Many film critics are satisfied enough to write about films. Pauline Kael, the immensely influential critic of the New Yorker magazine from 1968 to 1991, who died on September 3rd aged 82, always insisted that she was also writing about life - "the sense of the way movies interacted with public life". Even more, she was writing about the sense of how they interacted with her own life.
She dismissed out of hand the pious fantasy of critical objectivity - "saphead objectivity", in her phrase. She laid out her cards of temperament, personality, experience and prejudice, taking trick after critical trick with her sharp, funny, commonsensical and decisively individual reactions to cinema.
Pauline Kael was small, wiry and as energetic as a terrier. Born in Petaluma, California, she was an avid reader and film enthusiast, encouraged by her father, himself a film fan. From 1936 to 1940, she studied philosophy at the Berkeley campus of the University of California; she did not complete her degree, but was later given an honorary doctorate.
She saw herself as something of a wild westerner - she was brought up on a ranch near San Francisco - ready to take on the east coast cultural establishment. But she made a permanent move east only when the New Yorker beckoned, by which time she was nearly 50.
She was in her mid-30s when she began writing about films, hacking out dozens of programme notes for college and film-society screenings, producing articles for very small, and then for somewhat larger, magazines. Her first published essay appeared in San Francisco's City Lights magazine. A flirtation with the popular magazine press, as reviewer for McCall's, ended abruptly, she liked to boast, after she was cruel about The Sound Of Music.
Her first appearance in the New Yorker, in 1967, was a 6,000-word essay eulogising Bonnie And Clyde as "the most excitingly American movie since The Manchurian Candidate". However, her initiation at the magazine was not easy.
Although the editor, William Shawn, had promised her a free hand, her swashbuckling style grated on the style checkers, who tried to convert brusque assertions into mannerly assumptions. "I literally spent more time and effort restoring what I'd written than writing it," she recalled. Her tone of voice was essential to her; and she kept it.
At regular intervals, she published volumes of her collected essays and reviews: I Lost It At the Movies (1965); Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968); Going Steady (1970); Deeper Into Movies (1973) and Reeling (1976). Her final book, For Keeps, was published in 1994.
Looking back in 1994, Pauline Kael was as accurate as ever in pinpointing her own faults as a writer: "reckless excess in both praise and damnation . . . writing very fast and trying to distil my experience of a movie, I often got carried away by words . . .". Certainly, her enthusiasms could seem wild, as for Last Tango In Paris, of which she wrote: "Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form." She said the film's 1972 prΦmiere "should become a landmark" comparable to the first performance of Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring.
Never one to be guiled by the fashionable, the right-minded or the expensive, she boasted that "not many reviewers have a real gift for effrontery. I think that may be my best talent".
She was not often seen at European film festivals, or in London. However, on one trip to England, she called unexpectedly on a film-book publisher, and, as it turned out, inadequately announced. The publisher, impressed by his visitor's knowledge of the New York film scene, asked if she knew Pauline Kael. The bleak, horrified announcement, "I am Pauline Kael," cut short a promising encounter.
She was criticised by many colleagues in the late 1970s when she resigned from the New Yorker to become an executive consultant for Paramount Pictures. It was, however, a short-lived move; she returned to the magazine in 1980, disenchanted with film-making politics.
She seemed to lose some of her hard edge. As Hollywood moved deeper into the era of huge budgets, violence and special effects, there was simply less worth writing about, a temptation to try to whip up the old excitement about nothing very much.
"Movie criticism now is often a report on a vacuum," she said in 1994, three years after age and ill-health had forced her retirement from the New Yorker.
Pauline Kael: born 1919; died, September 2001