Portrait of Pauline Kael Opens Berkshire Film Festival

When it comes to a trailblazing voice in film like that of New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, the question is: what can you say about her that she couldn’t say herself? That is what director Rob Garver set out to do in his debut documentary, “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael.” It’s an immediately gripping, energized salute to a woman who paved the way for American film criticism as an art form. As Vanity Fair writer Lili Anolik says in the film, “She turned the movie review into something as expressive as a short story or a sonnet.”

Director Rob Garver spoke with Compass about “What She Said,” which will open the 2019 Berkshire International Film Festival in Great Barrington on May 30.

Alexander Wilburn: Within 10 minutes of watching “What She Said” I was thinking, “I wish I were having coffee tomorrow with Pauline Kael. I just want to hear her opinions.” Choosing her as the subject of your first full-length documentary and doing what I imagine was years of research, you must feel the same way?

Rob Garver: I think she would have been a fantastic friend, and she had so many friends, which is one of the things I learned. Atypical, maybe, of a serious writer. She was outgoing and loved to share the movies with people.

AW: It’s a really affectionate and appealing film. For you, why Pauline Kael?

RG: I read her as a kid in high school and in college. I started becoming really interested in movies and Super 8 and making movies with my friends. When I read her, she had the same enthusiasm for movies as I did as a kid. I didn’t know at the time she was a middle aged woman. It was a creative idea too, I had the challenge to tell the story of someone who wrote about movies through the movies. So that’s why there’s 210 pieces of different movies in my movie. I wanted to try to show you her experience of the movies. And her experience was unique because she was born in 1919, 100 years ago, and her life really spanned the history of 20th century movies. But the spark was really bringing her creative voice alive, because it was so alive to me when I first read her. Her voice was different. It’s personal. It’s funny. It’s honest. It’s insightful. 

AW: I thought the use of movie clips in the documentary was so interesting because it visually weaves motifs from her life. Starting with the tough dames of the 1930s films, and later as she finds her stride as America finds a stride in the 1970s wave of film. 

RG: It was a lot of trial and error, picking and choosing the things that worked and didn’t. It took me four years to make this movie from beginning to end. I had started to collect movies and get ideas for pieces that I could use. It was fun to find something that worked. I had to be patient with it, but when that paid off it was really rewarding. 

AW: When you were reading Pauline Kael as a kid, did your opinions match up?

RG: That’s the thing, a lot of people I talked to, we didn’t love her because we agreed with her, we loved her because she was really an artist in her own right. She expressed herself and she didn’t really care what people thought. She wasn’t trying to be the objective critic, she was all in for a movie, whether she liked it or didn’t like it. She was going to tell you what she thought. I disagreed with her on “2001,” and I think on a lot of other movies. You can always just appreciate someone who is very honest with how she thinks and how she feels about a movie. It was nice when you agreed, but when you didn’t you could have these arguments in your head with her.

AW: There was a line in the movie where someone points out, “The role of the critic isn’t to convince you.” 

RG: Camille Paglia said that.

AW: You have a real cast of provocative icons in their given fields — John Guare, Quentin Tarantino, Camille Paglia. How did you select your interview subjects?

RG: I didn’t just want to have film people and I didn’t just want to have her friends. I wanted to have other artists, and directors she reviewed, and directors like Tarantino and David O. Russell, whom she didn’t. I knew that it would make for a richer film to have different perspectives and give the audience a little bit more to chew on.

AW: Sarah Jessica Parker, who obviously voiced the narration of a famous fictional New York writer, voices the writing of Pauline Kael. How did her involvement come about?

RG: I had the idea that she would be good because she is associated with New York and writers, and not just for “Sex and The City,” but just last year she had started her own publishing imprint. She’s publishing new, mostly female young writers. She loves the written word and she told me her mother subscribed to The New Yorker and they would read her reviews together. And a fortuitous thing I found, the very last review Pauline published before she quit The New Yorker was “L.A. Story,” the Steve Martin movie from 1991, and the near very last sentence Pauline wrote was about Sarah Jessica Parker. It turned out Sarah knew that.

AW: I’m always curious to ask documentary filmmakers when their subject has died: if by magic you could ask Pauline Kael one thing, what would it be?

RG: The thing that really surprised me about her life is that she turned down the opportunity for a good job because she wanted to be a different kind of writer. There’s a moment in the documentary when she gets an advertising copy writing job and she says, “When they put my name on the office door and I was promoted I knew I had to quit because I would be stuck there.” I would definitely ask her how did she feel that day and how hard was it to make that decision? There are points in people’s lives that make all the difference.

This interview has been edited for space. 

“What She Said” is opening on May 30 at The Berkshire International Film Festival. For more information go to www.biffma.com