Female Film Critics 24/375
The transparent goal of the documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is measured praise for this influential film critic best known for twenty-four years of reviews in The New Yorker, beginning in 1968. Determined to make the presentation entertaining, director Rob Garver excessively inserts unidentified film clips reflecting and reinforcing comments and context.
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In an era in which a cacophony of critical voices competes for potential moviegoers’ time and attention — and yet not nearly enough of those voices represent the diversity of the public they’re speaking to — Pauline Kael’s iconic status seems like even more of an achievement. Her remarkable career is the subject of Rob Garver’s insightful documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael.
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Pauline Kael famously said that critics need only do two things consistently. We must always work to be better at our craft, and we must always be courageous. Whether you love or hate her work, this is a great reminder to anyone, regardless of what part of the business world they are in, from a woman who proved an important part of film history.
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There are snippets of Kael’s own voice in archival footage although first-time director Rob Garver fills in the blanks by employing actress Sarah Jessica Parker to read sections of her writing while the critic’s daughter Gina James and other associates provide commentary. Kael, who had a way of picking just the right searing or celebratory word, rattled the intellectual crowd while pooh-poohing the backers of critic Andrew Sarris’s auteur theory.
Read morePauline Kael, who wrote about film for The New Yorker, was one of the few high profile women critics in the 60s and early 70s and is credited with inventing modern film criticism with her colloquial, smart but non-academic approach. This entertaining documentary, essential for cinephiles and anyone who writes about film, traces Kael’s career as she struggled for years to eke out a living as a critic while raising her daughter, Gina James (interviewed in the film) on her own, a most unconventional undertaking in the late ‘40s.
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