Adrian Schober at Film Quarterly:
While often citing American critic and screenwriter James Agee as a model for her emotional and intellectual engagement with the cinema, Kael claimed that she “was more influenced . . . by literary critics, such as R. P. Blackmur.”17 The Blackmur influence has been duly noted in accounts of Kael’s work.18 It is likely that one of the things that drew her to Blackmur (if only after she became a dropout) is that he was an autodidact, without the benefit of an academic qualification, who rose to prominence writing essays, volumes of criticism, and poetry, and became one of Princeton University’s foremost professors. It has been suggested that this lack of a qualification afforded Blackmur a singular independence, allowing him to develop his own voice. This, too, is central to the Romantic narrative about Kael’s fierce independence as a critic, which explains her suspicion not only of “university types,” but also of theory. When she started writing on film in the 1950s, the study of cinema had not yet been enshrined in academia. Consequently, she educated herself through her own extensive reading, film watching (co-managing a movie theater and writing the program notes), and engagement with culture. In later years, she turned down offers to teach at the tertiary level.
more here.
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