"Most of the feckless, listless quality of today's art can be blamed on its drive to break out of a tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece."
So opens Manny Farber's influential essay "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" (1962, Film Culture), a pugilistic defense of the film artist as "ornery", "wasteful", and "stubbornly self-involved" . Like most of Farber's criticism, it's a wild, rambling read; it's also an invigorating explosion of prose that whips up all manner of ire as the critic disparages, in this instance, the paradigm-shattering cinema of Francois Truffaut, Michaelangelo Antonioni and Tony Richardson (amongst others). In conclusion, Farber advocates "buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim", preferring the casual "nailing down" of a moment to the laborious creation of "masterpiece art". The heroes of the piece are Raymond Chandler, Howard Hawks, Laurel and Hardy and John Wayne's "hoboish" performance in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. It's a jarring, essential read even today.
But Farber was so much more than this essay (which is reprinted in Phillip Lopate's AMERICAN MOVIE CRITICS and Farber's own collection NEGATIVE SPACE). And now that he has left us at the age of ninety-one, after a full life of critiquing and painting, I'll turn the floor over to those more fully acquainted with his work.
Here's a sharp paragraph from Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny.
Movie City Indie's Ray Pride goes longer with a eloquent overview of Farber's life. (Pride excerpts this hardly complimentary sentence on Hitchcock: "[He] has gone farther on fewer brains than any director since Griffith, while cleverly masking his deficiency, and his underlying petty and pointless sadism, with a honey-smooth patina of 'sophistication,' irony, and general glitter.")
And I rather like this Framework essay from Noel King.
You don't have to be in complete agreement with Farber to appreciate his writing. In fact, you can disagree savagely most of the time and still gain valuable insight on the art of filmmaking. He was the best kind of critic: learned in his provocation, but fervent in the pursuit of a greater truth. And he was so damn expansive! His writing would be impossible to categorize on Rotten Tomatoes; it was the journey, not the judgment, that mattered.
