A BLAST FROM THE PAST (from the March/April 2000 issue of Film Comment): THE THROBBING ACUITY OF NEGATIVE SPACE: Kent Jones talks movies, writing, and harp music with America’s most original film critic Manny Farber
***A series Manny Farber, 1917-2008 runs at the Walter Reade November 14-26. For program and ticket info, click here.***
Given the number of people who claim to admire his work, the constant attempts to reduce Manny Farber’s writing to a comfortable sound bite are pretty disconcerting. Too often, he’s been tagged as “hard-boiled” or “macho,” the Mitchum of film criticism. Never mind that this man’s-man spent his final stretch as a working critic concentrating on the likes of Roeg, Fassbinder, Akerman, and the Straubs, in collaboration with his sharp, perspicacious wife, Patricia Patterson. It’s a surpassingly stale image of a writer who properly belongs in the company of Melville (Herman, not Jean-Pierre), Dreiser, and Roth, artists who exhaust every possibility as they pursue mysteries right to their ends, so doggedly and intently that “the thing becomes filigreed,” as Farber himself once put it. No doubt Farber’s status as a gaudy noir wish-fulfillment has a lot to do with Movies, the mid-Seventies reissue of his collection Negative Space, with its colorful, nostalgia-crazed portraits of Bogart, Raft, and some Bacall/Lupino hybrid on its cover, and its midsection of sumptuous stills from the likes of Railroaded and Each Dawn I Die (but not Wavelength or Le Gai Savoir). But the urge to pin everyone and everything down to a single, flat, one-sided image has become almost second nature in America, as though it were a necessity of modern life: let too much specificity slip into our prose or our conversation, and the machinery of kulcha, high and low, might grind to a halt. What to do with this culture of “nothing but winners,” as Manny himself put it to me recently. He was referring to the wonderful world of cinema, but he could just as well have been talking about politics, journalism, publishing, the art world. Or the classroom.
But it was a copy of Movies that this nostalgia-bit 15-year-old first got his hands on back in 1975. In the lobby of a movie theater in western Massachusetts, specializing in revivals and unusual new foreign cinema. It was the sort of place that doesn’t exist anymore, anywhere, whose particulars—uncomfortable rows of used seats asymmetrically positioned around the theater, a rock-related rather than film-related ambience—are so gone that it’s hard to even remember why or how they came to be in the first place. Somewhere in the lobby there was a bookshelf, with a few dust-covered paperbacks for sale: The Bonnie and Clyde Book, Classic Film Scripts for The Blue Angel and Ivan the Terrible, Groucho and Me, and, with that corny cover that caught my eye, Movies. The know-it-all, first-year-grad-student type behind the counter took my $5.95 plus tax. “Manny Farber, he’s cool.” Do you know how old he is, or if he’s still writing? “I don’t know. Hey Tom, you know how old Manny Farber is?” “Manny Farber? I think he’s dead.”
Of course, at 15 what got me excited was Farber’s prose. As Jim Hoberman put it recently, when he introduced Farber to the audience of New York film critics who had given him a special citation for Da Capo’s expanded edition of Negative Space, you’d read his work and think, “Who is this guy and how did he get to write like this?” To say that the tone comes out of another era is to put it mildly—it seemed like quite a sparkling throwback during the mellow days of the New Journalism, and now, in the age of so much word-processed dribbling and do-it-yourself facetiousness, it’s positively startling. And very much the opposite of the hard-boiled style, much closer to a Johnny Carson monologue than a Horace McCoy novel. Farber worked up a rhythmically intricate prose, where the portrait of the film in question comes in bright, vivid swatches, the insights like “the sharp, clean thrust of the chisel as it slices through the wooden strut,” to borrow his evocation of a prized moment in Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle. A personal favorite: “Even at his worst, in reviews where he was nice, thoughtful and guilty until he seemed an ‘intellectual’ hatched in Mack Sennett’s brain.” This is from a 1958 piece for The New Leader about Farber’s old friend James Agee, that he now regrets having written. “He didn’t deserve that at all,” he said, as we sat and talked recently in the tearoom of an Upper East Side hotel. “So much of writing is involved with the time it’s written in, combating something or going with something. When that piece was written, all my friends in the world were idolizing Agee, and it just seemed so slumberous. So I decided I should reverse it.”
