This doesn’t follow at all. It’s a total logical fallacy, one that Kael’s admirers repeatedly resort to.

As pointed out above, Kael was basically the Ayn Rand of film critics in terms of the cult of personality built up around her (though even I’ll concede she wasn’t nearly as repulsive a human being as the sociopathic Rand, nor was her taste in art nearly as terrible as Rand’s).

Rand is widely read to this day, and continues to have millions of fans, especially in America. Yet her philosophy is a farce, she was a shallow thinker, an out-and-out sociopath, and her novels are poorly written: and yes, Kael herself would agree with that, since she dismissed Rand’s writing herself.

Writers can be overrated for generations after their deaths: it can take a long time for these things to be sorted out. (Let’s see if Kael is still popular 50 years from now.) This is especially true of writers who generate a cult of personality. Rand, a worse and more repellent writer than Kael, continues to be far more popular and influential than Kael, as the sales of her books are still very robust. For that matter, Star Wars is as popular and beloved as ever, a movie Kael disliked: following your logic, Kael would have to be “wrong” about the merits of George Lucas and Ayn Rand since she disliked them both, yet they are still enormously popular and influential.

What’s debatable, endlessly, is her taste in movies, which is subjective to an indeterminate degree. (The question of whether objectivity is possible takes film theory into the realm of quantum mechanics.) Kael panned some good and even great movies, IMO (and praised a few stinkers), but she also panned movies that I thought were great once, but which, partly on reading her reviews, & partly with my own maturation, I had to admit weren’t that great after all. There were times when Kael “ruined” a movie for me by exposing its weaknesses and flaws and making me feel like a sap for ever having fallen for it… She could write so damn well that she could make you doubt your own opinions. That pissed a lot of people off, the many misguided (IMO!) Kubrick fans foremost among them.

The fact Chris and others are taking the time and space to try and shoot Kael down only proves how formidable she was. How many other film critics does anyone care enough about to try and debunk? Really.

Kael was in a class of her own IMO because she was one of the great writers of the 20th century, and only happened to be choose to write about movies. She was a literary genius disguised as a film critic. That puts her in league with G.B. Shaw and very few others, among critics.

It’s ironic that the hardcore film theorists argue that she debased the art form by making it so subjective. The truth is she actually took it to another level, one they were too stuck in their dead theories to follow her to.

There’s a clue to this in something Kael once said: “I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.”

Kael was writing about life, not just hers but everyone’s, using movies to do so.

Let the record show what kind of mindset Kael and the Paulettes attract: those who will not honestly debate, those who will not discuss, those who refuse to get into the actual nitty-gritty of an analysis i.e. those who do not understand what arts criticism even IS. Nothing I have said about, or against, Kael, would even be considered controversial if we were talking about literary criticsm as opposed to film criticism.

This is because the history of literary criticism is full of detailed, in-depth analysts and interpreters i.e. writers who do not, like Kael, merely pontificate, but rigorously ANALYZE the works they turn their attention to, and offer bona fide INSIGHTS INTO THE HUMAN CONDITION. They’re writers like Northrop Frye, who managed to produce a book called Fearful Symmetry, about William Blake’s poetry, that’s very nearly as good – very nearly as valuable as a book of wisdom – as Blake’s poetry. In other words, GENUINELY great critics (as opposed to a blabbermouthed B.S.-er like Kael) are actually comparable in intelligence and imagination to the great artists they discuss! That’s what arts criticism ideally should be, and that’s what many literary critics throughout history have been but almost no film critics have been. The bar for film criticism is set so low that someone, like Kael, who would be considered just average – or below average – in literary studies – is considered “the best ever!!!” among moviegoers. That Kael is held in such high esteem merely demonstrates how low the bar has been set in film criticism.

Read Frye on Blake, or Hazlitt on Shakespeare, and Kael barely even qualifies as a critic at all in the time-honored sense of the word.

“So, basically, Kael was the Ayn rand of film reviews?”

Yup, pretty much.

I’m baffled by her review—she always taught us what to spot as phony, in this case the gross nincompoopery of Michelangelo’s women—but I don’t challenge her absolute right to comment. (I did when she committed a rare breach of ethics, in reviewing “Reds,” for example.) Don’t object to David’s respectable thesis on “L’Eclisse,” either, though I must say he expends many thousands of words about a movie Kael summarized in just 30. The disparity in critical analysis is the alarm—Pauline apparently woke up and smelled the director’s portentous brew.

With all due respect, I think you’re missing a rather important point. Obviously at least one person, Rosenfeld, has argued recently that these movies are something more than “emblems from the arty farty era.” If that’s truly all they were, then why do they continue to provoked such rich, interesting, thought-provoking analysis?

