After World War II, we despaired of movies as a mass medium.
And when the new European films came in, particularly the films from Italy, and then films from
Japan and other countries, we began to see the possibilities of movies as a different
kind of medium.
Post-war was a turning point.
Perhaps the nation had been holding its breath for so long, or that returning soldiers brought
back something of the wider world with them.
This was most significantly felt in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Despite the stiffening of the Eisenhower era, art, literature, and thought flowed.
It became the seabed where the Bohemians would bloom, and people were crazy about the movies.
It could be heard everywhere, in the streets, in the cafes, and on the airwaves.
The format was, they would go to some movie, and I think they would have dinner and drink
some wine, and then they would go into the studio in downtown Berkeley.
One member of this bright new community would later command a place among America's leading
film critics, Pauline Kale.
Pauline, let's start positively with that.
She would be, you know, the leading spirit in the thing.
From Hollywood, the only pictures that I think might be tolerable, on the waterfront
I think it's a tolerably fit movie for a list of good pictures, and beat the devil for laughs.
Instead of that, the only pictures I saw in equality would all be foreign.
Pauline had a very distinctive chatty voice, as her criticism remained chatty, even though
she became very famous and very influential.
And I think the program helped to shape that mode for her.
Her writing was so vigorous, and sort of smart, and snappy, you know?
Well, often her style was the fetching part of an article.
Many reviewers, and even many serious critics, have a sort of a detached way of going about
their work.
She wanted it to be personal.
She had a couple of blocks, you know, there were a couple of, she didn't like anything
that smacked too heavily of highfalutin.
Art for cutting to art.
Art for a lot of foreign directors that she didn't like.
She greatly appreciated the energy, and sometimes the smarts of traditional American popular
cinema.
The highbrow contingent, in which you would have to place most of the people who thought
of themselves as film artists, didn't care for most of these movies.
The thing about Pauline that people are always curious about is, who is this we that she
claims to speak for, you know?
She says, we really like that film, and we really hated that film.
She saw herself not as a solitary speaker, but as a kind of a mouthpiece for a spirit
abroad in the land, a particularly western spirit, moreover, because Pauline, who came
from Petaluma and was the daughter of a Jewish chicken farmer, I gather, was not your New
York intellectual writing for partisan review or anything like that.
She had a very healthy disdain for the New York intellectual establishment, and she
was hot to establish the fact that westerners could be smart about culture just as much
as anybody east of the Hudson.
Not far away in the sleepy college town of Berkeley, another eccentric was getting his
stored in this dawning age of cinephilia in America.
It was a theater as eccentric as the man himself.
As I recall, it was a twin theaters called Studio Guild or Cinema Guild, and it was a
twin theater.
It was two different rooms.
It had been like a store or something.
And they fitted them in odd storefronts.
Well, it had a little, little tiny box office on the left as you walked in, and then there
was one door to the left and one door to the right.
Ready secondhand seats.
You had to be careful when you sat down, or you might be stabbed by part of the springs
or something.
A sort of tasteful dinginess, I guess.
Edward Landberg was rather short, he was dressed rather kind of dapper, very much like the
ladies.
He had a kind of slightly ecotistical, even arrogant bent to himself.
He had a sense that he was on some kind of great cultural mission, but I kind of liked
him.
It showed a vast variety of things.
They were silent comedy.
Sometimes they were indeed documentaries.
Sometimes they were traditional Hollywood films.
Sometimes they were European features.
If this was it, I'm not sure that it was, it's hard to say.
I thought I'd become a film exhibitor, and that I'd never show a lousy film.
So I opened my own art house the other day.
It didn't exist anywhere in the United States at the time.
I wasn't showing films to make money.
I thought that they would draw for artistic reasons, and since I had a real instinct for
what was artistic, the audience found me, and that's how I was building the audience
before I met Pauline Kale.
That's his KPFA in Berkeley.
Here is Pauline Kale with another in here series of programs called Movies.
Why are our movies so bad, others so good?
I will not dispute the assumption.
I think our movies are shockingly bad, although in the past year there were a few we didn't
need to be ashamed of.
Pauline's reputation was growing.
She took sole charge of the radio show where people tuned in each week for her singular
insight.
She loved being divisive, and I don't think she was always right, either or fair, but
she didn't act like she, she didn't pretend to be fair.
She was the first critic that said, well, too bad.
This is, you know, I'm starting a religion here.
This isn't journalism.
This is religious writing.
This is dogma.
I would like to talk about the collapse of film criticism in this country so that there
are almost no intelligent guides, either for audiences or for filmmakers, and about why
our young filmmakers make spitballs instead of movies.
The outlets for serious film writing were too few at that time.
For a single mother like Pauline, stability could be elusive.
She worked odd jobs, shifts at a bookstore, and at a local dry cleaner, while trying to
establish herself as a writer.
I had read an article by her in Sight and Sound, which is a British film magazine, and
I was surprised to find that she was in Berkeley.
By and large, it was more intelligent than any film criticism that I'd heard.
And so I thought we, I didn't really know what I was looking for.
But I was looking for some kind of support since I was on my own doing this.
I went to San Francisco and she agreed to meet me.
