I Lost It At The Movies: Film Writings 1954-1965

Title

I Lost It At The Movies: Film Writings 1954-1965

Subject

films; criticism

Description

A compendium of movie reviews written by Pauline Kael, (film critic from The New Yorker), from 1954 to 1965. The book was published prior to Kael's 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 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.
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.
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.

Creator

Kael, Pauline

Publisher

London: Marion Boyars, 1965. This is the 1994 reprint

Date

1954-1965

Identifier

LIB00007

ISBN

9780714529752

Library Location

Oak Room

Files

9780714529752.jpg

Collection

Citation

Kael, Pauline, “I Lost It At The Movies: Film Writings 1954-1965,” Curzon Cinema Collection, accessed March 28, 2024, https://curzoncollection.omeka.net/items/show/1768.