Stanley Kauffmann - RIP

Still writing into his nineties. TNR posted tributes from Denby, Wolcott, Thomson.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115090/tribute-stanley-kauffmann

A New Yorker, also a playwright and novelist.

I linked to some reviews you can find on the TNR site in the obit thread.

...because this will let 95% of you dismiss him, from the NYT:

Philip Lopate called him “the only film critic who did not take sides in aesthetic debates,” adding: “This is peculiar. He did not align with the auteurs or the anti-auteurs, and he was far too gentlemanly to side with a critic like John Simon. He didn’t play favorites or fall in love the way Pauline Kael did, or to some extent Andrew Sarris.”

He could, however, deliver a tart putdown. He called the director Robert Altman “a walking death sentence on the prospect of American film,” dismissed “Casablanca” as “a slushy romance” and called Luis Buñuel “a highly resourceful technician and a highly neurotic adolescent.”

His prose was often fusty and beholden to the unexpected polysyllable, although not as gauchely as John Simon. But I read his collections twenty years ago with the same attention I did Kael's, and he persuaded me more often than not. I liked his idiosyncrasies, or at least he made them convincing – for example he adored Autumn Sonata and recorded how many times he rewatched it.

It's funny that Brando had his first pro acting job in one of his '40s plays, and SK hated his Don Corleone so much.

Really enjoyed his reviews alongside Robert Brustein's theater reviews and Jed Perl's art ones in TNR in the 90s.

I've expressed my reverence for his writing many times here and elsewhere. I think he stayed sharp right through to the mid-late '90s; he was especially good writing about Oliver Stone. I admire that he kept at it, though his (occasional) recent reviews were usually very ordinary--his review of Our Nixon wasn't really even a review. But that doesn't diminish his earlier work at all.

Always wanted to contact him for an interview, typically never followed through. I'll try to post some favourite excerpts when I get home.

everything TNR has online here:

http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/stanley-kauffmann

(his second column on Schindler's List, on that first page, is particularly good)

on The Piano:

"Every moment is upholstered with the suffocating high-mindedness that declines to connect symbols with comprehensible themes. I haven't seen a sillier film about a woman and a piano since John Huston's The Unforgiven (1960), a Western in which Lillian Gish had her piano carried out into the front yard so she could play Mozart to pacify attacking Indians."

I used to enjoy reading his praise of Emma Thompson.

Didn't round up any excerpts last night...Re Autumn Sonata: he was the opposite of Kael (and more like the rest of us, I think) in that he was always rewatching and reevaluating films. Most of his books had a "Re-Viewings" section at the end where he'd go back to four or five films he'd reviewed years ago and see how they held up. I saw an interview with him from a few years ago where he said his biggest about-face was with Godard. (He praised a couple of the '60s films at the time, but most of his reviews were unenthusiastic.)

Never found his writing fusty or pedantic. I'll try to take notice when I look for some excerpts, but I don't recall him forcing show-offy words into reviews like Simon. Thought he wrote with great clarity.

was kauffman a jew. wikipedia doesnt say

I can't find any definitive references, but I presumed from some of his passages about Schindler's List that he was.

More stuff (some of the TNR pieces now seem to be behind their subscriber wall; how generous).

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-stanley-kauffmann-1916-2013

Kauffmann's comic book credits:

http://seanhowe.tumblr.com/post/63599814675/the-new-york-times-obituary-for-legendary-film

Morbius likes to mention Kauffmann's Godfather pan, so I'll point out that he didn't think much of Playtime, either (review collected in Living Images: "Besides, Tati cannot rest with observation, he has to arrange...From sharp comment we decline through pointless points to cuteness"). My favourite critics, film and music, tend to agree and disagree with me in equal measure.

Hah just been reading Ray Carney's Cassavetes on Cassavetes, which includes the following:

"For John Simon, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE was 'muddleheaded, pretentious, and interminable'. For Pauline Kael it was 'a murky, ragmop movie.' And for Stanley Kauffmann WOMAN was 'utterly without interest or merit'. (To give a twist to the shiv, Kauffmann's negative assessment appeared in a two-film review which went on to praise MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS as 'first-class entertainment and one of the best all-star pictures I can remember'.)"

American critical hostility to Cassavetes seems utterly bewildering now

In case someone is too modest to post it himself, an awesome reflection on Kauffmann:

http://rockcritics.com/2013/11/05/calmly-disagreeing-stanley-kauffmann-1916-2013/

That's good, clem. I didn't mean to imply I found Kauffmann to be infallible (I quite like the first Godfather despite some of Brando's drag on it).

A Woman Under the Influence is marginally interesting crap. The Method approaching its worst.

clem, that's an excellent tribute.

I could barely sit through Faces Monday night.

Thanks, appreciate that (and the link). I had always hoped to interview him, and I kept balking, because there were interviews all over the place (not as many as Kael, but enough that they were collected into a book), and I figured it was something he got tired of.

Not sure Cassavetes has ever been without some measure of critical hostility, even today.

TBH, Playtime has had moderately diminishing returns with me, depending on my mood.

"I dream. Of Jeannie. With the. Light. Brown. Hair."

Same Cinemascope issue linked to on another thread:

http://cinema-scope.com/columns/deaths-cinema-long-view-stanley-kauffmann/

Excellent. For anyone who wonders why someone might consider The Wolf of Wall Street not just a hysterical mess, but something sadder:

“Fine artists make us feel proprietary about them,” (Kauffmann) wrote in 1975, apropos of Antonioni’s The Passenger: “They invade us so strongly, become so much of the way we look outward and inward, that we can’t approach new works of theirs without a sense that we are intimately involved.”

Even if that invasion goes back almost 40 years.

I thought I might find his review of The Virgin Suicides online--laudatory, if I'm remembering right. No luck, but there's an inventory of the 40 boxes of his papers kept at Boston University.

http://archives.bu.edu/finding-aid/finding_aid_335487.pdf