Manny Farber: An Introduction

The following notes were prepared for a booklet that announced my Masterclass on Manny Farber at the 2009 Jeonju Film Festival (Korea); this masterclass series also included Raymond Bellour and Richard Porton. My notes draw, in part, upon the concluding section of my long 1992 essay on mise en scène.

Outline of a Life and a Career

Manny Farber (1917-2008) is among the dozen most important figures in the history of film criticism, alongside André Bazin, Jairo Ferreira, Lesley Stern, Roger Tailleur, Judith Williamson, Raymond Durgnat, Shigehiko Hasumi, Victor Perkins, Frieda Grafe … He single-handedly opened up a new way of looking at and thinking about cinema, largely bypassing the traditional model of character, theme, plot and conventional dramatic structure.

Farber worked obsessively on details, surfaces, moods, intuitions. And he did so via an entirely personal writing style: full of breaks, jokes, loops, jazz-like inventions of words and sentences, and in-process meditation. His style is impossible to imitate well, but his legacy (both in writing and in painting) is enormously inspiring.

Farber was born in Douglas, Arizona (USA), in 1917. He died at the age of 91, on 18 August 2008. He pursued a career as an artist for his entire life, and had many exhibitions of his paintings around the world. He was also a tradesman who took pride in his carpentry skills; and a teacher at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) between 1970 and 1987 (where, at different periods, he worked alongside filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin, whom he regarded as his “twin-brain”; and film scholars including Raymond Durgnat).

Farber’s career as a film critic and writer takes in the following periods working for American publications: The New Republic (from 1942), Time (1949), The Nation (1949-1954), New Leader (1958-1959), Cavalier (1966), and Artforum (1967-1971) – in this last stopover, he was able to consider experimental and avant-garde cinema alongside commercial and B grade production. Key essays of the later ‘70s, written in collaboration with his wife, artist Patricia Patterson, appeared in magazines such as Film Comment and Francis Ford Coppola’s City.

During his lifetime, a selection of his writing on film was collected in the book Negative Space (aka Movies) in 1971 and 1998, and the remainder of this body of work appears in the Library of America volume, Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Polito in 2016. His writing on other subjects, particularly art, is sampled (along with his classroom teaching notes) in Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings, edited by Michael Almereyda, Jonathan Lethem and Robert Polito (Hat & Beard Press, 2019). There remains more still (especially from the teaching years) to be gathered and reprinted; one such essay from 1951 (about radio) appears here.

On Creative Criticism

In his blog of 9 February 2009, the American cultural theorist Steven Shaviro muses on the difference between two contemporaneous films, JCVD (Marbrouk El Mechri, 2008), a clever piece centred on action star Jean-Claude Van Damme, and The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky, 2008). He says of the latter’s star, Mickey Rourke:

I am rooting for him to win the Best Actor Oscar (though I will be very surprised if he actually does; while Hollywood loves rehabilitation stories, their love goes only so far, and The Wrestler is too much the sort of termite-art, semi-disreputable genre movie that the Oscar crowd looks down upon, preferring to give awards to white elephants).

In the blog, both of the special terms – termite-art and white elephant – are live Internet links. Both links take us to the same thing: another blog, Girish Shambu’s page, and in particular his entry “Termite Art vs. White Elephant Art” [no longer online], which begins: “A bit of self-searching: It's taken me a few years to come to appreciate Manny Farber's writing”.

Termites, white elephants, and negative space: these are the terms we associate with the life and legacy of Farber. What do any of these words really mean? Farber was not a theorist. He developed no intellectual system, and pursued no conventional academic career beyond his perch at UCSD. He went his own, irascible way, as a writer and as an artist. And what he primarily recorded were sensations, feelings, impressions. Some would also add: opinions.

But Farber, especially from the 1960s onwards, was cagey or indifferent about his evaluative opinions, which he would fix and unfix as he saw fit: from piece to piece, and even within a single piece, his rating of any given film could shift wildly. At one moment fascinating, the next moment corny; at one moment rich, the next shallow. Films were living things to him, and he cultivated a passionate, combative, ornery, frequently suspicious relation to them; one student remembers that, when he talked about a film in a classroom, always in close proximity to its projected image on a screen, he seemed to want to “wrestle it to the ground”.

