Manny Farber (filmnotes)

Manny Farber
In the last two decades, critics who write about film have made many claims on behalf of
the film reviewer, Manny Farber. Some of these claims are grandiose: Jonathon Rosenbaum has
called Farber “the greatest by far of all American film critics”; Martin Scorsese concurs, writing
that Farber’s “approach to the movies was utterly unique” and that “he saw elements and values
that no one else saw.” Richard Schickel claims that Farber “shaped and sharpened the
sensibilities of two generations of people who cared about film”. Novelist William Gibson says
that Farber “grasps and expresses the deep language of cinema more surely and with a greater
prehensile glee than any writer I’ve ever read.” And Susan Sontag claimed the Farber was “the
liveliest, smartest, and most original film critic this country ever produced.” With the
publication of Farber on Film, a collection of all his essays and reviews printed in 2009 in a
handsome volume by the Library of the Americas, it seems, Manny Farber’s posthumous fame
will undoubtedly increase with the years. The Library of America has anointed Farber with the
status of “classic.” Farber’s most famous critical distinction, his 1962 analysis of films into
“White Elephant Art” and “Termite Art” has proven remarkably resilient and, probably, is the
most frequently cited concept in current film studies.
Farber’s prose on film is knotty, often difficult, and idiosyncratic. He was not a theorist,
although he wrote several important and ambitious essays on the movies. For most of his career,
Farber was simply a working reviewer, someone hired to pass quick judgement on the parade of
Hollywood pictures released each week. In hundreds of short, capsule reviews, Farber developed
a tough, telegraphic style. Although he didn’t like film noir, Farber writes hardboiled prose – he
is like one of Hammet’s or Chandler’s gumshoes working a difficult case. Most famous film
critics developed some kind of aesthetic theory, some system of criteria for film excellence.
Farber seems to be anti-theoretical, opposed to any particular canon of film aesthetics. His
practical, open-minded approach to film criticism allowed him to champion movie-makers as
disparate as Raoul Walsh and Michael Snow and Jean-Luc Godard. Most of Farber’s writing
was published in periodicals like The Nation and New Republic. His more ambitious and
sweeping essays were written for Artforum and Film Culture. Farber mostly retired from film
criticism in 1970 when he joined the faculty of the University of California at San Diego. His
last important essay was published in Artforum in 1972. Farber was an important visual artist
and devoted much of his later life to working on his paintings. He had many shows and was
highly acclaimed as an artist during the final twenty years of his life. Farber died in California in
2008. He was 91 years old.
Manny Farber was born in 1917 in Douglas, Arizona. His parents were Russian Jews,
immigrants to the United States, and his family ran dry-goods stores in several small
communities in the Arizona desert. He was good high school athlete and was initially interested
in sports writing. He attended college at Berkeley and Stanford, but didn’t graduate. By 1938,
Farber was working as a guard in the San Francisco Museum of Art and moonlighting in the
construction industry. A year later, he moved to Washington, D.C. where he met the film
director Nicholas Ray, then working as a psycho-dramatist at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. (Both of
Farber’s brothers were psychiatrists and one of them was stationed at the hospital at Bethesda,
Maryland – the reason that Farber moved to the East Coast.) In Washington, Farber completed
his apprentice training as a carpenter, a trade that he followed for much of his life.
In 1942, Farber moved to Greenwich Village where he intended to pursue painting. He
took a job writing art criticism and, then, film reviews for The New Republic. In New York City,
Farber became friends with people like Saul Bellow, James Agee, Walker Evans, Mary
McCarthy, and Alfred Kazin. Farber showed paintings in group shows including Jackson
Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and other luminaries of the New York Abstract Expressionist
movement. Leaving The New Republic in 1947, Farber worked for The Nation and, also,
replaced James Agee as film critic for Time. His tenure at Time was brief. He seems to have
been fired in January 1950. For the next five or six years, Farber supported himself by carpentry
work, publishing occasional freelance articles on film – essays that he called “long position
articles” – in magazines like Commentary and The New Leader. Farber had his first one-man art
show in 1957. For about ten years, he made sculptures and worked as a carpenter at various jobs,
including a year-long stint at Corning Glass in upstate New York. Beginning in 1967, he wrote a
monthly film column for Artforum and, in that year, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to
complete a book of film criticism, Negative Space, ultimately published in 1971. Around that
time, Farber began teaching at the University of California in San Diego. He met Jean-Pierre
Gorin, a French film-maker who had worked on a number of Godard’s films, and co-taught
courses with him in San Diego. (Gorin later made a charming documentary about model train
enthusiasts and Manny Farber, Routine Pleasures, released in 1986). By the mid-seventies,
Farber had become close friends with Tom Luddy, the director of the Pacific Film Archive, and
an important advocate for avant-garde and European art-house cinema in San Francisco. (Luddy
was also a close friend to David Thomson, the well-known British expatriat critic.) With Luddy,
Farber programmed a number of highly influential film series in Los Angeles and San Diego.
