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Manny Farber (1917-2008): "The Geography of Gesture"

By Robert Polito

SF360.org editor’s note: Manny Farber, 91, died at his home in Leucadia, California, at midnight, Aug. 18. Said Telluride Film Festival co-director Tom Luddy, who shared the news with SF360.org, "I can only say that Manny was a dear friend and one of my heroes, a great writer and a great painter." One of America’s greatest film critics, Farber leaves behind many other admirers and friends in the Bay Area, including the San Francisco Film Society, who enjoyed Farber’s presence when he received the Mel Novikoff Award during the 2003 Festival. We welcome your comments on Farber’s legacy and life (below) and reprint Robert Polito’s article for the 2003 SFIFF catalogue in Farber’s honor.

No other film critic has written so inventively or flexibly from inside the moment of a movie as Manny Farber.

For much of his writing life Farber was branded an advocate merely of action films and B-movies—as though it might not be distinction enough to have been the first American critic to advance serious appreciations of Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh and Anthony Mann. Yet Farber resisted many noir films of the 1940s as inflated and mannerist, and he also was among the first critics to write about Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, and was an exponent of such experimental directors as Michael Snow, George Kuchar, Andy Warhol and Chantal Ackerman. As J. Hoberman has written, Farber played “both ends off against the middlebrow.”

Still, Farber’s notoriety as a film critic largely resides in his B-movie-steeped, careering slams of the 1950s and ’60s, particularly “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962). The Termite/White Elephant essay cashiered “masterpiece art, reminiscent of the enameled tobacco humidors and wooden lawn ponies bought at white elephant auctions decades ago.” White elephant directors “blow up every situation and character like an affable innertube with recognizable details and smarmy compassion,” or “pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.” Farber instead tracked the termite artist: “ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” Termite art is “an act both of observing and being in the world, a journeying in which the artist seems to be ingesting both material of his art and the outside world through horizontal coverage.” Against the white elephant “pursuit of continuity, harmony,” termite art mainly inheres in moments—”a few spots of tingling, jarring excitement” in a Cézanne painting or John Wayne’s “hipster sense of how to sit in a chair leaned against a wall” in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.

His friend, the late Pauline Kael, once remarked, “It’s his analysis of the film frame as if it were a painter’s canvas that’s a real contribution.” Farber could direct painterly thoughtfulness to issues such as color in Disney cartoons or slackness of camera in Hollywood features, and references from film and art crisscross and trespass in his criticism. For nearly all the years he actively wrote criticism Farber worked as an abstract artist—as a painter, sculptor and the creator of gallery installations and monumental oils on collaged paper. But shortly after he published his final film essay, Farber shifted to representational paintings—a profusion of candy bars, stationery, film titles, film directors and domestic still lives. These paintings are often multifocus and decentered. Intense detailing arrests the eye amid spiraling chains of association: visual, cultural or personal. They sometimes imply narratives, yet without positing the entrances, exits and arcs of any particular pre-existent story lines. In Farber’s film criticism is a prediction of the painter he would become.

Farber once described his prose style as “a struggle to remain faithful to the transitory, multisuggestive complication of a movie image and/or negative space.” His writing can appear to be composed exclusively of digressions from an absent center. There are rarely introductory overviews or concluding summaries, and transitions appear interchangeable with non-sequiturs. Puns, jokes, lists, slippery metaphors and webs of allusions supplant arguments. Farber wrenches nouns into verbs (Hawks, he writes, “landscapes action”), and sustains strings of divergent, perhaps irreconcilable adjectives such that praise can seem inseparable from censure, arriving at a kind of backdoor poetry: not lyrical, or routinely poetic, but original and startling.

Many of these aspects can be seen in Farber’s magnificent Hawks piece, originally published in Artforum in 1969. The essay manages neither a welcoming preface nor a resolving conclusion—the start and finish are all canny abruptness. Farber situates Hawks inside a vast allusive complex—Piero’s religious paintings, Cubist composing, Breughel, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Tolkien, Muybridge, Walker Evans and Robert Frank; a collage of allusive appropriation. Many phrases anticipate Farber’s later paintings: “secret preoccupation with linking,” “builds detail upon detail into a forbidding whirlwind,” “each bumping into the other in an endless interplay,” “many plots are interwoven” and “the geography of gesture.” And, rare for Farber’s prose, there is an explicit autobiographical reference—to the border town of his birthplace. The seaport in Only Angels Have Wings might be good, he writes, for a Douglas, Arizona, high school production.

He emerged as the boldest and most literary of film and art critics of the 1940s and ’50s by proceeding along almost stridently antiliterary tangents. Farber advanced a topographical prose that aspired, termite fashion, through fragmentation, parody, allusions, multiple focus and clashing dictions to engage the formal spaces of the new films and paintings he admired.

A poet and biographer, Robert Polito directs the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in NYC. At the time of this writing, he was editing a collection of Manny Farber’s film and art criticism.

topics: authors, bay area, cinephiles, critics, exhibitions

08.18.2008