When Pauline Kael titled her first collection I Lost It at the Movies in 1965, she wasn’t just being cheeky about her virginity. Though, let’s be real, she definitely was. But more than that, she was talking about losing her mind, her cool, and her patience with the state of American culture.
It changed everything.
Before this book dropped, film criticism was mostly a dry, academic exercise or a polite suggestion for a weekend outing. Kael showed up with a meat cleaver. She was loud, she was "vulgar" according to some, and she wrote like she was leaning across a bar, grabbing your lapels, and telling you why that prestige drama you liked was actually a piece of pretentious junk.
The Book That Killed Politeness
I Lost It at the Movies isn’t just a book of reviews. It’s a manifesto. Kael collected her writings from 1954 to 1965—pieces originally written for magazines like Sight and Sound or read over the air at KPFA in Berkeley.
She hated the "well-made" movie. Honestly, she despised anything that felt like it was trying to teach the audience a lesson. In the intro, titled "Zeitgeist and Poltergeist," she basically goes to war with the idea that movies should be "good for you." She wanted movies that made you feel something visceral.
The title itself? When people asked what she "lost," she’d tell them there are all kinds of innocence to be lost at the cinema. It’s a sensual relationship. For Kael, watching a movie was an experience that happened to your body, not just your brain.
The Auteur War: Circles and Squares
You can't talk about this book without talking about "Circles and Squares." This is the essay where she absolutely shreds Andrew Sarris and the "auteur theory."
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Sarris argued that the director was the ultimate author of a film. Kael thought that was a load of nonsense. She saw filmmaking as a messy, collaborative disaster where luck and "trash" often resulted in better art than a director’s "vision."
- Her argument: If a director makes a bunch of bad movies, why should we praise them just because they have a "consistent style"?
- The fallout: This essay started a decades-long feud that defined film discourse in the 60s and 70s.
- The irony: People later accused Kael of being an "auteurist" herself because she championed specific directors like Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman.
Why She Hated Your Favorite Classics
Kael’s "bad" reviews are often more famous than her good ones. She had a way of finding the one thread in a movie and pulling it until the whole thing unraveled.
Take West Side Story. In I Lost It at the Movies, she calls it "frenzied" and "phoney." While the rest of the world was swooning over the dancing, Kael was complaining that the "social consciousness" was laid on with a trowel. She didn't want a lecture; she wanted a movie.
She also took aim at The Sound of Music. She called it a "sugar-coated lie." It’s a famous bit of trivia that she was fired from McCall's magazine for that review because the editors thought she was being too mean to a family favorite.
Kael didn't care.
She wasn't there to make friends. She was there to protect the medium she loved from being turned into "middlebrow" mush. She defended "trash" (like Wild in the Streets) because it had more life in it than the "art" movies being shoved down people's throats.
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The Human Element: "I Lost It" and Personal Truth
There’s a famous story in the book about the film Shoeshine. Kael describes coming out of the theater in tears, only to hear a college girl say, "I don't see what was so special about that movie."
Kael says she walked up the street "crying blindly."
She wasn't just crying for the characters on screen. She was crying because if people couldn't feel the "radiance" of a movie like that, she felt there was no hope for humanity. That’s the core of her criticism. It wasn't about "technical proficiency." It was about the capacity to feel.
She used the first person "I" more than any critic before her. She’d tell you what she wore to the screening. She’d tell you what the person next to her was whispering. This wasn't vanity; it was an admission that criticism is subjective.
"Movies are our cheap and easy expression, the sullen art of displaced persons."
That’s a line from her later essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," but the seeds of that philosophy are all over I Lost It at the Movies. She believed that movies belonged to the people who were a "long way from home."
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What Most People Get Wrong About Kael
Today, people often dismiss Kael as a contrarian who just liked to be loud.
That’s a mistake.
She was deeply educated and had a massive knowledge of film history. She just refused to use the "correct" academic language because she thought it killed the excitement of the art.
Also, people think she hated everything. Not true. The second section of the book, "Movies Remembered with Pleasure," covers films like The Golden Coach and Seven Samurai. When she loved something, she loved it with a terrifying intensity. She was a kingmaker. If Pauline Kael said you were a genius, your career was made.
Actionable Insights for the Modern Cinephile
If you’re just getting into Kael or you want to understand why film Twitter is the way it is, here’s how to approach I Lost It at the Movies:
- Read the Introduction First: "Zeitgeist and Poltergeist" is the best primer for her entire worldview. It explains why she hates "educational" movies.
- Don't Look for "Correct" Opinions: You will disagree with her. You might even get angry. That’s the point. She wanted to provoke a reaction, not give you a "To-Watch" list.
- Notice the Prose: Look at how she mixes high-concept philosophy with slang. It’s a masterclass in voice.
- Track the "Sarris Feud": Read her "Circles and Squares" and then go look up Andrew Sarris’s "Notes on the Auteur Theory." It’s the original "Biggie vs. Tupac" of the intellectual world.
Pauline Kael didn't just write about movies; she lived them. I Lost It at the Movies remains the definitive document of a woman who refused to let "good taste" get in the way of a great time. It’s messy, it’s biased, and it’s arguably the most important book of film criticism ever published.
To truly understand Kael's legacy, compare her early work in this collection to her later "New Yorker" reviews. You’ll see the evolution of a voice that eventually dictated the taste of an entire generation. Grab a copy, skip the boring prestige dramas, and go find some "trash" that makes you feel alive.
Next Steps for Deepening Your Knowledge:
- Read the primary source: Secure a copy of the 1965 edition of I Lost It at the Movies to see how the essays were originally sequenced.
- Contextualize the "Auteur" debate: Read Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema to see the specific targets of Kael’s most famous broadsides.
- Watch the "Kael Classics": View Shoeshine (1946) and The Golden Coach (1952) to understand the "radiance" she was searching for in cinema.