don’t have a fad for your music.” Barber responded with a frozen silence that lasted for weeks. “He has pride and vanity at a maximum,” Pauline wrote to Vi. “ Nobody is ever rude to him—and I’m afraid the poor dear will take some time recovering.”
She limped through the following year with a string of odd jobs. Her greatest literary discoveries of 1945 were the works of Marcel Proust, which she made her way through in four weeks of concentrated reading. “I almost feel as if it had become a layer of my sensibility by now,” she told Vi. “When you get to know a book that well it seems to get into you.”
She was fascinated by the news that her old Berkeley classmate Virginia Admiral had left Robert De Niro, Sr., and gone off to live with Manny Farber, the film critic of The New Republic . This was bound to pique her interest, since for some time she had followed Farber’s reviews with great enthusiasm. Born in Arizona, Farber had certain things in common with Pauline—a Berkeley education, an interest in other forms of art (he went on to distinction as an abstract painter), and an intense dislike of overly formal, schematic “masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago,” which, he felt, “has come to dominate the over-populated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant are (1) to frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.” He much preferred what he called “termite art,” which he characterized as something that “feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art.” He believed that the movie critic’s objective was to dig into the truth of a film and get it across to his readers. He once said, “I can’t see any difference between writing about a porno movie and an Academy Award movie—both are difficult objects.” His writing was at once jazzy and direct and intellectually rigorous. Pauline admired many things about him, including his iconoclastic wit and his fondness for lively B movies, and his theory about white elephant art vs. termite art would be an important influence on her own development as a critic.
There were other movie critics that Pauline had admired over the years, and each of them cast some degree of influence over her as she began thinking more seriously about the art of the film. One was Graham Greene, who began reviewing films for The Oxford Outlook while still a student, and from 1935 to 1940 he reviewed by the week, mostly for the London Spectator . Greene was never afraid to rail about the blindness of the British Board of Censors, or to berate his British readers for not taking cinema seriously enough. Pauline agreed with his observation that “an excited audience is never depressed; if you excite your audience first, you can put over what you will of horror, suffering truth.” It was a point of view that led him in some surprising directions, such as his feeling that Alfred Hitchcock “amuses but he doesn’t excite.... He hasn’t enough imagination to excite; he doesn’t convince.” He felt that Hitchcock concentrated on his big moments at the expense of everything else that was going on in the movie: opinions that served as a blueprint for the critical position that Pauline would later hold on Hitchcock.
Another critic Pauline admired enormously was Otis Ferguson, who wrote for The New Republic beginning in 1930. Ferguson possessed a keen appreciation of the director’s contribution, but he also understood that movies were mostly the product of a factory system. “Movies are such common and lowly stuff,” he once wrote, “that in intellectual circles we often find ourselves
She limped through the following year with a string of odd jobs. Her greatest literary discoveries of 1945 were the works of Marcel Proust, which she made her way through in four weeks of concentrated reading. “I almost feel as if it had become a layer of my sensibility by now,” she told Vi. “When you get to know a book that well it seems to get into you.”
She was fascinated by the news that her old Berkeley classmate Virginia Admiral had left Robert De Niro, Sr., and gone off to live with Manny Farber, the film critic of The New Republic . This was bound to pique her interest, since for some time she had followed Farber’s reviews with great enthusiasm. Born in Arizona, Farber had certain things in common with Pauline—a Berkeley education, an interest in other forms of art (he went on to distinction as an abstract painter), and an intense dislike of overly formal, schematic “masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago,” which, he felt, “has come to dominate the over-populated arts of TV and movies. The three sins of white elephant are (1) to frame the action with an all-over pattern, (2) install every event, character, situation in a frieze of continuities, and (3) treat every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity.” He much preferred what he called “termite art,” which he characterized as something that “feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art.” He believed that the movie critic’s objective was to dig into the truth of a film and get it across to his readers. He once said, “I can’t see any difference between writing about a porno movie and an Academy Award movie—both are difficult objects.” His writing was at once jazzy and direct and intellectually rigorous. Pauline admired many things about him, including his iconoclastic wit and his fondness for lively B movies, and his theory about white elephant art vs. termite art would be an important influence on her own development as a critic.
There were other movie critics that Pauline had admired over the years, and each of them cast some degree of influence over her as she began thinking more seriously about the art of the film. One was Graham Greene, who began reviewing films for The Oxford Outlook while still a student, and from 1935 to 1940 he reviewed by the week, mostly for the London Spectator . Greene was never afraid to rail about the blindness of the British Board of Censors, or to berate his British readers for not taking cinema seriously enough. Pauline agreed with his observation that “an excited audience is never depressed; if you excite your audience first, you can put over what you will of horror, suffering truth.” It was a point of view that led him in some surprising directions, such as his feeling that Alfred Hitchcock “amuses but he doesn’t excite.... He hasn’t enough imagination to excite; he doesn’t convince.” He felt that Hitchcock concentrated on his big moments at the expense of everything else that was going on in the movie: opinions that served as a blueprint for the critical position that Pauline would later hold on Hitchcock.
Another critic Pauline admired enormously was Otis Ferguson, who wrote for The New Republic beginning in 1930. Ferguson possessed a keen appreciation of the director’s contribution, but he also understood that movies were mostly the product of a factory system. “Movies are such common and lowly stuff,” he once wrote, “that in intellectual circles we often find ourselves
Similar Books
