Reconsidering Pauline Kael

Via Arts & Letters Daily, the often very readable Open Letters Monthly offers an appreciation of the late film critic Pauline Kael.  One commenter (Belinda Gomez) notes, “Far too often, she’s a fan girl, not an actual critic. Her knowledge of film was wide but shallow.”  That may be the case.  But Kael’s were reviews that a beginning filmgoer could use, to work her way into the way knowledgeable moviegoers think.  The reviewer notes that the way Kael thought was not the way academic film critics think (there were few serious film critics even existing at the time, though, I think), but I don’t see why this should be reason to ignore her writing and opinions, even as judged by academic standards.  If academic criticism explains how a culture views a work of art, then academic criticism must take into account the views of that culture’s best critics (possibly, making an empirical study of what they wrote).  If, on the other hand, academic criticism ignores the best internal critics a culture has to offer, it raises the question, on whose views academic criticism is based.  (Even if it gives what Thomas Nagel called “The View from Nowhere,” one would like to know what that view is and who can tell us about it.)