A Commonplace Book

Kael was often accused of watching for plot and character more than for technical craft, and it is not hard to see why. Plot and character communicate effortlessly across time. The finer points of cinematic grammar require cultural education to be appreciated. She cared about audiences' raw responses--amazement, laughter, recognition--because those responses indicated whether a movie could speak for itself in the long run. She was dowsing for film classics with her nervous system as a guide.

Kael fell in love with writing about movies, because, unlike every other creative form at the time, they had no "tradition" from the audience's point of view. No movie canon was included in high-school reading lists; there was no time-tested consensus about which efforts were works of art and which were not. This under-construction aspect of the form excited her. In a 1965 lecture, she explained, "We were--and I am, of course, only guessing about you--driven to the movies as a compensatory necessity--a flight, and I don't mean a mere escape, to a world more exciting than the deadening world of trying-to-be-helpful teachers and chewed-over texts. We were driven to it by our own energies, which were not sufficiently engaged, not imaginatively used in the rest of our lives." It's a concept of movies as all good things at once--beguiling, unself-conscious entertainment and the recourse of brilliant kids far too smart for school. And it let Kael think about moviemaking as a craft that could perform seemingly irreconcilable tasks: plying the artistic vanguard while providing unforced popular entertainment.