes it in detail, providing context and history, noting the way “the demonstrators fill the frame so that – in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras – the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute.” He says, “Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.” That seems to end the matter: nothing more to build on there. Instead, it’s just the overture. The next paragraph raises a fascinating question: 

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy. I’m guessing he’s about 13. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left, a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly. And he’s white. We look at the photograph, and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question that it insists on our asking: What is he doing there?

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

The essay now becomes a work of detection. Dyer makes inquiries and finds out that it’s highly likely the boy is Eli Weinberg’s son, Mark. Dyer then wonders why Weinberg included Mark in the picture. He says, “In a sense, then, Weinberg could be said to have staged the picture, to have worked on its magic.” He further observes, “Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence. We want to hear his version of what happened.”  

This line of thought causes Dyer to remember another photo – Will Counts’ 1957 shot of a solitary black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by an angry mob of whites, including a young woman named Hazel Bryan. Dyer says, 

In 1997, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women [Eckford and Bryan] met in person – at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness. They became friends, spoke in public about the need for harmony and — the apotheosis! — appeared on Oprah together. A wonderful ending and an advertisement for the long-deferred, much broken promise of racial equality.

But that’s not the end of this story either. Dyer provides a coda: 

Except that this wasn’t quite the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering Eckford and Bryan. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

Dyer then refocuses on the Weinberg photo and concludes with these two extraordinary paragraphs:

Let’s go back in history to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he had died in 1965 at the age of twenty-four – so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! What an amazing unpacking of a photograph that, at first glance, seems strictly documentary! The whole book is like that. If you relish close readings of photos, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Geoff Dyer’s masterly See/Saw. 

Pauline Kael's Classic "Underground Man"

Robert De Niro, in Taxi Driver (1976)

I’m pleased to see that newyorker.com has included Pauline Kael’s “Underground Man” (The New Yorker, February 9, 1976) in its “Nights at the Movies” series. It’s one of her best. But I want to flag an error in the newyorker.com version. The punctuation after “hallway” in the following passage should be a comma, not a period:

One can pass over a lingering closeup of a street musician, but when Travis is talking to Betsy on a pay phone in an office building and the camera moves away from him to the blank hallway. It’s an Antonioni pirouette.

The correct version (from the original review) is all one sentence:

One can pass over a lingering closeup of a street musician, but when Travis is talking to Betsy on a pay phone in an office building and the camera moves away from him to the blank hallway, it’s an Antonioni pirouette. 

“Underground Man” is included in Kael’s 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down, a book Renata Adler adjudged “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless” (“The Perils of Pauline,” The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980). To which the only possible response is “Oy!”

Kael wrote a capsule version of “Underground Man” for use in “Goings On About Town” ’s “In Brief” section, condensing the two-thousand-seventy-four-word original to a hundred and fifty-three words. It reads as follows:

Robert De Niro is in almost every frame of Martin Scorsese’s feverish, horrifyingly funny movie about a lonely New York cab-driver. De Niro’s inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He’s Travis Bickle, an outsider who can’t find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can’t sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted – whores, pimps, transients – he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground. Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness. From Paul Schrader’s script; with Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Harry Northrup, Joe Spinell, Diahnne Abbott, and Scorsese himself. [Collected in Kael’s great 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991]  

It’s interesting to see how Kael composed this “In Brief” note, picking words and phrases from the original piece and combining them to make new, more concentrated sentences. For example, the line “This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground” is sourced in three separate sentences in the original: “ferociously” in “This picture is more ferocious than Scorsese’s volatile, allusive Mean Streets”; “powerful” in “No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying”; and the rest of the sentence in “Taxi Driver is a movie in heat, a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground.” 

For me, the “In Brief” note’s most quintessentially Kaelian line is “The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness,” a choice fragment of the original sentence: “Scorsese’s Expressionism isn’t anything like the exaggerated sets of the German directors; he uses documentary locations, but he pushes discordant elements to their limits, and the cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness” (my emphasis). 

