I Lost It at the Movies  

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"Can we conclude that, in England and the United States, the auteur theory is an attempt by adult males to justify staying inside the small range of experience of their boyhood and adolescence-that period when masculinity looked so great and important but art was something talked about by poseurs and phonies and sensitive-feminine types? And is it perhaps also their way of making a comment on our civilization by the suggestion that trash is the true film art? I ask; I do not know."--"Circles and Squares" (1963) by Pauline Kael

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I Lost It at the Movies (1965) is Pauline Kael's first collection of reviews, covering the years 1954-1965, which was published prior to her long stint at The New Yorker. As a result, the pieces in the book are culled from radio broadcasts that she did while she was at KPFA, as well as numerous periodicals, including Moviegoer, the Massachusetts Review, Sight and Sound, Film Culture, Film Quarterly and Partisan Review. It contains her infamously negative review of the then widely-acclaimed West Side Story, glowing reviews of other movies such as The Golden Coach and Seven Samurai, as well as longer polemical essays such as her largely negative critical responses to Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film and Andrew Sarris's Film Culture essay Notes on the Auteur Theory, 1962. The book was a bestseller upon its first release, and is now published by Marion Boyars Publishers.

Kael's first book is characterized by an approach where she would often quote contemporary critics such as Bosley Crowther and Dwight Macdonald as a springboard to debunk their assertions while advancing her own ideas. This approach was later abandoned in her subsequent reviews, but is notably referred to in Macdonald's book, Dwight Macdonald On Movies (1969).

When an interviewer asked her in later years as to what she had "lost", as indicated in the title, Kael averred: "There are so many kinds of innocence to be lost at the movies." It is the first in a series of titles of books that would have a deliberately erotic connotation, typifying the sensual relation Kael perceived herself as having with the movies, as opposed to the theoretical bent that some among her colleagues had.

Contents

The book is divided into an introduction, and four sections. These sections are entitled as such: I) Broadsides; II) Retrospective Reviews: Movies Remembered with Pleasure; III) Broadcasts and Reviews, 1961-1963; and IV) Polemics.

The introduction is entitled "Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; Or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?"

The contents of Section One (Broadsides):

  • Fantasies of the Art-House Audience
  • The Glamour of Delinquency
  • Commitment and the Straitjacket
  • Hud, Deep in the Divided Heart of Hollywood

Movies reviewed in Section Two (Retrospective Reviews):

Movies reviewed and titles of articles in Section Three (Broadcasts and Reviews):

Contents of Section Four (Polemics):

  • Is There a Cure for Film Criticism? Or, Some Unhappy Thoughts on Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality
  • Circles and Squares
  • Morality Plays Right and Left

Pages linking in as of July 2021

1965 in literature, 5001 Nights at the Movies, Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael, Deeper into Movies, Film Quarterly, Going Steady (book), Hooked (book), June 1919, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (book), Mad (magazine), Movie Love, Pauline Kael, Reeling (book), Roger Ebert, State of the Art (book), Taking It All In, The Earrings of Madame de…, What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, When the Lights Go Down (book)





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