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Freeze Frame

After enlivening this city with her presence and influence for nearly 40 years - 25 of which she served as the film critic at the Richmond Times-Dispatch - Carole Kass died Wednesday. She was 73.

Carole Kass brought a genuine enthusiasm and warmth to her work as a film critic and entertainment columnist that was uncommon. Those same traits were evidenced in everything she touched. Whether she was helping out a little independent movie theater with her printed words, or teaching cinema history to undergraduates at Virginia Commonwealth University, or teaching film production to inmates at the Virginia State Penitentiary, Carole always cared so much about the people she interacted with that it was startling at times.

I met Carole in 1971. Like so many others in love with movies, I began sitting in on her class at VCU. Of the sometimes hundreds in attendance at one of her screenings in those days, at least a third were probably not registered in the class. Carole didn't worry about that. When there were no more seats, we sat on the floor, or stood in the back.

From 1972 through 1983 ( my stint as manager of the Biograph Theatre on W. Grace St), I talked with Carole every week; usually several times. Carole was quite different from most of the people who write about film, or who make their living in the motion picture industry. There was no hidden agenda with her. She was not jealous of the filmmakers or actors she wrote about. The snide attitude that so many critics affect was not a part of the Kass style.

Furthermore, if there was an unsung benefactor in the story of the Biograph's 15-year-run, it was most certainly Carole Kass. She tilted her coverage of the local cinema scene to the Biograph's advantage in so many ways I won't attempt to recount them.

Carole simply loved good movies. She understood the power that film has to lift people from their everyday pain and depression, if only for a few sweet moments.

My last show-biz encounter with Carole took place nearly two years ago. She was a part of the Jewish Community Center's presentation of a live Joan Rivers show at the Carpenter Center. My job was to record the performance on videotape for the sponsors.

Rivers' topic was surviving tragedy. And in spite of the serious subject, she was very funny. After her prepared remarks, Joan answered written questions submitted by the audience and asked by Carole. Their impromptu performance together was at least as funny as what had gone before.

At that time, I knew that Carole was battling cancer. She joked with me about her worry over whether she would live long enough to do the show for the JCC. Well, not only did she live up to her promise but she pulled it off with aplomb.

After that show I went out to her home in the West End for a visit. I wanted to tell her how much she had meant to the Biograph's survival and to the film community in Richmond. Typically, she was her modest self. In her view, she was only a background artist, helping out - we were the ones who had accomplished something.

I chose the title for this piece - "Freeze Frame" - for a reason I'd like to explain. When I searched my grieving consciousness for a cinematic phrase, "fade-to-black" came to mind. Then I immediately rejected it.

Instead I chose the now familiar device that ends the 1959 French New Wave classic "The 400 Blows." It was that movie that put the freeze frame on the map as a way to end a film. I know Carole was particularly fond of that early Truffaut picture, as am I.

And, with the French Film Festival in town this weekend, it is particularly appropriate to remember that for so many in Richmond, it was Carole Kass who taught them to look beyond their provincial tastes in movies.

There's a direct line that flows from that VCU French Film Festival at the Byrd Theater, back through many people, film societies, venues large and small, straight to Carole Kass - and a freeze frame of her warm smile. Carole Kass's funeral will be held at 1 p.m. Friday at Bliley's Funeral Home, Central Chapel; burial to follow at the Hebrew Cemetery.