Forty-two years after it appeared in The New Yorker, “Underground Man” still thrives. Hail Kael! 

Paul Mazursky's "An Unmarried Woman": Brody v. Kael

Richard Brody’s recent capsule review of Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman (The New Yorker, July 24, 2017) spurs me to see this film again. I first saw it in 1978, when it was released. That’s thirty-nine years ago. Today, my only recollection of it is a vague image of burly Alan Bates slathering a canvas with paint. Brody calls the movie an “instant-classic drama.” He writes,

Mazursky’s achievement is distinctively choreographic: for all the trenchant conversation, he sets the characters into mad motion, alone and together—jogging, dancing, fighting, strolling, embracing—and even the static set pieces, in bars and at dinner tables, have the sculptural authority of frozen ballets.

This seems to contradict Pauline Kael’s view of it. In her “Empathy, and Its Limits” (The New Yorker, March 6, 1978; included in her 1980 collection, When the Lights Go Down), she says,

The cinematography, by Arthur Ornitz, which features windows and skyline views, doesn’t have anything like the sun-spangled vivacity that Gordon Willis brought to the New York of Annie Hall (a film with related states of anxiety). Ornitz is an inexpressive realist; he makes images “real” by sapping the life out of them. (There is no dynamism even when the camera moves.) But his work here is more delicately muted and less grungy than usual – the SoHo streets seem to spark him.

Kael’s response to An Unmarried Woman was mixed. She says, “It’s an enormously friendly, soft-edged picture. Yet there’s a lot of hot air circulating in it.” She’s critical of Mazursky, one of her favorite directors, for suppressing his sense of satire, particularly in relation to the character Erica, who Kael finds “puny and a bit of an idiot” (see Kael’s capsule review in her 5001 Nights at the Movies).   

It’s likely Kael’s review influenced my response when I first saw the movie back in ’78. Brody’s review provides a fresh take, focusing more on the film’s design than on its characters.

Interestingly, when Kael collected what she considered her best reviews in For Keeps (1994), she excluded “Empathy, and Its Limits.” Maybe she had second thoughts about its validity.  

Interesting Emendations: Pauline Kael's "The Long Goodbye"

It’s interesting to examine the artful surgery that Richard Brody performed on Pauline Kael’s capsule review of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973). Kael’s version, 321 words long, is collected in her 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991). Brody cut it to 182 words, deleting the first and seventh sentences, and skillfully merging the fifth, sixth, and tenth lines. Here’s Kael’s version:

In his novel, set in 1953, Raymond Chandler situated his incorruptible knight Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles, the city famed as the place where you go to sell out. And Chandler wrote to his agent that what he cared about in this book was “how any man who tried to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish.” Chandler’s sentimental foolishness is the taking-off place for Robert Altman’s heady, whirling sideshow of a movie, set in the early 70s L.A. of the stoned sensibility. Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is a wryly forlorn knight, just slogging along; still driving a 1948 Lincoln Continental and trying to behave like Bogart, he’s the gallant fool in a corrupt world—the innocent eye. Even the police know more about the case he’s involved in than he does. Yet he’s the only one who cares. Altman kisses off the private-eye form as gracefully as Beat the Devil parodied the international-intrigue thriller. Less accidental than Beat the Devil, this picture is just about as funny, though quicker-witted and dreamier, in soft, mellow color and volatile images. Altman tells a detective story all right, but he does it through a spree—a highflying rap on Chandler and the movies and L.A. The film drives you a little crazy, turns you on the way some musicals (Singin’ in the Rain, Cabaret) and some comedies (M*A*S*H, parts of Bananas and Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex) do. Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance. With Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, Jim Bouton, Henry Gibson, Jack Riley, and Ken Sansom. Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality); John Williams’ score is a witty series of variations on the title song; the script is credited to Leigh Brackett, but when you hear the Altman-style improvisatory dialogue you know you can’t take that too literally. Released in 1973.

