Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [207]
. . . Did you learn something? Did you know before seeing the film that children under four rode the death trains free of charge while those under ten went half-fare? And that these trains were booked by German travel agents? And paid for by the proceeds of confiscated Jewish property? That the Jewish workers in the gas chambers were not allowed to use the words “corpse” or “dead bodies” but instead “puppets” and “rags”? Can you imagine a great fiction writer improving upon all this? Don’t you at least think that Lanzmann’s selection of material out of 350 hours of footage he shot is done with the mind and heart of a great artisan, if not an artist?
He closed his lengthy letter with a telling observation: “You’re often on target but some forces outside of film criticism prevented you from experiencing this work in a whole way.”
Shawn called Talbot and confided that, although he had never censored one of the magazine’s critics, he had seriously considered not running the review. Pauline did not respond to Talbot’s letter, and they did not speak for an entire year.
A number of Pauline’s other friends parted company with her in their views on Shoah. Owen Gleiberman—then a young critic at The Boston Phoenix, and one who liked the film very much—thought that her review was one of her greatest efforts, and that it actually showed deep respect for the profundity of the Holocaust. David Edelstein had also admired Shoah, and couldn’t help wondering if part of her resistance to the film had to do with her deep-rooted suspicion of any religious group. “She had so little use for doctrine, or for Torah scholarship, or any of that crap,” said Edelstein. “She was as dismissive of it as anyone I’ve ever known. Uncomprehending. But I do believe that she couldn’t have written what she wrote if she didn’t on some level believe in an oversoul, some sort of interconnectedness that I think the great artists tap into and that she tapped into when she wrote about their work. I am sure she would snort like crazy if she heard me talk about it in those terms. I believe that she was an extremely spiritual person without being in any way, shape, or form a believer. I’ve met many skeptics, and in some ways they’re extremely obnoxious in their bottom-line dismissal of the idea of transcendence. They are so wedded to this idea that any discussion of the spirit is a delusion, that they can’t even give themselves to great art in a way that Pauline would recognize. Pauline could be transported—she could go to another place without identifying it as religious.”
On the subject of Shoah, Pauline herself remained unrepentant. Nine years after her review appeared, she told The New Yorker’s Hal Espen that “a Holocaust movie should not be sacrosanct simply because of the subject. I think most of the reviewers were willing to call the director of Shoah a great filmmaker because he’d taken on a great subject. They used to treat Stanley Kramer as a great filmmaker, too, especially when he made the nuclear-disaster movie On the Beach.” Perhaps she tired of the way her thoughts on Shoah shadowed her, though: Nearly a decade later, when For Keeps, a compendium of her selected criticism, was published, the review was not included.
As the time came to