I insisted that the piece was a good one, and very important to me personally (“You like everything I write!”). I read Agee quite carefully when I was young, and there was always something about his criticism that bothered me, no matter how gorgeous the prose. Simply put, he was forever writing about the film he wanted to see as opposed to the one he did see, and that unfortunate tradition in which the critic’s prose competes with the film in question begins with him. “I know what you’re talking about. He wasn’t that way himself. I’ve never seen anyone who loved movies so much, taking them apart and putting them together again. Maybe…” At this point, the lady playing the harp in the back of the room broke into “My Way.” “I knew she was going to do that,” said Manny. “It just figures. You get the feeling that when she’s finished, they’ll have to drag her out of here.” Throughout our conversation, he kept returning to the problem of that damned harp, trying to match the somnambulant sound with the lugubrious action. “Obviously the instrument takes so long to . . . there’s a pluck, and then you hear the sound . . . so there’s a waiting period. You keep wondering: when’s she gonna get to the next note?” It’s this kind of persistence, of refusing to rest until he’s absolutely nailed the object in question, that’s at the heart of his writing.
And the more carefully I read Farber’s pieces throughout the years—well over 20 at this point—the more I realized that this persistence was what made his work so thrilling (and lasting: how many film critics do you find yourself going back to over twenty years?). Every adjective and every reference point opens up new territory, as opposed to the common tactic of coordinating everything to one fixed meaning or judgment: the reader might just have the ecstatic feeling of gazing up at a meteor shower. The words are there to place the movie, through what Farber calls “surface excitement.” Which makes him diametrically opposed to the critic with whom he is most often lumped together, Pauline Kael, another old pal. As a prose stylist, Kael may well be as exciting as Farber, and my preference for his homegrown vernacular, forged in the great sports-writing era of the Twenties and Thirties, to her muscular matron urbanity is purely a matter of taste. But the fact is that Kael’s level of acuity is erratic, her many fine perceptions cunningly blended with a compulsive urge to dispense judgments, a reflexive polemicizing against any sign of high art in American movies and dangerously inflationary buildups of favorite films and directors. Farber is just as judgmental as Kael, but he never felt her need to stay perched outside of the movie, or to fill his pieces with so many directives and shoulds/shouldn’ts (“you” feel this, “you” wish that). With Kael, you’re always aware of the fact that she’s writing for a very particular audience: whoever agrees with her.
Whereas Farber burrows himself so deeply into whatever movie he’s dealing with that hierarchies and judgments—“derelict appendages,” as he once put it—are beside the point. The most crucial aspect of his writing is its mobility, the way that it implies that every point is connected to every other point, that contexts and positions are constantly shifting and mutating, that nothing is fixed and everything is fluid. “This will sound silly,” he told Cahiers du cinema back in 1982, “but criticism is a mode of writing that always lags behind its era . . . The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . . . is an exciting film . . . I know I now think about it in very contemporary terms: today, at this particular time. I know what these films said to Andrew Sarris . . . but what about right now?” It’s a point that’s often lost on Farber’s acolytes, who scour the landscape looking for examples of termite art when his most important lesson is to find oppositions that speak to the year 2000 as directly as White Elephant/Termite Art did to 1962. My personal vote would be the distinction between aesthetics that are handmade (Rushmore) and those that are rented for the occasion (Three Kings).
Farber went the deepest when he had Patterson for company. In their remarkable 1977 Film Comment piece on Taxi Driver, “The Power and the Gory,” their take may be more negative than positive, but the piece is so exhaustive, looking at the movie from more angles than you might have thought possible, that the attentive reader is bound to find it satisfying no matter what his/her position. “It’s a good piece,” said Manny. “It took an enormous amount of work. Believe it or not, it went from San Diego to Chicago and back—I don’t know what I was doing in Chicago. I spent a good half-day getting to a theater in the suburbs to see something in that movie. Why? I don’t feel safe unless I see things over and over again… I don’t think I’d ever do it again, see a movie that many times. Every frame.” After Patricia joined us, she also expressed relief, tinged with a little sadness, at being through with the hard work of writing. “This was before the word processor, and we did so much cutting and pasting that when we were through we had produced these incredible objects—you should have seen what the final pieces looked like.”
But when they see something that really grabs them, they have the urge to get back to the typewriter—not the computer (“We’re incapacitated by modern technology”). Manny’s curiosity in particular was boundless: what were people writing about, who won the Film Comment poll, what were Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films like, what was the last good film I saw? “We never get to see things, unless it’s five years from now when it’ll run for about three days. And San Diego is deadly on movie magazines.