Here’s Brody's version, published in the April 25, 2016 New Yorker:

Raymond Chandler’s sentimental foolishness is the taking-off place for Robert Altman’s heady, whirling sideshow of a movie, set in the early-seventies L.A. of the stoned sensibility. Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is a wryly forlorn knight, just slogging along; still driving a 1948 Lincoln Continental and trying to behave like Bogart, he’s the gallant fool in a corrupt world—the innocent eye. Even the police know more about the case he’s involved in than he does. Yet he’s the only one who cares. Altman tells a detective story all right, but he does it through a spree—a highflying rap on Chandler and L.A. and the movies. Altman gracefully kisses off the private-eye form in soft, mellow color and volatile images; the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality). Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance. Nina Van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, and Jim Bouton co-star; the script is credited to Leigh Brackett, but when you hear the Altman-style improvisatory dialogue you know you can’t take that too literally. Released in 1973.

With the exception of “heady, whirling sideshow of a movie,” all the words in both these versions are sourced in Kael’s great “Movieland – The Bum’s Paradise” (The New Yorker, October 22, 1973; included in Kael’s 1976 Reeling and her 1994 For Keeps), which I remember for this exquisite image: “When Nina van Pallandt thrashes in the ocean at night, her pale-orange butterfly sleeves rising above the surf, the movie becomes a rhapsody on romance and death.” As for the words “heady, whirling sideshow of a movie,” Kael inserted them when she condensed the 4000-word “Movieland – The Bum’s Paradise” to her 321-word capsule.

Minimal Realism in Pawel Pawlikowski's "Ida"

I like the look of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, and the feel of it. Pawlikowski has a poet’s gift for using objects, landscapes, and people expressively, so that they all become part of his vision. It’s this gift, I think, that makes Ida a rich, emotionally charged experience.

The best description of Pawlikowski’s technique that I’ve read is found in David Denby’s " 'Ida': A Film Masterpiece" (“Culture Desk,” newyorker.com, May 27, 2014):

The director and his fledgling cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, shot the movie in hard-focus black and white; they have produced images so distinct and powerful that they sharpen our senses. “Ida” might be called static were it not for the currents of emotion from shot to shot, which electrify the women’s relation to each other throughout. Clearing away clutter, Pawlikowski almost never moves the camera; many of the scenes are just long-lasting shots, fed by a single light source that often puts the faces in partial shadow (what we understand of these two women will always be limited). Sometimes the figures are positioned at the bottom of the frame, with enormous gray Polish skies above them, as if the entire burden of a cursed country weighed on its people. Both beautiful and oppressive, the bleakness of the landscape in winter suggests something uncanny in the air, as if we were watching a horror film without ghouls.

One can trace possible influences—Carl Theodor Dreyer, very likely, and Robert Bresson, and European art films from the sixties and early seventies like François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child,” and also Polish movies made in the period in which “Ida” is set. But I can’t recall anything major that looks quite like this movie. Pawlikowski is not after commonplace realism but something you would have to call minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention to what remains almost rapt: the clinking of the nuns’ spoons at a silent convent dinner, some gentle country sounds, the transfixing boredom of long drives through the flat landscape.

That “minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention almost rapt,” is an excellent description of Pawlikowski’s style. I prefer it to, say, “stylistic austerity,” and variations thereof, which some critics are using to describe Ida’s form. See, for example, Dana Stevens, "Ida" (Slate, May 2, 2014): “In many ways, Ida feels like a film that might have been made anytime in the past 50 years. It’s set in the early 1960s, and its stylistic austerity and interest in theological questions often recall the work of Robert Bresson (though Pawlikowski lacks—I think—Bresson’s deeply held faith in salvation).”

The comparison of Ida with Bresson’s work is, I think, a mistake. Bresson’s films, particularly Diary of a Country Priest (1950), are austerely beautiful. But they’re also intolerably pious and inhumanly pure. In her capsule review of Diary of a Country Priest, Pauline Kael says of the young priest whose faith is neither understood nor accepted by his parishioners, “Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is? The priest’s austere spirituality may give the community the same sort of pain that Bresson’s later movies give some of us in the audience” (5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991). Ida is brief; it is spare; it is shot in black-and-white; it is dominated by the color gray (not because Pawlikowski wants to be austere, but because he wants to be true to the times (“What was that lovely city beneath Communism’s gray casing?” Adam Zagajewsky asks, in his memoir Another Beauty). But Ida also has jazz in it, and sex, and vitality. There’s a young naïve, pious Catholic nun in it, but there’s also a worldly, cynical, hard-drinking, nicotine-addicted aunt known as Red Wanda.