You seem to have been suckered by Kael’s most lamentable characteristic: her belief thay you can simply steamroll over interpretations and exegeses you don’t like, without addressing the arguments they make. But that’s not how responsible arts criticism works or ever has worked. Rosenfeld’s essay exists. Rosenfeld’s essay is not just a series of categorical assertions (as Kael’s reviews generally are) but a first-rate piece of exegesis.

Arts critics who pompously try to “de-canonize” works they just don’t like, only end up making fools of themselves. For instance, the now nearly forgotten (for good reason) literary critic Yvor Winters (born in 1900) tried to throw a whole bunch of great writers out of the canon, including for example William Blake. But brilliant, in-depth commentaries on Blake’s poems and prose exist, whether Winters liked it or not: the fact that Winters insisted on attributing the stupidest conceivable “meanings” and “parsings” to Blake’s poems doesn’t change a thing. Brilliant readings of Blake, such as Northrop Frye’s in his great book Fearful Symmetry, don’t vanish in the face of Winters’ shallow misreadings. And there’s nothing Winters could do to change that fact: Frye demonstrated just how much substance was there in Blake, so Winters could stamp his foot and insist all he liked that Blake was stupid: the deeper, richer, more penetrating readings of Frye existed then, exist now, and will go on existing – and their very existence counts as a stone-solid refutation of Winters’ weak interpretation.

Well, the same goes for Kael vis-a-vis all the great filmmakers she dismissed. She dismissed them in vain, because neither she nor you can simply wave your magic wand and wish away the more penetrating, intelligent close readings of these films that have been written. Yours and Kael’s objections are built on sand. Were Antonioni’s films mere pointless relics from a bygone era, and nothing else besides, with nothing more to say to us, as you assert, then how do you account for both the continued influence of his “style” on fresh generations of filmmakers, and more to the point, how do you account for the fact – and it is a fact – that the critical corpus on his films is so much richer, smarter, and deeper – with so much more relevance to The Way We Live Now – than what Kael ever wrote about her favorite filmmakers?

Simply glossing over what Rosenfeld and others have written – simply pretending that what they have to say isn’t relevant anymore – doesn’t cut it, I’m afraid. Rosenfeld’s essay proves Kael wrong, whether you like it or not.

As for bringing Kael down a peg or two ten years after her departure, well, you sound like Susie Linfield, who wanted to write an “intellectual biography” about her, code for challenging Kael’s opinions and telling her what was wrong with them. Three months after announcing plans for the book Kael died, and apparently so did the bio. Her publisher understood that there’s no use in writing an erudite debate if the subject isn’t around to answer back.

http://benefitofthedoubt.miksimum.com/2010/10/searching-out-sick-soul-la-dolce-vita.html

(one would have to be tone-deaf not to catch the snideness, hypocrisy, and condescension running through the quotes from Kael’s “Sick Soul of Europe” essay contained in this entirely successful and correct rebuttal of said dim-witted essay.)

and this as well:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2008/02/are_movies_going_to_pieces.html

Analyzed with a cold (non-fanboy) eye, both Kael essays referenced in these links stand clearly exposed as little else but a tissue of critical fallacies, straw man arguments, misrepresentations, and false dichotonomies.

Just how long are Kael’s uncritical admirers going to carry on excusing such shoddy writing?

Kael most certainly did engage in venom and vituperation, on a regular basis (it was her calling card), and she certainly does so in her “Sick Soul of Europe” bullshit essay, which is one straw man and false dichotomy after another.

I have already pointed out to you an example of an essay, Rosenfeld’s, that DOES come to grips with what Antonioni was doing in L’Eclisse. Did you read it, or try coming to terms with its arguments? Doesn’t the very existence of such in-depth essays undermine the best-case argument one could make for Kael? To some degree, Kael was just plain “wrong” in her estimate of certain films. And L’Eclisse is one of them – and the very existence of Rosenfeld’s excellent essay proves it.

Why is it so hard for Paulettes to grasp that a responsible critic does more than just throw out one groundless charge after another? Kael could claim all she wanted that Antonioni’s technique had “overtaken” his grasp of “storytelling” and “character” – she could reiterate that till the cows come home – but OTHER critics, like Rosenfeld, provide EXTREMELY strong evidence to the contrary. I don’t care if she never read Rosenfeld’s essay – the point is, such counter-arguments – which are OBJECTIVELY vastly stronger pieces of writing than what Kael produced – existed then and continue to exist now.