“Actually, the things I’ve liked are all foreign, and they’re almost all duplicated by everyone else. I mean, if you asked Hoberman what he liked, he would say pretty much what I liked.” Like many people around the world, he’s fallen in love with Kiarostami. “One of his I liked a great deal was the one with the little kid [Where Is the Friend’s Home?]. The last fifth of the movie, where the kid goes looking for the notebook: his mother is putting away the washing, and suddenly Kiarostami switches to a night shot. He does the same sort of thing in Taste of Cherry, where the guy drives up to his apartment. The camera doesn’t take you inside the guy’s house, which is quite wonderful. It’s possible it’s just an accident that he got that effect. It’s a double transition—in lighting, and in what he’s showing you about the person. Through the whole movie, you’re right on this guy’s shoulder, you’re with him, and suddenly you’re taken away from him in space. There’s something very exciting about it—what is he doing in that room? It’s funny that he even goes back to the house. It seems unusual. He’s a funny director.”
I asked him how he thought the seemingly modest earlier film stacked up against the grander newer one. “About even. I think the kid’s movie is less sentimental, less cosmetic. The other movie is sort of troubling be-cause . . . everything works. It’s a little rich. I think it’s tremendous for metaphor, for doing various forms of digging a grave or burying somebody. He keeps playing around with the idea of shoveling dirt on top of a casket: sand coming down, a little guy coming down the hill. A guy going upstairs to a lookout station, with a funny ladder shot, at the mine. And the soldier running away from him. It’s a little bit of a shift. The whole first part of the movie is exciting for being inside of the car and looking out. It’s the most common movie shot, and it’s one thing they never get right. The scale is very exciting. When you’re in car scenes in movies, the things that are passing are much smaller than he gets, the aspect of them. He gets the laborers walking past, much closer and larger.”
But the movie that’s excited both Farber and Patterson the most over the last few years was barely a blip on the radar screen of American criticism, Maurice Pialat’s unsung masterpiece Van Gogh. “That’s one of the things that kills me about getting away from criticism, that we were never able to do Van Gogh. And God knows, we’ve seen it thousands of times.”
“We own very few videos, but we got that one,” said Patricia.
“He is some director,” said Manny. “The thing about his movies—he gets low shots. His focus is closer to the ground than other people’s, it seems to me. So he gets some very intimate things. Like in that whole scene of the picnic. And he did beautiful work with that actor [Jacques Dutronc]. Using his back – he has this funny back that projects a little bit. And Pialat gets measurements that intrigue me. The spaces that he goes through within a railroad car, and the people walking alongside, the way he spaces them, the way that Van Gogh looks at a painting—it’s not too different from Bresson, the way he breaks up action. You get a kind of staccato move. We first saw it in Paris…”
“We knew so much of Van Gogh’s history that we pretty much knew what was going on,” added Patricia. “It’s funny. Pialat Frenchifies him so much that he has to become a libertine: he spends more time at the whorehouse than he does at his painting. But I just found it so exciting that they didn’t go down the usual routes. There’s no reason to try a closer image of Van Gogh. We already have it through his writing and the painting. To do something close, a step-by-step kind of mimicking, wouldn’t work.” We had a good laugh over the way Pialat references every painter in the impressionist canon—Bonnard, Renoir, Degas—but barely gets around to Van Gogh himself. “He never really does Van Gogh,” said Manny. “Ever! And at the end, it’s as if he says to himself, ‘Wow, this is a movie about a painter! I’d better get to work!’ Suddenly he starts brushing the canvas. It’s very funny.”
So what does Manny Farber do now, at the age of 82? Like Patricia, he’s a painter, and has been since he was a young man; contrary to popular belief, it isn’t something he took up after he “retired” from film criticism. He doesn’t show often in New York—“The only place I score is in San Diego. Which is fortunate, because that’s where we live”—so I haven’t been able to keep up with his work the way I’ve wanted to. The last show I saw was five years ago, made up of large canvases that featured handwritten notes (a constant), vegetables from the garden, and stray household objects thrillingly splayed and scattered across an indeterminate surface with constantly changing multiple perspectives (another constant, as anyone who knows his movie paintings can tell you): your eye is continually being oriented and re-oriented, and, just as in life, hierarchies are continually being thwarted, overthrown. The overall tone? Organic. A field where space stretches off the canvas, and where the contrast in objects and colors, which always seem to be edging or blending into one another, suggests that every-thing under the sun emanates from the same source. I went back to the show three times, and each time I was more wonderstruck by the time Farber took, the patience he had, with the rendering of ordinary, everyday, unenhanced vision. “Did you like the paintings? Did they interest you?” Manny asked me. I said I loved them. “Truthfully? Because they go nowhere.” Characteristic self-deprecation. Just like his criticism, which, taken all together, adds up to an ecstatically engaged and bracingly immediate history of the cinema, it’s not that Manny Farber’s paintings don’t go anywhere—it’s that they never end.
