4 Pauline Kael Quotes on History

Pauline Kael quotes on history

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

24. The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.

39. In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture - turning it into Pop art and camp - had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures - and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.

40. Unlike storybook heroes and heroines but like many actual heroes and heroines, she was something of a social outcast. (As Simone Weil noted, it was the people with irregular and embarrassing histories who were often the heroes of the Resistance in the Second World War; the proper middle-class people may have felt they had too much to lose.)