Yet who’s ever claim Rosenfeld as one of the greatest film critics? Why is it that it’s always Kael? Or if not Kael, maybe someone like John Simon might get trotted out, if your tastes run more to Ingmar Bergman and less to Hollywood? Why, pray tell, is it always some preening narcissist who gets trotted out as “the greatest film critic” and NEVER a rigorous close analyst, a scrupulous exegete, like Rosenfeld, or his ilk? It’s simple really: people aren’t interested in actually THINKING about film, they just want to read entertaining, acerbic, witty stylists: they don’t care WHAT the critics say, only HOW they say it: hence the cult of Kael, or if not Kael, maybe Simon or even Anthony Lane (invariably praised for his witty one-liners, not his actual THOUGHTS and IDEAS – since in fact Lane HAS no ideas of any importance.)

You don’t see this as an enormous problem. I do. And the problem extends far beyond Kael, but since she’s the name that gets trotted out most frequently as the “greatest of all film critics,” she’s the one who needs to be taken down a peg, or three, as Renata Adler, amongst others, so remarkably did. The real crux here is this: are critics to be celebrated primarily for their tossed off one-liners, or are they to be celebrated primarily for their capacity to apprehend, and extrapolate, the truth? For me, what matters most is this ability to “parse” – to see and to say what is OBJECTIVELY there in a film, to make the implicit finely explicit (to borrow a phrase from Harold Bloom). For you and for most Kael admirers, evidently, all that matters is a wallowing in subjectivity, so long as this wallowing is wittily, cleverly, engagingly articulated.

I’m with Goethe on this one: “The classical the healthy, the romantic is the sick.” Insofar as our time worships the frenzied romanticism Kael liked to worship, it’s a very sick era indeed.

How exactly do the “abstract elements take over”? How precisely, in terms of visual evidence, does “the spacial become glacial”? Does she demonstrate that this happens or does she merely assert it? Do I even have to ask? The stone-solid FACT of the matter is that she ONLY does the latter. That you continue to think otherwise, continue to pathetically defend this arrogant practice says more about your blindly partisan, hero-worship devotion to the fatuous cult of Kael than anything else.

(For there are countless critics and analysts of film and the other arts who back up their evaluations with close ANALYSIS and INTERPRETATION. That, in and of itself, makes them more valuable and better critics than Kael, regardless of whether you share their rating of this-or-that particular movie. I happen to dislike the movie Barry Lyndon – Kael also disliked it – but her review made no effort to understood what Kubrick was trying to do – and was completely clueless about his methods, whereas an admirer of Lyndon named Jim Emerson wrote a piece that “got” exactly what Kubrick’s methods and motives were. So I would rank Emerson’s piece on Lyndon as far better than Kael’s, EVEN THOUGH KAEL AND I BOTH DISLIKE THE FILM AND EMERSON LIKES IT. It’s the quality of the analysis that matters, not how much energy the critic expends trying to bludgeon the reader into submission.)

Does Kael provide a shred of concrete evidence for this averred radical shift in style? No she doesn’t. Of course, L’Eclisse (and no, I was not referring to La Notte, but L’Eclisse, which she specially dismissed in addition to all A’s other titles after L’Avventura) is not the same movie as L’Avventura, but Antonioni does not make some massive change, nor is the experience of watching the movie strikingly different, nor are the storylines or characters even radically different. Remember, I’m not criticizing her for not liking L’Eclisse so much as her lambasting of fans of Antonioni, and her clear implication that they’re a bunch of pseuds and poseurs, DESPITE THE FACT THAT THESE MOVIES SHE DISPARAGED ARE NOT ENORMOUSLY DIFFERENT FROM THE ONE ANTONIONI SHE HERSELF LIKED.

Even if she THOUGHT there was a stylistic shift, it’s simply delusional, and monumentally arrogant, to think and to declare that OTHER VIEWERS couldn’t possibly have valid reasons for liking the latter two films in the trilogy. How seriously would you take a critic who loved Hitchcock’s Saboteur, for example, but then proceeded to excoriate and defame fans of North by Northwest? It’s fine if you don’t like NBN, and it’s fine to dislike both movies, but it’s the height of absurdity (and psychosis) to believe that a viewer must be STUPID to like Saboteur and Northwest alike, given the enormous similarity in the plots, pacing, cutting, atmosphere…. and given that the latter film is, if anything, a deepening and enhancement of the former…. exactly as Antonioni continued to deepen, clarify, enhance, and improve on the L’Avventura template.

And this is NOT just “i say this, you say that,” but very demonstrable.

