I learned this morning, via an e‑mail from a mutual friend who was very close to him, that the critic and artist Manny Farber died last night, at his home in San Diego, aged 91. If you’ve never read Farber, just stop here and get to it. His collected criticism, in a volume called Negative Space, is one of the touchstone texts of film writing—tough-minded, sharp-eyed, idiosyncratic, often wildly funny, and with a bedrock integrity and aesthetic acuity that even best best of contemporary film critics are hard-pressed to approach, let alone match. He is most often cited for coining the phrases “termite art” and “white-elephant art,” two opposed categories. What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle. He could appreciate a B war picture in the same sense that the guy on the street could, while fully comprehending its value as a work of modern/contemporary art. I’m away from my study, so I can’t grab a copy of Space to quote from it willy-nilly. But I can say this: I doubt that Farber was particularly surprised by Godard’s Breathless, because his criticism actively anticipated that film.
Farber’s subsequent work as a painter casts its own wonderful spell, one as exhilarating and specific as his criticism. About Face, the catalog from the exhibit held at P.S. 1 in New York from a few years back, is a good introduction. The paintings, in one sense, are objective demonstrations of what he observed of “termite art,” which, according to Farber, “goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, like as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” On the other hand, they are beautifully contained, cogent works.
He led a remarkable life and left us some remarkable gifts. I wish I’d known him. To those who did, my condolences.
UPDATE: Several appreciations are now online. Here are a few.
J. Hoberman’s is here.
Ray Pride’s is here.
James Wolcott’s is here.
Jim Emerson’s is here.
The House Next Door’s Keith Uhlich has a pretty good round-up in the Links for the Day.
Finally, a short film by Paul Schrader on Manny Farber’s painting Untitled: New Blue.
(Updated by Aaron Aradillas)
UPDATE, PART 2: A couple more appreciations.
Roger Ebert’s is here.
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s is here.
(Updated by Aaron Aradillas)
There is an excellent short film about a painting by Farber that Paul Schrader owns, “Untitled: New Blue”. You learn a lot about Farber from watching the film. Schrader has it available for viewing at his site (which you turned me on to in one of your posts, Glenn). Here’s the link:
http://www.paulschrader.org/untitledBlue.html
Well said. No other critic has left me feeling like a mote swirling in his or her refulgence. Indeed, it’s rare to find any writer so lively, contradictory, and thoughtful; so readable and engaging; so endlessly giving in just one book of collected essays. He’s helped me a ton. I imagine he will continue to help. Words like his don’t disappear.
And he was a dope painter, too. I can barely write a post every week, let alone create other crap. I feel my size, and it is small. Miniscule.
It’s stupid, but I didn’t realize he was still alive. Things have been tight, but I’ve been meaning to buy Negative Space for a few months now; I suppose this is extra incentive. The few passages I’ve read were eye-opening and I think his influence on criticism and the medium has probably been underrated.
Awwww, I’m sorry to hear that. I knew Manny pretty well through my father’s work at UCSD … I enjoyed the man, and I loved his writing. Thank you, Glenn, for posting this tribute.
Although I knew he was also a painter, the Manny Farber I first encountered in back issues of Film Culture and in collected writings like Negative Space (1971) was a brilliant, spirited, clear-eyed, iconoclastic, no-nonsense film critic. Essays like “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962) were lean, mean, superbly on target and amazingly prescient, celebrating B‑films and maverick, marginal auteurs long before they became de rigueur among cineastes. He was an early champion of Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, Val Lewton and Don Siegel, and penned some of the first American appreciations of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Marguerite Duras, Werner Herzog, Chantal Akerman and other 70s European avantgardists.
His commitment to genre and grit, to economies of scale and purpose, to the joys of pulp and a contrarian, underground aesthetic, were legendary. His prose was pugilistic, hardboiled and decidedly interdisciplinary, setting an example for future cultural critics. He employed references from all over the spectrum, drawing from abstract expressionist painting, comics, photography, performance art, and from a wide ranging connoisseurship of tasty vernacular forms. He was less literary than visual, less concerned with polite plot elements than viscerally engaged in the mise en scene. His best writing seems to come from within the film, not as a critic judging from on high but rather as a fellow artist, intuitively solving problems and thinking on his feet along with the director.
Farber eloquently and mercilessly excoriated the bloated, mindless excesses of “good taste”, the hypocrisy and creative pretensions perpetuated by the Hollywood studio system. He was a staunch foe of lazy, acquiescent thinking, of the prosaic and the middlebrow. He did not suffer fools gladly. In support of his “small, mobile, intelligent” strategy, he reveled in language that was dense, rhythmic, pungent and precise as a jewel cutter.
Farber contributed reviews and essays to The New Republic, Time, The Nation, Film Comment, and Artforum, as well as to second tier stroke mags like Cavalier. Starting in the mid 70s, he was professor at the University of California San Diego, and regularly exhibited his work. A retrospective show of paintings, entitled About Face, opened at PS 1 in September 2004 after previously being presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Austin Museum of Art in Texas.
Farber began as an abstract painter but settled on figuration in his mature work, to become a master of the idiosyncratic still life. The painting below, Howard Hawks “A Dandy’s Gesture” (1978), is part of the “Auteur Series” (there are also pieces named for Anthony Mann and Luis Bunuel). It employs a scattershot arrangement of objects and notepad drawings (elephant, airplane, speedboat, railroad tracks, cattle, houses, chocolate candies), presented out of scale and seemingly viewed from above, as if they are miniatures on a worktable or maquettes from a set designer, a collection of decontextualized signifiers recalling some of the director’s most famous efforts: To Have and Have Not, Twentieth Century, Hatari!, Red River.
Like Robert Frank and Larry Rivers, Farber was the quintessential Jewish hipster, effortlessly inventive and subversive, an inveterately wisecracking wordsmith, a kibbitzer, an elder statesman of the counterculture. Susan Sontag once said, “Manny Farber is the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced … [his] mind and eye change the way you see.”
Lovely, Glenn. Can’t find your e‑mail address, so I’ll just link to my appreciation:
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/flickgrrl/