Ida is, as Anthony Lane says, in his "Road Trips" (The New Yorker, May 12, 2014), “a road movie, of sorts” (“Thus to our surprise, this small tale becomes a road movie, of sorts, and a journey back into a divisive past”). That “of sorts” is crucial. Most road movies (e.g., Thelma & Louise, The Motorcycle Diaries, Sideways) are wild rides. Ida is more solemn (Denby calls it a “spiritual journey”). But it’s still a thousand times wilder than Bresson’s painstakingly tedious and offensively holy Diary of a Country Priest. In Ida, two women – tough, wry Wanda and her young niece, Ida, a Catholic nun – set off by car to discover how Ida’s parents died. Their vehicle, a small, white Polish sedan (is it a Trabant? a Syrena? I’d love to know) has almost as much presence as the Norton motorcycle (“the Mighty One”) in Motorcycle Diaries. At one point, we see an intoxicated Wanda driving it, and in the next moment, we see it being hauled back onto the road by a handsome team of workhorses. I leaned forward to absorb this remarkable scene, but it vanished in an instant – just one example of Ida’s many wonderful, understated details.

Road movie landscapes are often ravishing (e.g., the gold-and-green Santa Ynez Valley in Sideways, the soaring Andean vistas in Motorcycle Diaries); not so in Ida. Well, let me qualify that. Ida’s landscape is ravishing if you relish, as I do, the beauty of bleakness – “the moon-gray landscape of eastern Poland,” as Lane describes it ("Ida," newyorker.com). This is a landscape soaked in repressed memory, and Ida is an opening to it, an excavation of horrific memory buried in the Polish ground.

Interesting Emendations: Pauline Kael's "Bonnie and Clyde"

Reading Richard Brody’s “Ten Greatest Films of All Time” list ("The Top Ten," newyorker.com, May 15, 2012), I found myself considering what my own list might look like. One film I’d definitely include is Arthur Penn’s great Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Rereading Pauline Kael’s classic review of it (“Bonnie and Clyde,” The New Yorker, October 21, 1967), I was intrigued by the line, “There is a kind of American poetry in a stickup gang seen chasing across the bedraggled backdrop of the Depression (as true in its way as Nabokov’s vision of Humbert Humbert and Lolita in the cross-country world of motels) – as if crime were the only activity in a country stupefied by poverty.” It’s an inspired sentence, containing a number of Kael’s signature moves: praise in terms of poetry, literary reference, use of parenthesis. Interestingly, she deploys this line to set up a significant criticism of Penn’s direction:

But Arthur Penn doesn’t quite have the toughness of mind to know it; its not what he means by poetry. His squatters’-jungle scene is too ‘eloquent,’ like a poster making an appeal, and the Parker-family-reunion sequence is poetic in the gauzy mode. He makes the sequence a fancy lyric interlude, like a number in a musical (Funny Face, to be exact); it’s too ‘imaginative’ – a literal dust bowl, as thoroughly becalmed as Sleeping Beauty’s garden. The movie becomes dreamy-soft where it should be hard (and hard-edged).

This passage not only pinpoints one of Bonnie and Clyde’s few weaknesses, it also illuminates Kael’s notion of cinematic poetry. One of her favorite expressions of movie love was to call a film “poetry.” For example:

“La Grande Illusion is poetry” (“Retrospective Reviews: Movies Remembered with Pleasure,” I Lost it at the Movies, 1965)

“Yet it’s an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life – poetry of the commonplace” (“The God-Bless-America Symphony,” When the Lights Go Down, 1980)

“It’s a traumatic poem of violence” (“The Wild Bunch,” 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991)

“An amazingly high-strung, feverishly poetic movie about Cain and Abel as American brothers living on a lettuce farm in California in the years just before the First World War” (“East of Eden,” 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991)

The above passage from “Bonnie and Clyde” indicates Kael’s notion of poetry – “toughness of mind,” not “gauzy,”  “hard (and hard-edged).”