And not necessarily to win the fight, either. Like the mighty Surrealist critic Ado Kyrou (1923-1985) as described by his friend Louis Seguin, Farber “preferred discovery to certainty, and sought surprise rather than satisfaction”. He looked in the nooks and crannies of movies, for the small, strange, unexpected, unconventional things: that, in a nutshell, is what termite art is all about.

When Farber died – unleashing a great outpouring of appreciation from his fans and friends, in print and on the Internet – a bad and inaccurate cliché quickly spread around the world: Farber was, to many, the champion of hard-boiled, tough-guy, American cinema of the 1940s and ‘50s, the films of Raoul Walsh, Sam Fuller, ‘Wild Bill’ Wellman, Don Siegel, and all the rest: a King of the Bs. And so he was – but that’s not all he was, far from it.

As someone always involved with the American art world, Farber embraced the avant-garde cinema of Michael Snow and Ernie Gehr early on. In his last decades, he moved away from contemporary mainstream, and even sub-mainstream B cinema – the kind he was obliged to follow as a paid reviewer – almost altogether.

In his thought, his classes, his conversation and his art – but, past a certain point, no longer in writing, which he stopped near the end of the ‘70s – he dug deep into films by Chantal Akerman, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Abbas Kiarostami… and Maurice Pialat, which is why I choose La Gueule ouverte (The Mouth Agape, 1974) as a speculative example of a film that Farber might have loved and well appreciated (his own and Patterson’s favourite from this director’s work is Van Gogh, 1991 – a film about the tortured life and intricate process of art-making). I have explored this virtual Farber/Pialat relation here.

For what Farber himself thought of many of these experimental-narrative films, we have only his art for clues: for it was in painting, increasingly, that Farber practiced, prolonged and transformed his creative criticism.

The error in thinking of Farber-the-critic as the All-American, B movie Guy is that, ultimately, and really at no time in his writing, teaching and creative life (and that last role continued virtually to his final day), was he terribly interested in convention. Genres, economically told plots, the celebrity-personae of movie stars … none of this mattered much to him, even if he could note or even admire it in passing. All of that was a kind of commerce of the banal, of industry, of the Hollywood sausage machine, devoted to infinite tweaking of the same, broad, White Elephant formulae.

Farber looked instead for what was odd, obsessive, even perverse – and he looked for it directly on the material surface of films, not in their hermeneutic depths. The arresting gesture of a bit-part character, an intriguing play of colours, a block of jazzy rhythm, a sensation of physical space (urban, suburban or natural), a difficult, awkward or clumsy torsion of the camera in relation to the event or situation being filmed: this is what got his analytical juices going.

But this was not a Formalism taking refuge in sheer, content-less abstraction; for Farber, such material, stylistic, formal details were also social microcosms, the nailing of a certain sensibility issuing from a particular time and place – a sensibility reflecting attitudes toward (for instance) work, class, sex, violence … Yet this was never an ideology to be read off the mechanics of narrative, characterisation or theme (an entire panoply of critical terms in which Farber showed precious little interest) – rather, in the smallest, most telling, sometimes offhand details.

Farber’s longtime friend Donald Phelps (1929-2015) once placed him into an intriguing, rather lost cultural context of his time and artistic milieu.

… he counterpoises the richness of the world against the modesty with which we must use it. We cannot own art – whether the work or the activity – by fiat, he seems to be saying in each of his articles. All we can do with art is produce it – an endless traffic of behaviour – and all we can own are the boundaries of ourselves. […] The common denominator of these artists [he admires] … is their dedication to their art: not as a replica of themselves, but as an emanation of themselves, a current of that behaviour which at once links them to the world and dissolves them among the things of the world. Manny Farber has discerned and embodies this dedication.

To examine Farber’s critical legacy today is to look into the history of what can be called the evocative, descriptive or ekphrasistic tradition within film criticism – which, in his case, truly leaves the realm of scientific or objective analysis to become creative criticism, writing as itself a gesture of art. This is essentially the tradition “in the name of the Farber”, so to speak.

