"Movie love is abiding throughout life....We're lovers who are let down all the time, and go on loving."-Pauline Kael
It is a passion for cinema that we celebrate when we celebrate Pauline Kael. At PFA, her death in September moved us to remember the ways that she inspired us, not only as a writer, but as a film programmer. A Petaluma native and UC Berkeley graduate in philosophy (1940), from 1955 to 1960 Kael was programmer and theater manager of the Berkeley Cinema Guild, an art house at the corner of Telegraph and Haste owned by Edward Landberg, to whom Kael was briefly married. The Cinema Guild was so successful, a second screen was added in 1955, making it the Berkeley Cinema Guild and Studio (the first twin cinema in the U.S.!).
Kael's short program notes for the Cinema Guild contain all the brittle wit and terse observation we later came to expect in her lengthy New Yorker reviews and the capsules she published in books such as I Lost It at the Movies and 5001 Nights at the Movies. Consider the way she sums up the class consciousness and inherent feminism of Lubitsch's Cluny Brown in a seeming throwaway remark: "A girl with a passion for plumbing is frightfully repugnant to stuffy people who don't even want to admit that they have drains." Or her summation of De Sica's Shoeshine: "If Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty." She loved neorealism for its heartwrenching strength and social purpose, just as she loved W. C. Fields for his irreverence. She was deeply suspicious of pretention, and was a champion of B films that hit the viewer in the gut as well as of the films of Bergman and Renoir. She was invigorated by movies, and she actively promoted intellectual discourse, both on the page and in the lobby. In short, she was a breath of fresh air for Berkeley (where she also reviewed films on the air on KPFA until 1963).
Kael believed in the films she showed, and (as with Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours, below), she would program a film over and over again until people finally came. She was for us the very model of a film programmer, one whose relationship to the audience PFA, indeed repertory cinema in general, inherited. (Interestingly, Tom Luddy was programmer at the Cinema Guild after Kael and before he became PFA's world–renowned film curator in our first decade.) Remembering Pauline Kael, we present a selection of films she programmed for the Cinema Guild, accompanied by their original program notes.
