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Selected Writings of Pauline Kae
Library of America
November 2011
On Sale: October 27, 2011
750 pages ISBN: 1598531093 EAN: 9781598531091 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
"Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula
to apply," Pauline Kael once observed, "just because you
must use everything you are and everything you know."
Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New
Yorker, Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes
of a generation, enthralling readers with her gift for
capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor's
gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael
called movies "the most total and encompassing art form we
have," and she made her reviews a platform for considering
both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process
a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and
improvisatory grace. To read The Age of Movies, the first
new selection in more than a generation, is to be swept up
into an endlessly revealing and entertaining dialogue with
Kael at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best. Her
ability to evoke the essence of a great artist-an Orson
Welles or a Robert Altman-or to celebrate the way even
seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched
by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a
corrupt movie industry. Here in this career spanning
collection are her appraisals of the films that defined an
era-among them Breathless, Bonnie and Clyde, The Leopard,
The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, Nashville-along with
many others, some awaiting rediscovery, all providing the
occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive
on every page.
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