Pauline Kael Quotes

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

One of the surest signs of the Philistine is his reverence for the superior tastes of those who put him down.

Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it.

How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?

Movie criticism to be of any use whatever must go beyond formal analysis - which in movies is generally a disguised form of subjective reaction to meanings and implications, anyway.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons.

Movies—a tawdry corrupt art for a tawdry corrupt world—fit the way we feel.

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

Like those cynical heroes who were idealists before they discovered that the world was more rotten than they had been led to expect, we’re just about all of us displaced persons, “a long way from home.” When we feel defeated, when we imagine we could now perhaps settle for home and what it represents, that home no longer exists. But there are movie houses.

I would like to suggest that the educated audience often uses “art” films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood “product,” finding wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism.

For several decades now educated people have been condescending toward the children, the shopgirls, all those with “humdrum” or “impoverished” lives - the mass audience - who turned to movies for “ready-made” dreams. The educated might admit that they sometimes went to the movies designed for the infantile mass audience - the number of famous people who relax with detective fiction makes this admission easy - but presumably they were not “taken in”.

The words "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang," which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies.