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KAEL_TECHNIQUE

                                             November 20, 2012
                                             December 10, 2012
There are some good
side-bar quotes up here:

   [link]

This one is appropriate to appropriate:

   “An idea does not exist apart from the
   words that express it. Style is not an
   envelope enclosing a message; the
   envelope is the message.”

           -- Dwight Macdonald
                                        DWIGHT_MAC


Compare that to some
off Pauline Kael's          I think we can take
remarks on technique.       cinematic technique
                            as a rough analog of
She never quite comes       literary style.
out and says that
technique doesn't
matter, but she
definitely downplayed        From "Trash, Art and the Movies" (1969)
it's importance:
                                                        MY_NAME_IS_MODESTY                transgression, without
                                                   ever coming to a
                                                   comfortable resting point."

                                                       This is as quoted by
                                                       Jim Emerson in "Trash
                                                       and Art: Critics
                                                       on/of Pauline Kael",
                                                       February 19, 2007

                                                       [link]








        I wonder about her
        comments on "2001":                   It doesn't bother me greatly
                                              that her take on "2001" is
        She continually uses                  negative-- her comments are
        Kubrick's name over-and-over          largely rational, and you can
        without mentioning Clarke.            see why she wouldn't have
        Can she possibly believe that         found "2001" to be viscerally
        a film is solely the result           appealing.
        of one intelligence?
                                                   Her complaints largely
            It's apparently one of her             miss the point: with
            well known contradictions:             "2001" things that had
            she criticized the                     previously only been
            "auteur" theory, but                   imagined and described
            perpetually spoke as                   were put on film...
            though the director was                if these scenes were
            a god-like, lone creator.              things that lived in
                                                   your imagination,
                                                   then seeing them on
                                                   screen has a "visceral"
                                                   appeal of its own.
                                                   If you're not someone
                                                   who ever tried to
                                                   imagine weightless
                                                   environments, or
                                                   artificial centrifugal
                                                   gravity, or experiencing
                                                   raw vaccum on your skin,
                                                   then the film might seem
                                                   "merely" intellectual.

                                                           2001
  At one point in "Trash, Art, and
  the Movies", Kael talks up the
  wide range of different personal
  and cultural contexts all as
  valid ways of seeing...

  But these apparently do not include
  the movie production nerd obsessed
  with technique, or the moralist
  concerned with what the state of
  popular art may say about us.


      Kael sometimes seems like
      an aesthetic fascist, a           One can enjoy "Bonnie and Clyde"
      an advocate for one way           without rejecting "2001".
      of seeing.

      She's documenting her reactions,
      okay, she insists that they're
      valid, okay, but she rarely drops
      the familiar stance of the critic,
      copping a pose about speaking the
      truth, stating the way you should       CRITICAL_ABCS
      react, standing up for standards.

      The teenager's desire to see "Bonnie and Cylde"
      is judged approvingly as "honest", which implies
      that anyone who feels otherwise is dishonest...
                                                         HONEST_KAEL
             Kael, like Dwight MacDonald, were both
             critics of responses they suspect are
             insincere: they reject posing, they
             reject seeing as you've been told to see.




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