Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [119]
Pauline’s mid-March review of Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, a documentary about the collaboration of France’s Vichy government with the Nazis—“one of the most intricately balanced moral dilemmas imaginable”—was her final review of the season, and never before had she found it so difficult to step away from her job for six months. Films had become so amazingly present and alive with the work of so many superb craftsmen (Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sam Peckinpah) and so many artists capable of revitalizing genres that had long ossified (Robert Altman, Bob Fosse). The confluence of talent and activity exhilarated her so much that she couldn’t stop talking about it; often, she told people that she had the best job she could possibly have found.
One of the things that thrilled her most was that this explosion of creativity was being born out of a specific, unique time in history. The subjects and attitudes of current films were providing a kind of living journal of the times; a legitimate movement was afoot, with filmmakers responding to the world around them and putting their visions up there on the screen in new and exciting ways. Best of all, the audiences were with them. The dialogue between screen and audience that Pauline had always envisioned was rising to glorious heights. Later she would compare this period of filmmaking with the great flowering of American writing in the nineteenth century, with the best of the current crop of directors and screenwriters reinvigorating their art form just as Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Whitman had theirs.
“Inexplicably,” she wrote in that season-ending column in March 1972, “despite everything—the suicidal practices of the film industry, the defeat of many people of talent, the financial squeeze here and abroad—this has been a legendary period in movies.... A reviewer could hardly ask for more from any art, high or popular.”
The luckiest people who work in the arts are those who find themselves in just the right place during the perfect confluence of creative activity and an eager, inquisitive public. Pauline was in the vortex. She had reached the apex of her moviegoing life, and she wanted it to go on forever.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After winding up her reviewing at The New Yorker in March 1972, Pauline once again plunged into a hectic schedule on the lecture circuit. She always had mixed feelings about this part of the year. Lecture appearances provided her with much-needed income, and she relished the chance to speak with young people about what they responded to in the movies; many of the conversations she had with college students on the road provided her with important material for her New Yorker pieces. But she disliked having to associate with faculty members and attending the English Department party that inevitably followed her lecture appearances. She considered most of the English and film studies professors she encountered to be dull, pompous, jealous of her position in the world, or all three. Still, if academia remained generally unattractive to her, she was quite attractive to academia and regularly received offers to become a visiting or regents professor—one example of many being the unsuccessful attempts of the Berkeley professor David Littlejohn to persuade her to join the School of Journalism faculty. She did, however, agree to serve as a member of the Educational Advisory Board of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a post that allowed her to use her influence to help artists she considered deserving and underfunded.
When she wasn’t on the road, she was occupied with the ongoing process of fixing up the house in Great Barrington. She told friends that she dreamed of one day living there full-time, though she could not yet see how such a thing would be feasible in practical terms, given the intensity of her schedule at The New Yorker and the necessity