Read this brilliant piece of in-depth analysis – responsible, rich criticism of the sort Pauline couldn’t, or couldn’t be bothered to, produce – and then tell me with a straight face Antonioni lost his mojo after L’Avventura, and “the spacial” simply became “glacial”:

http://www.davidsaulrosenfeld.com/index.html

Isn’t this something you should ask yourself each time you insist, with no evidence beyond generalizations, that Dirty Harry and Billy Jack and like The Exorcist and The Fury are so similar? I’ve spent the last couple of posts showing, and quoting–which you did not do–the clearly expressed reasons for Kael’s judgments. Saying that the Exorcist is serious in shallow way but that The Fury is witty in its style is not a counter-intuitive assertion–there’s no onus on her for saying that each movie has differing strengths and flaws.

Kael broke with Antonioni after L’Avventura, a failure of judgment I think she can rightly be criticized for. I don’t recall Kael dealing with L’Eclisse at length–perhaps you have in mind Kael’s response toward La Notte, found in her essay “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties.” There she said what you just noted–that Antonioni had not made a major stylistic revolution. Instead she believed his style had seeped into the content:

“In L’Avventura, and in La Notte, Antonioni’s camera work is an extraordinarily evocative mixture of asceticism, lyricism, and a sense of desolation. He is a master of space; he can take bleak landscapes and compose or transform them into visions of elegance or beauty…but in La Notte, the architectural sense, integral to the theme and characters of L’Avventura, begins to dominate the characters, and as the abstract elements take over, the spacial becomes glacial: drama and character and even narrative sense are frozen.”

One could quote more, but basically speaking Kael continued to see that tendency in L’Eclisse and later Antonioni films. One can dispute her reaction, (I would) but to say that “the only possible conclusion is that Kael was erratic, inconsistent, and plagued by bipolar mood swings” is ridiculous, either as criticism or the most presumptuous armchair psychology.

MERELY DOGMATICALLY ASSERTING SOMETHING TO BE TRUE does not, in and of itself, make it true. What evidence does she provide? Where’s the analytic component – the exegesis? – as opposed to solely evaluation.

In other words, simply insisting – like the Pope ex cathedra – that The Fury is a completely different kettle of fish from The Exorcist doesn’t make it so. Arts criticism isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a free-for-all where anything goes. She’s making a counter-intuitive assertion, which means the onus is on her, not her detractors, to back up her claims with some reference to what’s on the screen.

Another example: Kael didn’t like Antonioni much, but she did admire one film of his: L’Avventura. However, a couple years later she trashed his movie L’Eclisse and went on to write a long, poorly argued, ill-tempered screed berating the fans of L’Eclisse, implying they were all phonies and pseuds and poseurs if they claimed to love it. YET SHE HERSELF GREATLY ADMIRED L’AVVENTURA, BY THE SAME DIRECTOR (even starring the same actress, Monica Vitti). She chided audiences who DIDN’T get L’Avventura – then a couple years later she berates audiences who DID admire L’Eclisse!

Why is this so objectionable? Simple: because Antonioni didn’t undergo some major stylistic revolution between the time he made the one movie and the time he made the other. The two films are remarkably similar in their visual style, cinematography, Monica’s acting choices, languid pacing, storyline, character interactions, themes, ideas, symbols, motifs…. it’s not like Antonioni made two radically different pictures. The thematic concerns are the same and the stylistic choices of leading lady and director are remarkably similar. The only difference is that, if anything, the latter movie is an improvement on the former, and probes the same ideas more fully and deeply. It makes no sense whatever to hail L’Avventura as a masterpiece (as Kael did) and then dismiss L’Eclisse as boring garbage (as Kael did…. as well as suggesting that fans of L’Eclisse were idiots to boot).

Therefore: the only possible conclusion is that Kael was erratic, inconsistent, and plagued by bipolar mood swings. There’s nothing in the latter film to justify her sudden schizoid swerve from hosannahs to vitriolic contempt and loathing of Antonioni’s artistry. We’re not talking the difference between early and late Picasso here, or early and late Henry James. We’re talking about a movie made two years later that undergoes no major stylistic shifts or thematic departures.

Therefore, Kael’s bipolar reaction – from love to loathing – vis-a-vis Antonioni is unjustified. Now, that would be fine if that was a one-time occurrence, or a handful of times throughout her career. But, in fact, it was a recurring pattern with Kael. She would constantly discern massive moral, ethical and aesthetic divides between two very similar films: like L’Avventura and L’Eclisse, or like Dirty Harry and Billy Jack, or like The Exorcist and The Fury – then proceed to lambast the admirers of movies she disliked. Fair enough: but if you’re going to heap scorn and abuse on someone for liking a particular sort of film, you better not be caught out heaping hosannahs on another title that possesses so many of the very same attributes you just finished berating the first film for having!

