Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [41]
She also encouraged her colleagues to rebel whenever possible. “She was kind of a champion of mine in times when I was in a little bit of trouble at KPFA,” remembered the station’s music director, Alan Rich. On his weekly music review program, Rich’s critical arrows were often aimed at the San Francisco Symphony. Unfortunately, several of the Symphony’s major donors were also viewed by KPFA’s management as potential patrons of the station, and from time to time, Lewis Hill made his objections known to Rich. “I remember running into Pauline on Telegraph Avenue,” said Rich, “and she, at the top of her lungs, started yelling about how good I was, and how dare they give me a hard time.”
Pauline’s weekly broadcasts, meanwhile, were covering many of the new European movies that were catching on with American art-house audiences. One of the most exhilarating movements in world cinema then was the Nou-velle Vague (New Wave). The many champions of the New Wave during the late 1950s and early ’60s prized its style of looking at movie storytelling—a more complex, relaxed, intuitive means of portraying characters and situations onscreen. Those at the forefront of the New Wave carried on loudly about the stagnation and lack of imagination that had blighted French cinema since the end of the war, arguing that it had never moved ahead in any innovative way, having been crippled by the hard financial times that cast a pall over the postwar years.
New Wave filmmakers were not too concerned with plot symmetry and conventional narrative technique; they wanted to get at the absolute truth of a situation, often in jagged and allusive ways. If the final result challenged or even puzzled the audience, so much the better. Among the notable characteristics of the New Wave was a preference for location shooting over studio-made sets, a sense of the absurd, an overall feeling of cinema verité—an attempt to portray life as it really was, not as moviegoers had grown accustomed to seeing it manipulated. There was some irony in this, since many of the New Wave directors—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, among others—had begun their careers by writing for the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, a scholarly journal that consistently paid homage not only to the Italian neorealist movement, but to commercial Hollywood studio product. The Cahiers critics were at the forefront of the new movement of auteurists, intent on reevaluating the achievements of many screen directors they considered underrated, and linking their films to one another in terms of style and theme. They elevated the works of studio directors such as Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk to a level of appreciation that Americans had not shown them. The Cahiers du Cinéma group revered directors who left a conspicuous visual “signature” on their movies, and, like police detectives trying to connect a disparate set of clues, they loved searching for visual links among the directors’ films. John Ford, with his painterly instinct in depicting the Old West, and Alfred Hitchcock, the most unapologetically commercial director of all, were held up by the New Wavers as cinema geniuses par excellence.
In 1959, the crucial year for the New Wave, three films premiered at the Cannes Festival and went on to tremendous international success. The first, Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus, with its relentless impressionistic score by Luiz Bonfa, was by no means a characteristic New Wave effort, but the other two, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, were landmark events in world cinema. These films had unexpected rhythms, perversities of editing, scenes of great complexity, ambiguity, and beauty. The 400 Blows, in