Local rep theatre, The Mayfair.In her essay "Movies on Television," Kael bemoans the situation of those of us too young to see great movies the moment they came out. How unfortunate, we have to see them on television: "all jumbled together, out of historical sequence. Even what may deserve an honorable position in movie history is somehow dishonored by being so available, so meaninglessly present. Everything is in hopeless disorder." A criticism of how movies looked, chopped up & made to fit TV, this essay also emphasizes the social nature of movies: they are participatory, an event, something done en masse in public, at night... well, sometimes. I certainly realize I have missed these films as social events and will never have that experience. Religiously attending my local rep will not make up for that, seeing flicks in the disgusting local multiplex won't either. Most of what I see I do see in my living room.
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is the second collection of Kael's writings and contains reviews of films that were produced close to the time of publication, essays on the careers of those in the industry and reviews of films that were produced during the studio era. Kael's writing was pretty unflinching. Take her piece on Stanley Kramer, best known for Guess Who's Coming for Dinner. Right off the bat she compares him with a salesman who used to hang around the coffeehouses on campus, took a psych test and discovered that "he was a phenomenon, according to the testing centre, because of the enormous discrepancy between his abilities and his professional and artistic aspirations." Ouch! She brings herself into the writing frequently (or her lived experiences) and focuses on circumstances behind a production, the role of a producer or the work of a cameraman, as much as she does the stars.
Movie criticism would not strike me as a genre with much longevity, but the quality of Kael's writing belies this. I was surprised how few of the films I had heard of (often Italian or Japanese) which she considered to be highly influential of American directors in the 60s. Some of her writing is surprisingly prescient; other films which she dismissed have gained a foothold over time. One of these I would say is A Man for All Seasons; Kael describes the titular character (Sir Thomas More) as not "particularly relevant to this season, I doubt he's relevant to any season." When I re-watched this one on television recently, I could only draw a straight line from that film's antagonist's abuse of power and disregard for established law to Bush 47's disregard for habeus corpus, etc.
Kael claims that because of television there really is no natural selection process for movies (unlike other arts) but this is where she and I would part ways; for Kael, a good movie is a good movie but the rest is detritus "what does not deserve to last, lasts," she writes, "and so it begins to seem one big pile of junk." So, Kael may be the only writer I have ever read who actually celebrates that only a small percentage of other, earlier art forms have survived!
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