Manny Farber RIP

Yeah, I should've started a thread instead of appending stuff to this:

Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

manny farber

Which film critics do you trust (if any?)

One of the greats. To tie his passing in with the Scorsese thread, do check out his jaw-dropping review of Taxi Driver, co-written with Patricia Patterson. If history were just, it would surpass the film itself in prestige.

I liked his paintings, too.

xp: feel free to respond here to why Farber's preference for Wellman over Welles and Hitchcock is or is not relevant to his stature.

Well, Track of the Cat is equal to anything they've ever done. And I love his tough, hour-plus melodrama of the 1930s, especially Safe in Hell and the heartbreaking Wild Boys of the Road.

melodramas

k... I've only seen Wild Boys out of those.

"[Evaluation is] practically worthless for a critic,” Farber replied. “The last thing I want to know is whether you like it or not; the problems of writing are after that. I don’t think it has any importance; it’s one of those derelict appendages of criticism. Criticism has nothing to do with hierarchies.”

x-p to Morbs

And I see there's already a discussion of the Taxi Driver on the Scorsese thread.

review..ugh

If history were just, it would surpass the film itself in prestige.

farber was great but this is nuts. of course I'm the guy who said that reading lester bangs' lennon obit made me miss bangs more than lennon, so I'm maybe I'm not one to talk.

RIP

As responsible as anyone for the Sam Fuller re-evaluation (I don't care for Fuller). His take on John Huston should be read in a film studies course beside James Agee's; it's a nice tonic. I wish I'd read him sooner, as he would have been a definite influence. The ways in which most experiences art flirt with disappointing the audience is an idea that's fascinated me for years, and a lot of my work is informed by it.

*most experiences WITH art

I don't completely agree with that quote, but he more imaginatively and specifically about what happens on-screen than anyone since Bazin. It seems kind of petty to discount him based on preferences. One of the best things about reading Negative Space is figuring out or placing choices that initially seem counterintuitive or just contrarian.

His Buñuel essays are confusing and confused.

yeah Colin, I was remembering that quote on the other thread. The problem is that 95% of readers primarily want to know if you like it or not.

I certainly wasn't thinking of discounting him though.

Was "white elephant" art a dig at Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants"? I don't think he mentions the story in the essay, so I never knew if it was a coincidence.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?l=w&p=6
white elephant
1851, from supposed custom of the King of Siam in showing his disfavor of a courtier by giving him care of one of the sacred albino elephants, a high honor, but ruinously expensive.

"ruinously" is a great adverb.

Lincoln Center w/ a Farbercentric retro next month:

http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/mannyfarber/program.html

http://filmlinc.wordpress.com/2008/11/10/required-reading-who-was-manny-farber-film-bloggers-respond/

made the Oscar obits number!

Guess I never linked to this here...

http://blog.rhapsody.com/2008/08/rip-manny-farber-poptimist-critic-1917-2008.html

wow, this is pretty crankypants for a review of stuff by a great critic that most people have never read.

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-farber-mystery-20090922

- oh hey, j-dog, there's an 800-page book of manny farber's film criticism coming out
- you mean they *left out his art criticism* >:O

Went to MOMI and saw Dave Kehr interviewed after a Raoul Walsh film -- an anthology of Kehr's Chi Reader pieces from '70s/80s has just been published -- and in Q&A someone asked about Farber. DK praised his brilliant writing style... "but I didn't know what the hell he was talking about!"

I'll cop: me too, mostly. Termite art, shmermite art.

i never really know what he's talking about either, though he's one of my favorite critics just on a sentence-by-sentence basis. he definitely looked for things in movies that pretty much no other critic (or viewer) ever did.

i'll never quite forgive him for that horrible attack on poor little rita tushingham (who gets shit in negative space for not being as good an actor as olivier (!!) in an article titled 'pish-tush'!), though.

there is sort of a nasty macho streak in his writing that gets under my skin. something very telling about one of the quotes linked to upthread:

Early on, he championed the manly gut-punch of directors like Hawks, Walsh, and Fuller, while riotously thumping the phony, overheated theatrics of Welles, Wilder, Kazan, and Stevens.

Calling his macho streak "nasty" is a bit loaded - it's there certainly, but Christ, applying such a blithe generalization is just such a disserve to Farber, completely against his aesthetic. I mean, what I like is that he may have that consistent bass line of what he liked, but he would contradict his earlier opinions routinely, not so much out of any hypocrisy but because it seemed a work was always in flux in his mind, always continually being readjusted.

I haven't yet got my hands on the more recent complete film criticism, but I've always viewed Negative Space less as a sum of opinions (hell, I disagree with a good 40 percent of it) and more as one of the best handbooks on how to look at art, really any artform, around.

"disservice", ahem

That came off a bit more aggressive than intended. I was referring mostly to that quote you mentioned, the one in the intro (or was it a blurb?) to that edition of Negative Space, which has always irked me.

But "nasty", yes, can't really see that. The affinity is certainly there, but placing a value on it just rubs me wrong.

I'll shut up now.

I think Termite Art is the only essay of his I understand. Partially because I haven't seen many of the movies he writes about, partially because even when I have I don't necessarily know "what the hell he was talking about."

Not Manny Farber, but pinch-hitting for the Dwight Macdonald thread that doesn't exist (Eisenhower, Yoakam, Howard, and Twilley get their own threads). Macdonald's "Masscult and Midcult" is not quite the same thing as Farber's "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," but there's some definite overlap.

Just finished the Macdonald essay--first piece in Essays Against the American Grain, so I still have the rest of the book to go. (Next up, a piece on James Agee.) I think I may have read it ages ago, not sure, but long forgotten so it felt new. Loved it--the whole way through, I was trying to situate its relationship to some other benchmark writers for me, Pauline Kael and Bill James and Chuck Eddy. (Not hard to come up with many others who'd fit that lineage.) They'd adamantly reject some of what he writes (the need for some high cultural elite apart from all the noise below), elsewhere--his loathing of midcult--they're completely in sync. With James, who's dealing with baseball players, he's probably closer to Farber's distinction: Steve Garvey and Jim Rice were overrated white elephants, Amos Otis and Bobby Grich underrated termites. Also thought of Armond White, a perverse distortion of midcult hatred fueled by his resentment over getting drummed out of the New York Film Critics Circle. Not that Macdonald is immune from airing his own grievances: you find out near the end of "Masscult and Midcult" that the piece was commissioned then rejected by The Saturday Evening Post because of three sentences about The New Yorker. (You find out from Macdonald himself, in a footnote.) Very funny at times: "I agree with everything Mr. (Thorton) Wilder says but I will fight to the death against his right to say it in this way."

Everyone's sense of who'd qualify would differ--maybe even interpretation of the term itself--but for me, the ultimate midcult band is U2.

Conceding that these are all just made-up, highly subjective categories in the first place--a parlor game, as I think either Kael or maybe even Macdonald himself designated Sarris's auteurist hierarchy--my interest in the topic is definitely tied in at the moment with Killers of the Flower Moon. I might be cutting slack for a director I once loved, but I don't think Scorsese is quite yet midcult--although Macdonald names a number of artists who started out producing great work and descended into midcult over time. But I think Killers of the Flower Moon is definitely a hunk of White Elephant, from a guy who once worked very much in the realm of termite art.