What is film criticism? Note on Pauline Kael at 100

Comment published on New York Times blog in response to opinion essay by Nathan Gelgud, “Happy birthday, Pauline Kael, my old foe,” June 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/movies/pauline-kael.html#commentsContainer&permid=101032009:101032009:

As a film critic, I beg to differ with Gelgud on one point. He posits that film criticism can be done either from the point of a filmmaker, or of a film viewer (the positions of Godard and Kael, respectively). There is a third possibility: the writer on art writes as a writer, and he/she is a viewer, who may or may not be an artist, but is driven by a great anxiety to make sense of his experiences of art. He will therefore aim to write about those films that seem to most demand an interpretive labor because they trouble him, make him itch. Trusting his intuitions, he believes that if the film moves, troubles, or affects him, it is because of something in the film.

The critic I posit will feel free, as many of us do today, to bring to bear other discourses (from other arts, or from philosophy and "theory," a derivative of philosophy that brings together a theory of society with one of art). The point is simply to help in making the best sense of the film.

Kael championed "Last Tango in Paris" as liberating viewers into a heightened authenticity of tragic experience. I read the film more as criticizing that idea. For me, an artwork is a thought that thinks through its forms. Criticism for me is best read, as it is written, after viewing. I do not evaluate or recommend. The task is to make sense of an experience that is enigmatic and a bit troubling. Art and thought about art can help us live and be worldly citizens.