Film
In Memoriam: Manny Farber, 1917-2008
by Evan Davis'09
Tuesday December 30, 2008
“A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.” That’s the most famous sentence in the most famous article Manny Farber ever wrote (“White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” Film Culture, 1962), and it could very easily be said that this sentence encapsulates Farber’s aesthetic perspective. His refusal to stand still, to plunge right into the center and work his way outward, making the notion of boundaries pointless: that’s Manny Farber, in a (Lee-Marvin-pea-)nutshell.
There were many things that made Farber special. One of them was that he was also a painter, one whom the New York Times once dubbed the greatest still-life painter of his generation. It is, in fact, his painting which makes one realize that this theory of “Termite Art” didn’t extend only to the cinema. Anyone who has seen his still-lifes from the 1970s onward (the earlier abstract work from the 1940s-60s is unseen by me) can see space stretching out to infinity, finding no beginning, center, or end point. Objects are arranged meticulously to not allow the eye to become grounded in space; the painting creates its own space. And anyone who has read Farber’s praising of Howard Hawks, Werner Herzog, Sam Fuller, or Michael Snow knows that this expanding out of space is what Farber craves from the cinema.
Someone once said of British rock in the mid-90s, “an oft-asked question . . .was ‘Blur or Oasis?’ The correct answer was ‘Pulp.’” The question can similarly be framed within the world of American film criticism: as to the question of Pauline Kael or Andrew Sarris, the correct answer was Manny Farber. That is because while Kael and Sarris both opened up a national conversation on film, Farber was the only critic of his generation who was able to make art of his prose–in effect, a parallel work which lived next to and complemented the films he discussed. What’s more, he was never as polemical as Kael or Sarris. Those two ground their heels into the dirt and came out swinging; Farber liked to dance around, shadowboxing, always trying to get his hands on the object Kael and Sarris often consciously avoided while landing blows against each other.
You can disagree with Farber more than you agree with him, but because of the propulsive fluidity of his writing, you can never think that he doesn’t have something incredibly vital to say about everything he engages with. “The Power and the Gory,” he and his wife Patricia Patterson’s 1977 Film Comment review of Taxi Driver, opens up pathways of thought that one never considered possible in terms of analyzing a single work. He often moves from praise to pan in the same sentence. That’s because judgment, for Farber, was “a derelict appendage,” the last thing that anyone should consider when watching a film, looking at a painting, or listening to a piece of music. The notion of the “masterpiece” is anathema to Farber because it means the work has become static, no other avenues of understanding being possible. Dismantling the notion of perfection was perhaps Farber’s most important contribution to how we think about art.
Greatest Hits:
On Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday: “Bravado posturings with body, lucid Cubistic composing with natty lapels and hat brims, as well as a very stylized discourse of short replies based on the idea of topping, outmaneuvering the other person with wit, cynicism, and verbal bravado.”
On Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes filmmaker Chuck Jones: “Ridiculousness is behind every Jones gag, but it is labyrinthine in effect because of how much gentleness is mixed in along with an infinite response to one animal’s brass, hunger, manipulative power, or blinding speed.”
On French filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet: “The Straubs are always major spade-and-shovel workers in framing that places the material close to the surface…[their] upfront framing is interesting in that it creates both a feeling of cement blocks and extraordinary poetry at the same time.”
Everything at once, from every direction: here’s to the Termite himself, Manny Farber.
A collection of Farber’s writing, Negative Space, is available in the Sarah Lawrence Library. His reviews can also be found on thenation.com and in Donald Phelps’s For Now #9, which can be searched for online.
