FILMOGRAPHY

Pauline Kael was particularly gifted at sensing differences among directors, often making brutal distinctions when appraising a given vision or stylistic predilection. The following excerpts, taken from reviews of Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning and Huston’s The Bible, present a unified aesthetic front. I find these passages both instructive and inspiring, as I’m afflicted with the kind of cinematic wildness she meticulously congratulates here. (I also happen to like the phrases “screen artist,” “movie-making sixth sense,” “sinfully extravagant” and “Promethean temperament.”)

“Boudu is a more leisurely film than we are used to now, not that it is long, or slow, but that the camera isn’t in a rush, the action isn’t overemphatic, shots linger on the screen for an extra split second — we have time to look at them, to take them in. Renoir is an unobtrusive, unselfconscious storyteller: he doesn’t ‘make points,’ he doesn’t rub our noses in ‘meaning.’ He seems to find his story as he tells it; sometimes the improvisation falters, the movie gets a little untidy. He’s not a director to force things; he leaves a lot of open spaces. This isn’t a failure of dramatic technique: it’s an indication of that movie-making sixth sense that separates a director like Renoir from a buttoned-up-tight gentleman-hack…He lets a movie breathe…Renoir’s camera reveals the actors as if they were there naturally or inadvertently — not arranged for a shot but found by the camera on the streets, in the shop, on the banks of the Seine. The camera doesn’t overdramatize their presence, it just — rather reticently — picks them up, and occasionally lets them disappear from the frame, to be picked up again at a later point in their lives.”

“John Huston is an infinitely more complex screen artist than David Lean. He can be far worse than Lean because he’s careless and sloppy and doesn’t have all those safety nets of solid craftsmanship spread under him. What makes a David Lean spectacle uninteresting finally is that it’s in such goddamn good taste. It’s all so ploddingly intelligent and controlled, so ‘distinguished.’ Lean plays the game of spectacles like a sane man. Huston tests himself, plays the crazy game crazy — to beat it, to win…

Huston shoots arrows all over the place; he pushes himself too hard, he tries to do too many things. [The Bible] is episodic not merely because the original material is episodic but also because, like Griffith in Intolerance, he can find no way to rhythm together everything he’s trying to do. Yet the grandeur of this kind of crazy, sinfully extravagant movie-making is in trying to do too much. We tend, now, to think of the art of the film in terms of depth, but there has always been something about the eclectic medium of movies that, like opera, attracts artists of Promethean temperament…I don’t mean men like DeMille who made small-minded pictures on a big scale — they’re about as Promethean as a cash register. I mean men like Griffith and von Stroheim and Abel Gance and Eisenstein and Fritz Lang and Orson Welles who thought big, men who’s prodigious failures could make other people’s successes look puny.”