Greil Marcus: Self - Critic
Quotes
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Greil Marcus : It would be hard to be as engaged with the world as Pauline was, in terms of her energy, in terms of her intellectual curiosity, in terms of her capacity for outrage and love.
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Greil Marcus : Pauline is quarreling, fighting with, condemning, attacking and she loved to set up New York critics as straw men and then knock them down.
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Greil Marcus : [on Kael's review of "Bonnie and Clyde"] This is in the middle of the Vietnam War where people are becoming inured to death, to carnage, to blood... I will never forget the last line of that piece, "By making us care about these outlaw lovers, this movie has put the sting back into death." Wham. The movie ends in complete silence and the theater is left in complete silence. Everything you've been watching on the news every night from Vietnam has suddenly been made *unreal* by this movie. That's the great inversion that happens in art. That happens and the criticism can help make happen.
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Greil Marcus : Even if you've seen the movie you haven't seen the movie. You're seeing it for the first time as you're reading the review.
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Greil Marcus : She wrote as someone who, in order to see a movie, had to go to a movie theater and pay to buy a ticket and go in and find a seat and sit down. When she writes about a movie, she also writes about the audience around her. She writes as part of an audience and she's listening to the catcalls and the wisecracks, the sound of boredom, or the sound of excitement, engagement. And all that goes into her writing.
