somehow justify the inadvertencies and the shortcomings and in some cases even the stupidities of what they see.” He also accused her of being one of the critics who imposed an idea on the film that was unjustified simply “to assuage their own boredom.” Pauline laughed. “I’ve never been bored, John, except sometimes, you know, caught by lecturers.”
Her views on 8½ were even more controversial. Critics had lined up to applaud Federico Fellini’s view of the fantasy life of a bored, creatively stymied director. Unlike nearly all of her major critic colleagues, Pauline hadn’t warmed to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which had been released to immense worldwide success in 1960 but which had struck her as a work that “wants to be a great film—it cries out its intentions.” While admiring its cleverness, she felt that Fellini had misstepped in using Rome’s beautiful people as stand-ins for the aimlessness of modern life, and she was temperamentally unresponsive to any attempt to dramatize the anxieties and fears of a creative artist who had the good fortune to be rich and famous. She found 8½ alienating as well, because it was “surprisingly like the confectionary dreams of Hollywood heroines, transported by a hack’s notions of Freudian anxiety and wish fulfillment. 8½ is an incredibly externalized version of an artist’s ‘inner life’—a gorgeous multi-ringed circus that has very little connection with what, even for a movie director, is most likely to be solitary, concentrated hard work.”
She was likewise troubled by the art-house audience’s enthusiasm for two other movies released in 1961: Antonioni’s La Notte and Alan Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, both of which explored the angst of modern times, the futility and ultimate failure of human intimacy. While many critics found them daringly experimental and intellectually thrilling, Pauline thought them stultifying and empty—all surface posing and no real substance. “And isn’t it rather adolescent to treat the failure of love with such solemnity?” she asked, with the rhetorical question that had become one of her stylistic trademarks. “For whom does love last? Why try to make so much spiritual desolation out of the transient nature of what we all know to be transient, as if this transiency somehow defined our time and place?” Marienbad, in particular, was offensive to her: “Enthusiasts for the film,” she wrote, “start arguing about whether something happened last year at Marienbad, and this becomes rather more important than what happens on the screen in front of them—which isn’t much. The people we see have no warmth, no humor or pain, no backgrounds or past, no point of contact with living creatures, so who cares about their past or future, or their present?” She criticized all three films in a persuasive essay titled “The Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties,” which The Massachusetts Review published in the winter of 1963.
In this viewpoint, she often found herself pitted against her colleagues. Colin Young, an editor at Film Quarterly and later head of UCLA’s film school, used to tangle with her often, particularly on the subject of Antonioni. “Pauline had her blind spots,” said Young. “I remember once being at an Academy screening of foreign-language nominees, and in the toilet after the screening of La Notte, I overheard two guys who were peeing. They were saying, ‘What’s the matter with this guy? He’s good-lookin’, he’s got a good job, he’s got a beautiful wife, a mistress—why the fuck is he so miserable all the time?’ Pauline would have said ‘Here here’ to these guys. She couldn’t stand all this agonizing. She was a frontier plainswoman.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
During the early 1960s Pauline’s reviews had drawn a devoted and gradually growing following among readers of film criticism. The numbers were modest: Her work had appeared only in small-circulation publications and listener-supported radio broadcasts. She was a little like the flickering beacon from a lighthouse far off on the West Coast, only dimly perceived in the east. She needed either a major platform or a major critical piece to raise her visibility. Very soon, she got both.
The critical piece was “Circles and Squares,” a lengthy polemic that she finished early in 1963 against the auteur theory. The premise of auteurism was that the strong, individual personality of a talented director was always visible in his films, and that it was necessary to examine how that personality provided crucial links in his entire oeuvre. Even if the film in question happened to be a routine product of the Hollywood studio system, the auteurists held that a good director’s signature