Just as Raymond Durgnat (1932-2002) dissolved the film-text into a semantic mass, Farber and those he has influenced (including Gorin, Ronnie Scheib [1944-2015], Chris Fujiwara, Greg Ford, Rick Thompson, and A.S. Hamrah) restructure movies into worlds or environments – texts you can inhabit and walk around – in order to grasp better the aesthetic and cultural sensibilities that they picture and figure. In this vein, Richard Jameson suggests, in a text on the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990): “It has always been one of the special pleasures of movies that they dream worlds and map them at the same time”.

In this sense, the critic takes on the challenge of redescribing, analytically, what the film itself already describes minutely, materially, physically – in Durgnat’s sense of cinema as a medium that moves “from narrative to description”. Yet the redescription allowed by ekphrasis is not a redundant duplication (or, at least, should aim not to be), since the critic’s task starts with (as Raymond Bellour once put it) “the necessary labour of description” or, as Harun Farocki practiced it (in talks and tele-essays), “saying what you think it is that you see” (since we each process our vision a little or a lot differently, depending on many intrinsic and extrinsic factors). “Describe first” – this was, equally, the motto of beloved of another, later UCSD teacher, Lesley Stern (1950-2021), who linked it to the alchemical power of “working the magic”.

Farber covered both classical and modern tracks in his relentless pursuit of the possibilities of open form (Gorin and Patrick Amos suggest that “any one-to-one correspondence, the fixity of any code, is anathema to Farber”). This pursuit led him, from the 1940s to the ‘60s, to value American films and directors way outside the auteurist canon (such as Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers [1970]); and later to produce, collaboratively with Patricia Patterson, remarkably funky (i.e., culturally bricolaged) accounts of emerging directors of radical, avant-garde fictions (like Straub & Huillet or Marguerite Duras). There is a fascinating audio recording of an on-stage interview with the couple, dating from Paris 2004.

Farber’s open-formalist edge is apparent in his exactness, and his will to inventory the quasi-technical aspects of a given stylistic configuration. In Farber and Patterson’s outline of Fassbinder’s “ritualised syntax”, for instance, they enumerate:

1. The insertion of “violence and tension beneath stupefyingly mundane talk”.

2. Acting that is “feverishly singular. As in Noh theatre, it’s proto-artificial and always trying for the emblematic joined with the rich effect of a sausage bursting its casing”.

3. The musical incantation of language.

4. Concepts of design that express “the pull between characters and their diminutive, doll-house environment”.

5. The typing of dress and decor for each character. “Fassbinder’s very eclectic: his people stand before beautiful wallpaper like Xmas lights, mixing styles and eras within the same tableau”.

This is later complemented with a shorter listing of “what Fassbinder is about” as exemplified in What Makes Herr R. Run Amok? (1969):

1. Humiliation; daily, hour by hour, in the shop, at breakfast, humiliation everywhere.

2. The shopkeepers of life treated without condescension or impatience.

3. Physical and spiritual discomfort: The essence of Fassbinder is a nagging physical discomfort.

This gives some sense of the mixed realm of critical modes – expressive, formal, subjective, textual, social – in the Farber legacy. Another important aspect of this legacy is its strong sense of what the act of directing a film may actually entail: not creation ex nihilo, but the expert juggling and balancing of the given elements (from the set to the actors), each of which have their own volatility, possibilities and ‘monumentality’ to be reckoned with. Which leads to the idea – from critic Kent Jones via filmmaker Elaine May – that each interesting film creates its own unique ecology, its dynamic system of forces, elements, logics …

Manny Farber, finally, is a great writer – a true writer, more a writer than the term film critic usually implies. But what does it really mean to say this? Why is the materiality of the writing of Farber – or Tailleur or the great Australian critic Meaghan Morris – so often rendered immaterial, a wasteful luxury, mere surplus value?

In a split that we can well recognise from the history of film itself, écriture is here divorced from content, to be damned or indulged accordingly. But writing is always more than simply badly done (dense, circumlocutory, baroque) or a good read (witty, racy, colourful, etc.).

What about some sense of the action of critical writing, what it can conjure, perform, circulate, transform? In writing as much as in film, we must come to close terms with what is at once materialist and mysterious in matters of style.

© Adrian Martin March 2009 (+ updates September 2024)