Interestingly, when Kael wrote her capsule “Bonnie and Clyde” review (collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies) for the magazine’s “Goings On About Town,” condensing the original ten-thousand-word essay to 175 words, she distilled the “There is a kind of American poetry” line to its essence, deleting the parenthetical comparison with Nabokov’s Lolita, and completely omitting her criticism of Penn for not having “the toughness of mind” to do justice to the “kind of American poetry” inherent in the story. The result is a capsule review conveying the impression that there is, in Bonnie and Clyde, “a kind of American poetry in a stickup gang seen chasing across the bedraggled backdrop of the Depression – as if crime were the only activity in a country stupefied by poverty.” It’s a superb line, enacting the poetry it describes. And it comes with an unforgettable soundtrack. I hear it now, mentally, as I write this – bluegrass, banjos - Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs playing their brilliant, jangling, jumping “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” another of Bonnie and Clyde's myriad artful elements. 

Brody's Misinterpretation of Kael

Richard Brody, in his “Sontag On Movies: For Interpretation” (“The Front Row,” newyorker.com, May 23, 2012), says, “Sontag ghettoized much of classic Hollywood under the rubric of “camp” (famously, in her “Notes on ‘Camp’”), just as, around the same time, Pauline Kael ghettoized the same movies by calling them “kitsch.” I question the accuracy of his statement about Kael. In “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag identified Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon as “among the greatest Camp movies ever made.” Kael, in her brilliant 1991 collection 5001 Nights at the Movies, praises Trouble in Paradise as “Perhaps the most shimmering of the romantic comedy collaborations of the director Ernst Lubitsch and the writer Samson Raphaelson.” She says it’s “full of suave maneuvers and magical switcheroos; in its light-as-a-feather way, it’s perfection.” Regarding The Maltese Falcon, she writes, “This film is an almost perfect visual equivalent of the Dashiell Hammett thriller” (5001 Nights at the Movies). She says, “It is (and this is rare in American films) a work of entertainment that is yet so skillfully constructed that after many years and many viewings it has the same brittle explosiveness – and even some of the same surprise – that it had in its first run.” Kael’s admiration for these two movies is obvious. It’s difficult to comprehend how Brody concluded that she “ghettoized” them as “kitsch.” Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Credit: The above portrait of Pauline Kael is by Eda Akaltun.

Pauline Kael

This may strike some people as strange, but I still read Pauline Kael - not for her opinions, but for the sheer pleasure of her writing. In a Foreword to Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), William Shawn says, “Her opinions are forceful, convincing, often unexpected, but whether or not one agrees with them one comes away from her writings in a state of exhilaration.” As part of this blog’s ongoing narrative, I want to explore the bliss of Kael’s writing. Today, I begin with a look at a sentence I have chosen for its combinational delight. It’s from her “In Brief” review of Phantom of the Paradise (collected in 5001 Nights at the Movies): “The singer, Beef, is played by Gerrit Graham, who gives the single funniest performance; Harold Oblong, Jeffrey Comanor, and Archie Hahn turn up as three different groups – the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums, and, with black-and-white expressionist faces, the Undeads.” I find the syntax of this sentence delicious. And the names it contains – Beef, the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums, the Undeads - are wonderfully surreal. But it’s the little tucked-in loop “with black-and-white expressionist faces” that’s pure Kael. Her style is, first and foremost, descriptive. Interestingly, if you look for this sentence in the full-length review (“Spieler,” The New Yorker, November 11, 1974), you will find only the part that comes after the semi-colon. And if you look for it in the shortened version of “Spieler” collected in Kael’s For Keeps (1994), you will not find it at all.