Tough shit, Bill!
Translated from French
During the year 1973, one of the writers of The New Yorker is summoned by the editor-in-chief William Shawn to rewrite a paper about the last film of Terence Malick. This writer is Pauline Kael and she is hardly the type to be intimidated by the fragility of the masculine ego.
The cinema critic Pauline Kael (1919-2001) shakes the industry of the seventh art, created by, and for, men in a noticeable way in 1967 after a dithyrambic review of Bonnie and Clyde that she describes as "the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate”. This essay of 6000 words published in The New Yorker finds a resounding echo among the general public, while the snobby Hollywood establishment sneers at the film. An enthusiasm, due to the editorial angle of Kael, that refuses the uptight writing of a supposed cinematographic intelligentsia. To uniformed analyses, she opposes a swift writing that interconnects the plastic materiality of the piece and the phenomenological experience of the spectator, stating "when I write about a movie all my experiences and reactions seem to come together". An approach that goes against the male gaze, in films and journalism, then dominated by white men. If this process is not defined in terms of phenomenology at that time, Pauline Kael clearly fits into this demonstration of an embodied cinema: the one of a person driven with emotions and the one of a visual object that takes place in a context. This journalistic incarnation, rejecting the absurdity of an objective analysis that she qualified as "saphead objectivity” allowed the redefinition of a certain critical frame for the seventh art. Because if the audio-visual productions have an impact on the construction of the society, so do those who comment on it.
Where the director and British critic, Laura Mulvey, theorised on the male gaze in her 1975 book Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Pauline Kael had already participated in its deconstruction – an ‘impressionist’ writer of this art, an attribute that she rejects while embodying it. At that time, she quite rightly notes that solely women in journalism are qualified as impressionists, with the idea that "they might have impressions, something might hit them but they really couldn’t think straight” and to specify that it was for men "their way of dismissing a woman critic”. As she fights against this label for years, she perfectly determines the contours of a concept that characterises her writing by the combination of "one’s instincts over sum total of one’s mind and responses” adding "I’m not a mechanic between mind and instinct”. This is precisely what she does through her critiques, where she closely analyses the cinematographic object while focusing on making explicit what was implicit in her reactions, refusing to linger on the mechanisms of the film itself, when men actually auto-congratulate themselves with academic discourse full of vacuity and auto-quotes. This will, of analytic and emotional fidelity, pairs with her redactional method that maintained an organic relationship with writing: she wrote all of her critiques by hand in one frenetic go, after one watch. A much needed narrative, as since les frères Lumière the aesthetic had been theorised by men what resulted to an absolute concupiscence of gaze imposed on the collective unconscious. To this, were often added masturbatory reflections of journalists in order to elevate hollow films to the status of masterpieces. Or to depreciate brilliant productions, following the example of a journalist depicting the last film of Céline Sciamma, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, of ‘the most neutral of a stiffed up cinema”. Counterbalancing the white heteronormative critic is then vital. Pauline Kael ignored these patriarcal-capitalist and elitist considerations and drew an anthology of impressionist cinema against that of the white male. The equivalent of the ‘phenomenology approach […] considering that watching is foremost an embodied experience” theorised by Iris Bray in Le regard féminin.
Before taking her retirement in 1991, the critic nonadept of the journalistic consensus decried some ‘big names’ such as Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood and even Alfred Hitchcock. It seems anecdotic but would be forgetting the male domination in this industry, necrosed by the alpha and the audacity of Kael to face it. Georges Lucas did not hesitate to use her name in Willow (1998), revenge of a filthy littleness, for the demoniac character of General Kael. Escaping the normative carcans of Hollywood, scares the white power that tends to coerce its unidirectional vision of the visual culture. Ironically, the critic declared that she was "often accused of writing about everything but the movie”, which is probably also true of this portrait. It however appears that it is the notes scribbled in margins that turn out to be the more pertinent. As this last comment highlights all the effrontery of the writer.
In 1973, following a negative review from Pauline Kael of Badland by Terence Malick, William Shawn, friend of the director and editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, asked the critic to rewrite the piece, a perfect illustration of a rancid male’s ‘entre-soi’ (inner circle). Kael then replied “Tough shit, Bill!”.
References Houston, Penelope, « Pauline Kael », The Guardian, 5 September 2001 Pauline Kael on Criticism, Deep Focus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REarWn1Inhg Pauline Kael on Writer's Workshop, 11 February 1982
Tessé, Jean-Philippe, Cahiers du Cinéma, September 2019, no758
Brey, Iris, Le regard féminin, une révolution à l’écran, 2020, p. 15
Pauline Kael extended interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLKl4_gSpuk
Pauline Kael - Biography - IMDb