“You do realize that the pulp bestsellers and penny dreadfuls of previous eras and centuries allowed the victimized, ravished heroines to express outrage at their plight, don’t you?”

And you do realize that Kael is discussing a scene she found unique in movies, and not literature, right? If she thought this was unique to the medium she was reviewing, she had every right to be interested in it. Bringing in Lillian Gish’s horror in BoN is irrelevant, since her reaction in the scene is dramatically generic.

“Someone like Kubrick could be constantly berated (with some justification) for soullessness, but DePalma at his most soulless would be given a lifetime free pass by the Almighty Queen of Arbitrariness.”

Kael praised a good deal of Kubrick’s work up until 2001, and then knocked it afterward. She was notorious in her praise for DePalma, though that didn’t stop her from saying something like The Untouchables was “too banal, too morally comfortable” and “not a great movie.” It was less DePalm’s soulfulness (except in works like Casualties of War) that she replied to as much as his sensousness of his style.

“if she thought The Accused was exploitative and not a serious examination of the issue of rape, then she DEFINITELY…should have found Billy Jack to be likewise exploitative and NOT “feminist” in any meaningful sense”

Why? Because Billy Jack is pulpy and thus automatically exploitative trash in your blinkered outlook? Kael didn’t praise Billy Jack as some kind of pioneering feminist film–she said a moment in it allowed a character to express her outrage in “terms of a specific feminine anger.” That didn’t stop her from finding the film “mixed Up” and “primitive” and often “atrocious.”

Kael obviously had her favorites, but there’s no attempt in your ranting to examine why certain directors captured her attention and what that might say about her standards and expectations. Instead, evidence of a standard of taste becomes absence of one. Kael disdained the Exorcist for its “shallow seriousness,” whereas she praised The Fury by saying “With Spielberg, what happens is so much better than you dared hope that you have to laugh; with DePalma it’s so much worse than you feared that you have to laugh.” She’s hardly praising DePalma for something she damned Friedkin for.

Just because Kael CLAIMED that a “sweet, naive feeling” and “Fairy tale quality” is present doesn’t mean it’s actually present. That she could constantly rationalize her wholly irrational caprices doesn’t make them something other than caprices. That Kael actually read “feminism” where none exists is a strike against HER, not Adler. You do realize that the pulp bestsellers and penny dreadfuls of previous eras and centuries allowed the victimized, ravished heroines to express outrage at their plight, don’t you? It’s a standard melodramatic trope: maybe you think D.W. Griffith a feminist when he has Lillian Gish express her horror and revulsion at the assaults of her Negro attempted rapist in Birth of a Nation?

Kael continued to dogmatically “read” deeply humanistic impulses, and heartfelt tenderness and compasssion, into DePalma’s films, even the ones that were purely technical exercises in Hitchcock-derivative suspense. Someone like Kubrick could be constantly berated (with some justification) for soullessness, but DePalma at his most soulless would be given a lifetime free pass by the Almighty Queen of Arbitrariness.

By Kael’s logic, she should have been wholly behind a movie like The Accused, for example, if “a specific feminine anger at her violation” is what moved her. But, in fact, she panned The Accused – and even had some valid reasons for doing so (it was a movie of its moment, but probably not a great film). However, if she thought The Accused was exploitative and not a serious examination of the issue of rape, then she DEFINITELY – if she had even the slightest capacity for consistency and fairness – should have found Billy Jack to be likewise exploitative and NOT “feminist” in any meaningful sense. But she didn’t. And the reason she didn’t is because she made of career out of glorifying and sanctifying her whims of the moment.

Kael’s emotional responses, of course, could turn on a dime, and she could be quite belittling of feminist concerns when she felt like it. This is because she had no standards and no capacity for consistency, which is why one piece of violent pulp could be extolled as “feminist” and another could be berated for alleged misogyny and other times Kael quite obviously had a thing for bad boys who were anything but feminist. Back and forth Kael went like a see-saw – ridiculing “macho” attitudes in THIS movie, then doing an about-face and hailing the politically incorrect “macho” sexiness of THAT movie. She drones on about how awful The Exorcist is, then a few years later she’s lambasting people for NOT embracing DePalma’s The Fury, even though it’s more of the same kind of dreck she just finished ridiculing audiences for lapping up a few years earlier. But of course, The Fury was a DePalma film, so that makes it a masterpiece in Kael’s delusional mind.