She lived in Lyons Street or something.
I met her and we had some conversations.
I remember one time I was over there and by chance it wasn't deliberate on my part.
My hand grazed her breast and she kind of looked up at me and said, what you got to
lose?
When they got married, it surprised the hell out of everybody and whether they ever had
a sex life or anything was utterly unclear immediately.
We became more and more involved.
She started to write program notes for the Cinema Guild.
I know people were very pleased when she and Landberg made a sort of partnership to work
together on the theaters because we knew that that would make it livelier and more sort of
give a higher tone to the proceedings.
Did they not have a high tone?
When you saw the previous write-ups, they were okay, but they were nothing that special.
I thought if I just gave the titles of the films that I showed, the word of mouth would
get around.
I didn't want to manipulate the audience.
They were little masterpieces of criticism, actually.
Dreyer turns the camera on the faces of Joan and the judges and in giant close-ups he reveals
his interpretation of their emotions.
In this enlargement, Joan and her persecutors are shockingly fleshly.
No other film has subtly linked eroticism with religious persecution.
She had this incredible gift of writing about a film that she didn't really think was very
good and yet made you want to come and see it.
You won't count this film among your deathless experiences.
Chances are, the day after, you won't even remember the name of the heroine, but you
won't want your hour and a half back either.
They were such a big deal.
I mean, we'd plan our weekends around going to Berkeley to see these movies.
Everybody in Berkeley had on their refrigerator or on their bulletin board and their dorm.
When you read those notes, you'd be enticed to see every single one of those movies.
All that she developed on the radio and in print, the chatty tone and personal POV, the
we in her writing, was here.
The cinema guild was the form that energized Pauline's talents.
John Fontaine suffers and suffers, but so exquisitely in this romantic evocation of
late 19th century Vienna that one doesn't know whether to clobber the poor wronged
creature or to give in and weep.
When the calendars would come out of what they were going to be showing, we'd be out
of our minds because nearly every one of them would be some legendary film that we'd read
about and suddenly here they were going to be showing, the Bogart films.
That ambiguous mixture of avarice and honor, sexuality and fear, Humphrey Bogart gave new
dimension to the detective genre.
It's hard to imagine when those films were not all around us, but they were more legendary
than anybody had actually got to see them.
Citizen Kane is a perfect example.
You couldn't see Citizen Kane anywhere.
Wells not only teases the film medium with a let's try everything once over lightly,
he teases his subject matter once over heavily.
Citizen Kane is more fun than any other great film we can think of.
It was stuff you'd never find anywhere, you know, I'm not sure where they got all that
stuff, especially then.
They would rediscover films that were totally ignored when they came out of the commercial
cinema like Charles Lawton's Night of the Hunter was a great film and it was a huge
flop when it came out as a theatrical release, but you know, Pauline Cale knew it was a wonderful
film and that film was constantly in their repertory.
The notes which I wrote for the Night of the Hunter when I was still programming for the
Berkeley Cinema Guild, I said that I thought it might turn out to be an American classic
of the same sort as Germany's cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
I will be very deeply touched and very grateful if you are partly instrumental in making people
see what I think is in that movie and I'm very glad you are fighting and scrapping to
draw people's attention.
His theatre, her writing, it was a perfect match or was it?
Did they love the movies too much but not one another?
I found myself basically out of a job because she was doing it all.
Yeah we had something common but what exactly was I can't remember.
Just didn't seem like a likely match.
It was hard on it being married to her but it may have been harder than anybody to be
married to either of them.
She started to copyright the notes under her own name.
After less than a year I asked for divorce.
She is fired by her husband, ex-husband or whatever.
When he fired her he changed the combination unsafe.
He's a strange guy.
She apparently thought that I would just collapse but she did what she could to make me fail.
She realized that she wasn't going to be able to beat me so she left for New York, tailed
between her legs and got the job at the New Yorker that she got.
So in a sense I forced her to become famous.
The initial reviews are extremely negative.
Cooley Kale wrote an enormous piece, about 5,000 words, on Bonnie and Clyde.
She realized what was going on, that this was some kind of real shift was going on in
public taste and so she was able to like surf in on that.
She saw the wave, she wrote it all the way to a staff job at the New Yorker, became the
most influential film critic in America, up until the time she retired.
David Landberg felt that Pauline had wrongly gotten all the credit, he felt that he should
have had more credit during her years, that he was also part of the team.
He wanted to prove that cinema Gill would be just as good as before, it's not better.
To his credit he was perhaps the first exhibitor in this country to show Ozu in a truly crusading
way.
Ozu was not well known in this country, films were not in distribution in this country.
He really understood and loved Ozu and deserves a lot of credit for introducing many of us
to Ozu.
The exhibitor, the critic, both shaped the ways we see the movies and help articulate
our feelings around them.
And for a brief moment, like luminescent shadows flickering through the darkness, this unconventional
cinema on Telegraph Avenue served as a testament to the power of those feelings.
They
still have pullettes.
They still have all these critics that either are pullettes or not pullettes, which I'm
shocked by that people take that really seriously, and they do.
There's still wars about that.
I'll lay me down.
