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PAULINE KAEL, the legendary film critic for the New Yorker, would have turned 100 last month (she died in 2001). As part of the centenary celebrations an admiring and buoyant documentary, “What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael”, was shown at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. The film makes it clear that Kael (pictured left) was the most influential critic in the history of the medium. And that she always will be: no other film writer can ever have the same impact she had.

Partly this is because she was the funniest, the most combative, the most erudite and the most enthusiastic writer in the business (and that is the kind of hyperbole she enjoyed using herself). She expunged “term-paper pomposity” from her reviews, distancing herself from aloof “gentleman critics” by balancing her encyclopedic film knowledge with proudly subjective opinions, autobiographical tidbits, dirty jokes and remarks she overheard from other patrons in the cinema. Although her acidic wit was compared to Dorothy Parker’s, she saw herself as an outsider in New York and in the New Yorker. A California rancher’s daughter, she was accused by a colleague of “trampling through the pages of the magazine with cowboy boots covered with dung”.

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Partly, though, Kael’s pre-eminence was a matter of timing. She was old enough to remember seeing silent movies with her parents in the 1920s, and yet she didn’t join the staff of the New Yorker until 1968, when she was nearly 50. Prior to that, she had lurched from magazine to magazine, struggling to make a living. The problem was that she despised Hollywood’s big-budget crowd-pleasers, panning the likes of “The Sound of Music” as being overblown and sentimental. “American movies have never been more contemptible,” she declared in 1967, a stance that did not endear her to her editors.

But 1967 was also the year when Arthur Penn’s controversially bloody “Bonnie and Clyde” was released. Most critics loathed or ignore it, but Kael was infatuated, and her 9,000-word defence of the outlaw biopic earned her a position at the New Yorker. Suddenly, a generation of American film-makers was experimenting with the iconoclastic “New Wave” techniques of Europe’s auteurs—and Kael loved them. In particular, she loved the sex, the violence and the exploding heads she saw in the work of Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman. There was none of that in “The Sound of Music”. And so it came about that a middle-aged single mother became a best-selling pundit by championing America’s youngest, hippest male directors. She made their careers, and they made hers.

“What She Said” may not be particularly iconoclastic, but it is a lively, exhaustively researched, and stunningly well edited tribute to an uncompromising talent. Written and directed by Rob Garver, the documentary compiles excerpts from Kael’s journalism (read by Sarah Jessica Parker), hundreds of film clips and snippets of interviews with figures such as Camille Paglia, Paul Schrader, Quentin Tarantino, David O Russell and others. John Boorman, an English film-maker, recalls that when Kael was at her formidable peak, directors felt as if they were “under surveillance”. Ridley Scott is still angry about her dismissal of “Blade Runner” in 1982. On a chat show in 1973 Jerry Lewis, “The King of Comedy”, said that Kael was a “dirty old broad” who “never said a good word about me.” “But she’s probably the most qualified critic in the world”, he added.

Just think about that: a film star praising a film critic on television and assuming that the audience would know who he was talking about. It would never happen now. In the modern, fragmented, cultural landscape, cinephiles no longer queue up to buy magazines which run 9,000-word essays by their favourite critics—they harvest opinions from countless blogs, tweets and podcasts instead. In the unlikely event that a 21st-century reviewer could write as scintillatingly as Kael did, and that she had a movement as inspiring as the American New Wave to write about, most people would still have no idea who she was or what she said.

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