Reeling and 5001 Nights at the Movies by Pauline Kael

Continuing a closer look at this...

I first read Pauline Kael's film criticism not long after finishing the paper that had led me to Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. Considering I was a burgeoning film buff, I'm sure I would have gotten around to reading her work on purpose, although I ended up discovering it by accident. Our neighbors across the street were renovating their basement, which they had been using to store all of their books and they offered to pay me to box them all up. I noticed that they had quite a few books of film criticism and while taking a break (it was a hot day - I needed to stay hydrated) I picked up a copy of Reeling and started skimming through it.

By this time, I was already familar with, if not the exact movies she was wiritng about in Reeling, many movies from that era. One of the "major events" in my cine-biography was moving from a rural New York town of 10,000 that had a good, solid video store (Village Video on Raymond Street in Malone) and a single screen theatre to Montreal, a genuine, world-class city with a number of great video stores, multiplexes, and (at the time) even a few rep houses. And given that I was a fan of Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, I had ended up watching quite a few movies from the "American New Wave". So, my brief look at the book was enough to get me hooked: passionate writing about the kind of movies that I was just beginning to get passionate about - a perfect match!

I went to the bookstore the next weekend to get my own copy, but, since I couldn't find Reeling, I bough 5001 Nights at the Movies, which replaced the Halliwell's Film Guide that I was contiually checking out of the library as my main source for movie recommendations. Over the years, my copy of 5001 Nights stayed with me, moving from house to dorm to various apartments, getting pretty beat up along the way from almost constant reference.

Over the years, I've come to agree with Michael Blowhard that Kael's criticism is more valuable as writing - for its humour, its voice, its passion - than as film criticism, per se. As a critic, Kael is perhaps too reliant on her immediate reaction: her wisecracking confidence doesn't leave any room for doubt or self-reflection. Too often she writes as if she's trying to have the last word rather than start a conversation. But the things she taught me to value in movies - mainly a sense of vitality and emotional truth - are still important to me today. And I still use too many em dashes.