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The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Pauline Kael
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Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Firsts
First
Make
Prerogative
Medium
Mediums
Fool
Artist
More quotes by Pauline Kael
In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.
Pauline Kael
In a foreign country people don't expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don't consider that you might be different because they don't recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.
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Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
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Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.
Pauline Kael
I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.
Pauline Kael
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again.
Pauline Kael
It's sometimes discouraging to see all of a director's movies, because there's so much repetition. The auteurists took this to be a sign of a director's artistry, that you could recognize his movies. But it can also be a sign that he's a hack.
Pauline Kael
Great movies are rarely perfect movies.
Pauline Kael
It is a depressing fact that Americans tend to confuse morality and art (to the detriment of both) and that, among the educated, morality tends to mean social consciousness.
Pauline Kael
The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.
Pauline Kael
tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
Pauline Kael
Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.
Pauline Kael
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us.
Pauline Kael
Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.
Pauline Kael
Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.
Pauline Kael
The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
Pauline Kael
Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
Pauline Kael
If I never saw another fistfight or car chase or Doberman attack, I wouldn't have any feeling of loss. And that goes for Rottweilers, too.
Pauline Kael
If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
Pauline Kael
Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
Pauline Kael