Early Life and Career
Kael was born on a chicken farm in Petaluma, California, to Isaac Paul Kael and Judith (Friedman) Kael, Jewish immigrants from Poland. Her parents lost their farm when Kael was eight, and the family moved to San Francisco, California. She matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1936; she studied philosophy, literature, and the arts but dropped out in 1940 before completing her degree. Nevertheless, Kael intended to go on to law school but fell in with a group of artists and moved to New York City with the poet Robert Horan.
Three years later, Kael returned to San Francisco and "led a bohemian life," marrying and divorcing three times, writing plays, and working in experimental film. In 1948, Kael and filmmaker James Broughton had a daughter, Gina, whom Kael would raise alone. Gina had a serious illness through much of her childhood; and, to support Gina and herself, Kael worked a series of such menial jobs as cook and seamstress, along with stints as an advertising copywriter. In 1953, the editor of City Lights magazine overheard Kael arguing about films in a coffeeshop with a friend and asked her to review Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. Kael memorably dubbed the film "slimelight" and began publishing film criticism regularly in magazines.
Even these early reviews were notable for their informality and lack of pretension; Kael later explained, "I worked to loosen my style—to get away from the term-paper pomposity that we learn at college. I wanted the sentences to breathe, to have the sound of a human voice." Kael disparaged the supposed critic's ideal of objectivity, referring to it as "saphead objectivity," and incorporated aspects of autobiography into her criticism. In a review of Vittorio De Sica's 1946 neorealist Shoeshine (Sciuscià) that has been ranked among her most memorable, Kael described seeing the film
| “ | after one of those terrible lovers' quarrels that leave one in a state of incomprehensible despair. I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, 'Well I don't see what was so special about that movie.' I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?... Later I learned that the man with whom I had quarreled had gone the same night and had also emerged in tears. Yet our tears for each other, and for Shoeshine did not bring us together. Life, as Shoeshine demonstrates, is too complex for facile endings. | ” |
Kael broadcast many of her early reviews on the alternative public radio station KPFA, in Berkeley, and gained further local-celebrity status as Berkeley Cinema Guild manager from 1955 to 1960. As manager of a two-screen theater, Kael programmed the films that were shown "unapologetically repeat her favorites until they also became audience favorites." She also wrote "pungent" capsule reviews of the films, which her patrons began collecting.
Read more about this topic: Pauline Kael
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“The symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year’s hay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground.... So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I restore myself when I’m alone. A career is born in public—talent in privacy.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)