Luddy and Farber were the chief exponents for New German Cinema in the United States and
their programs introduced directors like Werner Herzog, Rainer Fassbinder, and Jean-Marie
Straub ot American audiences.
Farber got in trouble in 1982 when he was accused of burning down his wife’s studio. At
the fire scene, Farber instigated a fistfight with campus security and had to do 40 hours
community service, conducting a free film seminar for San Diego high school students. By this
time, Farber had shifted his interest to experimental films and was spending much of his time on
his own paintings and assemblages. He had a one-man show at the LA Museum of
Contemporary Art in 1985 and two years later retired from teaching to devote his time to painting
and sculpture. Negative Space, Farber’s book on film, was re-issued to much acclaim in 1998.
Farber continued to make paintings and collage-assemblages until his death in 2008.
In an interview in 1967 published in Film Comment, Farber defined his critical principles.
Film criticism, he said, is “primarily about language” – it is having “a push-pull relationship with
both film experience and writing experience.” The film critic should approach movies from a
stance of “coolness and anonymity.” The criticism should focus on the film and not on the critics
response to the movie. A review should “burrow into the movie” and the prose technique should
embrace a collage or multiplicity of perspective with “different voices” addressing the film from
varying points of view. The writing should be “syntactical” yet playful, and not “precious.”
Farber said that he wanted to “get the edge”and the discipline of criticism required “a great deal
of time and discomfort: long drives to see the films again and again; nonstop writing sessions.”
Ultimately, the audience for his criticism should “get some uplift” – whatever this means. From
these precepts, it is clear that Farber saw film criticism as a kind of bricolage, a collage technique
that approached a film from different angles, a sort of cubist construction, that was not merely a
form of journalism but a kind of art work in and of itself. As a consequence of Farber’s
idiosyncrasies, it is often very hard to assess whether he is praising a film or denouncing it by his
criticism – indeed, for Farber categories of praise or blame seem strangely unimportant,
something that is curious for a writer so aggressively opinionated. Farber’s criticism seems
primarily designed to force the viewer back to the film itself and acknowledges that a motion
picture, like a piece of music or an architectural monument, can not really be effectively
described or assimilated by mere words – Farber’s objective seems to suggest new or different
ways to view movies. Descriptions of movies are not movies; there is no way to quote or cite a
film and, therefore, any assessment of a film provided in writing will always be inadequate. This
proposition is demonstrated by Farber’s approach to his film classes – Farber taught like
Nabokov: he was uninterested in thematic details and instead, on his exams, often asked his
students to describe from memory the direction a camera moved, the color of an actor’s shirt or
tie, or to draw storyboards of selected sequences of the movies under consideration. He seems to
have viewed movies not from a literary standpoint but from the stance of an painter and
sculptor.0
From these notes, it is obvious that it is difficult to fix in any summary form Farber’s
criteria for film excellence. Often, Farber finds a sequence or fragment of a movie praiseworthy
while detesting the rest of the picture – in fact, Farber rarely commends a movie for its totality of
effect or thematic structure or scheme. Instead, he views films as fragmentary, spliced-together
images, the record of “industrious activity” more or less thrown together at random. He is
opposed to the notion of the masterpiece and dislikes films that subordinate their parts to the
whole – rather, he tends to focus on specific instants in the montage where acting and
camerawork combine to provide a privileged perspective on something that seems to be true and
real. Farber is always proclaiming the importance of reality or truth – but finds these values in
the edges of the screen, in extras that most writers would barely notice, in the background
landscape, in the performance of a grizzled character actor or an accident of light and shadow.
He is an enemy to the grandiose and thematic, an enemy to philosophy, and opposed to the notion
of using film to communicate messages or ideas. A film is what it does: a flicker of light that
creates what Farber called a “negative space” – that is, a wholly imaginary space that constructed
by the film-maker as an expressive instrument.
Farber’s acerbic minority-report suggests an alternative history to cinema. In Manny
Farber’s criticism, Orson Welles is a poseur whose Citizen Kane, far from revolutionizing
movies, instead set them back. In Farber’s world, a B-picture Western, made for the second half
of a double-bill, and shot in a couple weeks, may be a more important example of film art than
Lawrence of Arabia or Taxi Driver. He has founded no school and has no successors because his
perspective is so casuistic, so intensely specific to the films that he deplores or praises, as to be
inimitable.
I am attaching to this note three of Farber’s most famous and characteristic later essays:
Underground Films (November 1957 – Farber is referring to low-budget action
movies);
The Gimp (June 1952 – Farber’s famous attack on Welles);
White Elephant Art versus Termite Art (Winter 1962)