Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [205]
For Pauline it was never enough to take on starkly dramatic subject matter—one had to do something with it. On this particular point, she got into further trouble with another picture she covered at the same time, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour-plus documentary on the Nazi death factories, Shoah, which was released to an almost universally rapturous critical reception at the end of 1985.
Pauline’s unsentimental attitude toward her Jewish background hadn’t changed over the years. The idea that she might be one of the “chosen” struck her as absurd, and she resented the sense of entitlement she perceived in many members of the New York Jewish literary community. She had no more tolerance for the religious feelings of Jews than she had for those of Christians. Charles Simmons remembered a night when he invited Jack Greenberg, an attorney and later dean of Columbia College, Greenberg’s wife, and Pauline all to dinner at his apartment. Simmons made a baked ham, and when they all sat down to dinner, Mrs. Greenberg exclaimed, “I can’t eat that!” “Oh, for Chrissake, are you kidding?” snapped Pauline. “That medieval bullshit?” Simmons quickly prepared Mrs. Greenberg a plate of scrambled eggs, but he recalled thinking that Pauline’s attitude was so contemptuous because she considered such thinking irrational.
Pauline sat through the entire length of Shoah (in two parts) at regular showings in a theater, not at a private screening, since she wanted to gauge the audience’s response. She later wrote that the large crowd for the first section had largely dwindled away by the time the second was shown (though this was denied by her old friend Dan Talbot, who had acquired the film’s distribution rights in New York). Shoah was the most comprehensive film ever made about the death-camp experience, but Pauline felt it contained few moments of genuine beauty. Lanzmann’s approach to his subject struck her as highly self-conscious and arty, played out at a punishing length. She hated the insistent way that the camera kept returning ominously to the railroad tracks that led to the camps. She believed that everyone who saw Shoah was being asked to surrender unconditionally to the view of Nazi horrors that it presented, and she was unable to find that level of surrender within herself.
Her colleague Jane Kramer at The New Yorker agreed with her about Shoah. “I hated it,” Kramer recalled. “I just thought, the poeticized landscape, the heavy symbolism. When you think that it followed a movie as brilliant and intimate as The Sorrow and the Pity? Lanzmann was such a sanctimonious presence—kind of like the Elie Wiesel of filmmakers. He sure as hell wasn’t the Primo Levi. You look at those two writers about Auschwitz, and the depth and humanity of Levi and the capital gains of Wiesel. He was arrogant and self-serving.”
Pauline turned in her review of Shoah, and Shawn called her into his office as soon as he had read it. He did not want to publish it at all, and they had a series of heated discussions over it. Shawn held the piece for two weeks, which enraged her—she felt like a schoolgirl being reprimanded for having written an honest essay. Finally she was able to get it into print, on two conditions: that it was strategically placed at the end of the column that led with her reviews of Out of Africa and The Color Purple, and that she added an opening that prepared the reader for what was to follow. It wasn’t Pauline’s style to offer an apologia for her views or to prepare her readers for a soft landing, but Shawn was immovable on this point. Grudgingly she provided the introduction:
Probably everyone will agree that the subject of a movie should not place it beyond criticism.... I ask the