Credibility

I have a few closing remarks on the third (1965) New York Film Festival. Thirteen symposiums took place as part of the festival. Now I know what Pauline Kael lost at the movies: the taste for cinema. Hollis Alpert spent much time trying to persuade us that his reviews are really too intelligent, that cinema does not deserve the intelligence he is giving it...

A curious thing: Although I haven't seen any of them at any of the avant-garde and underground film screenings, all critics participating at the symposiums kept stressing their deep concern with the young and new cinema.

-- Village Voice film critic Jonas Mekas,
writing in the Village Voice, 23 September 1965

That's one of my idols, Jonas Mekas, as collected in the invaluable anthology of his Village Voice columns from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Movie Journal. Another critic writes here about coming upon Mekas' book. I mentioned it here in 2005. An early Voice column is here.

technorati: film criticism, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas