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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

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Pauline Kael
Age: 82 †
Born: 1919
Born: June 19
Died: 2001
Died: September 3
Film Critic
Journalist
Writer
Petaluma
California
Fact
Depressing
Social
Tends
Facts
Educated
Art
Tend
Mean
Morality
Americans
Among
Detriment
Consciousness
Confuse

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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.
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The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new
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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.
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All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for.
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I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.
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What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.
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Art doesn't come in measured quantities: it's got to be too much or it's not enough.
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I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn't know.
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tasteful and colossal are - in movies, at least - basically antipathetic.
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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.
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Robert Redford ... has turned almost alarmingly blond-he's gone past platinum, he must be into plutonium his hair is coordinated with his teeth.
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An avidity for more is built into the love of movies. Something else is built in: you have to be open to the idea of getting drunk on movies. (Being able to talk about movies with someone -- to share the giddy high excitement you feel -- is enough for a friendship.
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Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.
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Since I have an aversion to movies in which people say grace at the dinner table (not to the practice but to how movies use it to establish the moral strength of a household), the opening night montage of Sunday-night supper in one home after another in Waxahachie, Texas in 1935 - a whole community saying grace made me expect the worst.
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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.
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Protagonists are always loners, almost by definition.
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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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Really, it's not people who don't understand us who drive us nuts—it's when those who shouldn't, do.
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The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen.
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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.
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